Play the Man, not the Ball

There is a regular setter in the club whom I like very much indeed, but have a bit of a problem with his quizzes. The issues are three-fold.

The first is to my mind he ‘cheats’ on his connections. What I mean by that is that he will only use part of a word to make the connection sometimes. Using Helena for Helen, for example. Sorry, but my attitude is that if you can’t do connections properly, then don’t use them. It’s annoying because when he uses connections he sometimes comes out with absolute beauties.

My second issue is that he uses Family Fortunes type questions in some of his rounds. I’m sorry, but I don’t like guessing games. Test my knowledge, please, not my ability to put myself in the heads of 100 random yoyos who took part in a survey.

But the third issue is the one I end to come back to with him. Slapdashery. I admit it. I am anal and I am pedantic. I put time and effort into working out my questions and phrasing them as well as I can to make sure that there is minimal opportunity for confusion about what I’m actually answering. I know I can’t expect everyone else to do this, but it still irks me when they clearly don’t. On Thursday night he asked

“Who was the first winner of Big Brother?” “Craig Phillips!” I said straightaway and wrote it down. Now, when it came time to give the answers, he announced, “And the first winner of Big Brother was Jack Dee.” I remonstrated that this was Celebrity Big Brother, and it came after, not before the original series. He apologised, but the damage was done. I mean, it didn’t affect the outcome of the quiz, but it annoyed me.

And it annoyed me because for donkey’s years I’ve lived by the adage ‘Play the man, not the ball.’ Or to put it another way, bear in mind who is asking he questions, and how likely it is that they will have a particular answer rather than the correct one. Yet I didn’t do it this time. The even more galling thing is that this question was part of a connection set. Jack Dee fitted the connection like a glove while Craig Phillips didn’t.