QuizList

During my time playing pub quizzes in London, I have noticed that things tend to function according to a set of fairly irrational laws. If I am searching for a comparison from the known universe, I think that might vaguely be astronomy, where a series of minor bodies are circled by even more minor bodies, and all of them circle round the main attraction (money), there are frequent explosions and collisions and a number of black holes (into which jackpots disappear), an asteroid belt of whirling detritus (most QuizMasters’ questions), and an Oort cloud at the edge of the known system into which you should not venture (Barnet).

But patterns emerge. I am going to describe some things I perceive as laws.  And if you disagree, remember this site has a comment facility, which all too few people use (they prefer to mutter at me when they see me).

The First Law of Quizzing is, of course, that you don’t talk about quizzing.  Why?  Well, it is perceived as somewhat uncool. You must pretend that it is something you just do to support your local pub; but any indication of chasing after jackpots is not on.  (And thereby hangs a tale from South Central London, of which more another time…)  Anyway, you would not want someone assuming your role model was an Egghead.

The Second Law of Quizzing is the same as Murphy’s Law/Sod’s Law:  If something can go wrong, it will.  A £1000 jackpot exists – it suddenly vanishes!  Your team gets 39/40, an unheard of score in that particular quiz, and on that same night someone gets 40/40! Your mate swops jackpot tickets with you and goes up to answer the question, gets it wrong, and it emerges that you were the only person in the pub to know it!  Your team gets all answers to a three-question jackpot right on the very night the QM has one wrong answer among the lot!  All genuine examples, and you get the picture.

The Third Law of Quizzing is:  You are more likely to win a quiz the first time you are there than on any other occasion.  Now, I believe this is for a number of reasons.  Firstly, you take the QM et al by surprise and the result is likely to be genuine.  Only when you come back and keep winning do QMs feel that they have to put ‘measures’ in place, and sometimes this is in reaction to moaning from other teams.  Secondly, in their early days quizzes are either ridiculously easy or ridiculously hard, both of which can favour the experienced quiz player – after a while a quiz tends to find its level and idiosyncrasies creep in, which may favour more regular players.  Lastly, unfortunately as quizzes progress there tends to be more cheating.

The fourth law of pub quizzes is that the QuizMaster is always right, even when he or she is wrong.  This refers not just to quiz questions but to scoring, adding up, and perceptions of cheating.  Wrong answers given out as gospel include the surname of Bonnie Parker’s sidekick (apparently it’s’Barrows’), the date Guy Fawkes was executed, the date Madame Tussaud’s opened in London, the spelling of ‘medieval’, Freud’s stages of sexual development (I had a long argument about this, and the wisdom of putting such a question in a quiz is highly questionable), something or other about an echidna which I can’t even remember exceptr the word ‘echidna’ evokes PTSD type symptoms, and on and on.  Wrong scoring includes taking a random number some group of eejits had written at the side of their answer sheet as their score and awarding them the £80 prize, assuming that as we crossed something out we had one incorrect answer, taking ‘The Ghosts’ as a reasonable synonym for the band ‘The Spooks’ and a team winning the quiz on that point, and endless examples of creative addition and subtraction.  Basically, it’s the QM’s quiz, and they can do what they want.  If you query something, you are unlikely to get anywhere;  you will hack them off and be told ‘it’s only a game’, and in the most extreme examples you will be barred from the quiz or pub.  Not that the latter has happened to me personally, but I do remember the evil eye and public criticism from the charming landlady I got in that rubbish Camden town pub that shall remain nameless.  And visitless.

The fifth law of pub quizzes is that ability at answering questions is frequently inversely correlated with the number of persons in a team.  Unfeasibly large teams usually mean there are a number of Bezzes whose main contribution is the use of mobile technology for answers.   One or two people in a team may alarm other punters and suggest ‘professionals’, though small teams are as likely to be ‘crap sharks’ like the ones that used to appear in Viz.  Three or four punters is probably ideal and tends to provide a reasonable spread of key subject areas.

The sixth law is ‘If you build it, they will come’.  You may find a high jackpot ripe for the plucking and settle down for a determined assault on it, but sooner or later others will get to hear about it and flock in, buying huge numbers of tickets and provoking groans from the regulars.  Worse still, this may include people who don’t even play the quiz but just swoop, raptor-like, at the end of the night.  This is generally a matter for pubs and QuizMasters to sort out but regulars can make their feelings known if they feel this is taking the p*ss.  As it frequently is.

 The seventh law of pub quizzing is that everything is predictable.  It is somewhat related to the Second Law of Quizzing, that if something can go wrong it will, but has other nuances.  You go to a quiz, are told that one team wins all the time, and it follows as night follows day that you lose to them.  You go to a badly organised quiz, which seems to offer lots of opportunities for cheating, and the winners are those who cheat the most.  And so it goes.

The final two laws of quizzing relate to quiz questions.  The Eighth Law of Pub Quizzes, aka Fletcher’s Constant as it was he who promulgated it first, is that ‘If the topic is hard, the question is easy. If the topic is easy, the question is hard.’  For instance, the QM announces a round on Physics or Logic, and surprise surprise, the questions are low-grade and you get a full house.  Then an innocent sounding round on Television follows, and it’s a stinker.  Handy to remember this when planning what round to play your joker.

The Ninth Law is for Quizmasters.  It is that no-one else will find your pet topics as interesting as you do.  Please, please, do not set a whole round on your girlfriend, or continue to ask the same questions about  ’Back to the Future’, or the Nuremberg trials, or whatever.  I am searching for a quotation (thought it was CS Lewis) where some good advice to writers is given which would be equally relevant to QMs.  It goes something like ‘Read over what you have written, identify the three things you like best, and take them out‘.