Back in the hot seat

 Or should I say, the reasonably warm seat? On this Thursday just gone I did my first stint as question master for the best part of two years. I haven't been keeping track but I'm pretty sure that the last time was or the New Year Quiz, the first quiz in January 2020.Remember those pre lockdown times? Seems a very long time ago. Funnily enough I've already agreed to QM for the New Year quiz this coming January, which was a bit of bravado on my part. After all, what if I'd done the quiz on Thursday and found that I hated it?

Well, yes, okay, that was unlikely to happen, I admit. I first attended this quiz in the summer of 1995, and Brian, the organiser, asked if anyone could do the quiz for the next week. I volunteered, did the quiz, and loved being question master. I loved being question master every bit as much as I enjoyed playing in the quiz, and became a regular setter. And I'll be honest, it really helped me become a better quizzer. During that first year I also began playing for teams in the Neath Quiz League, and the Morriston Hospitals Quiz League, both sadly defunct now. Especially in the Morriston Hospitals team, we had some very good players, and I used to measure myself against them, and to me, this produced tangible evidence I was getting better within a year or so. 

I used to take hours to put together a quiz. First of all there was the gathering of the questions from a range of sources. I didn't have a PC or the internet for the first 5 years or so I was doing the quiz, so this took quite a bit of time as you can imagine. I'd write all of the questions down. Then I'd look carefully at them and decide which questions were going into which round. Easy ones in round one - what the late Robert Robinson used to call the mental equivalent of a quick jog around the block. Increasingly harder ones in the next three rounds, then an easy round five, then harder round six, round seven would be the hardest, and then any old questions would do for round 8, because in those days there was no guarantee we'd get a round 8 in - although we usually did. Ooh, do you know, I'm getting a little bit of a warm glow just thinking about those days. So doing it like this, I'd end up always writing each question out twice, and often three times if I typed the quiz up in work during lunch time. Then I'd test the questions at lunch time in the staff room at work. Doing all of this meant that anything unclear or ambiguous in the questions would be ironed out by the time I did in the club. It was one of the biggest gripes I used to have about some of the guest question masters we used to had - their question ideas were often very good, but their phrasing of the questions really wasn't.

You could usually tell how the quiz was going down. Nobody would give you a hard time, but occasionally you could tell that it just wasn't going down how you would have liked with the teams. On other times, though, when the teams 'got' it, when you could see them enjoy working it out, there was nothing quite like it. You see, when you set a pub quiz, I've always believed that your aim as question master is to give your teams an evening's entertainment. It isn't to try to catch the teams out, and ask them things they have no chance of answering correctly. Any fool with access to the internet can do that. 

So, did I manage to give the teams a decent evening's entertainment on Thursday? I'm not sure. I looked through the quiz a couple of hours before the quiz, and I was convinced that it was too hard. Looking at the scores throughout the quiz, I don't really think it was, but . . . I don't know. I used a gimmick that I was the first to introduce o this quiz in the year that I started. I played in an open quiz for the Neath Quiz League, and this was the first time that I encountered a connection round. "'Ello" thought I, " that's a good idea. I'll take that and pretend that I came up with it." And so I did. Basically, in a connections quiz, in any given round, the first three questions will be unconnected. So for example, the answers might be

Bob Marley

Key

Crewe Alexandra.

The 4th question would ask what connects those three answers, which in this case would be Skeleton, as you can have a skeleton bob, a skeleton key and a skeleton crew(e). As a variation I used 9 part connections in round 1 and round 8. The good thing about a connection is that t makes it easier to find answers you didn't know - or if you have two possible answers to a question, then chances are only one of them will fit the connection. 

Of course, the connection quiz is not without its challenges. For one thing, you need to be pretty sure that there's only one connection between the answers. For another, I feel that on a three part connection, if you have all three answers correct, then the connection shouldn't be very obscure. It should be gettable if you have two answers right. Just my opinion, and as always, feel free to disagree. As for the three questions themselves, I feel you can have one obscure question, but at least two of them need to be gettable. 

In all honesty, then, I didn't get a huge, great buzz from being question master on Thursday, although I did really enjoy putting the quiz together. So I doubt very much I'll do it again before the New Year quiz in January, but I can see myself doing it again after that before another 2 years has passed.