The craft of the connection

Now, you know I’m not one to blow my own trumpet – oops sorry, my nose has just started growing – but though I do say it myself last Thursday night’s quiz which saw me acting as question master seemed to go down quite well in the weekly quiz in the rugby club.

Several times in the last few years I’ve said words to the effect of the only gimmick you need in a quiz is good, interesting questions that you’ve checked the answers of which have been carefully worded to make them as clear as possible, covering a wide spectrum of subjects to provide something for everyone. I stick by that – it’s the best gimmick you can possibly have. But I will admit that I do tend to use a specific gimmick whenever I do a quiz for the club now and that is the connections gimmick. You know how it works I’m sure. You ask, let’s say three questions all seemingly unconnected. Then for the next question, you ask what connects the previous 3 answers. So for example if you asked –

Who duetted with Monserrat Caballe on Barcelona?

What is the name of the trophy awarded to the winner of the ladies’ singles at Wimbledon

Whose real name is Peter Gene Hernandez?

answers of Freddie Mercury, Venus Rosewater Dish and Bruno Mars would give you planets of the solar system or roman deities.

I am happy to claim that I introduced connections to the rugby club 30 years ago. I didn’t come up with the idea independently – I had it from Geoff Evans of the Neath Quiz League of years gone by. It proved popular and up until lockdown when I was a regular setter I would use it once in every three quizzes that I made. Since lockdown I have only set quizzes when I’ve been asked to, and I use it pretty much every time I do.

Why? Well, it would nice to say I do it because people enjoy it and it makes for a good quiz. I think that people do enjoy it and it does make a good quiz if you take time and trouble to get it right. But that’s not the main reason. No, the main reason is that I enjoy the mental challenge of putting them together. It keeps me interested. For every two or three connections I come up with that work and will get asked, there are always a couple that I just can’t quite get to work. You have to be ruthless at such a time. If it doesn’t quite work, it’s no good to you and you have to chuck it out and find something else that does work.

And it is a challenge. Without care and dare I say it a certain level of ability you can end up making connections that are unsatisfying, obscure or downright unsolvable. The guys on my team get it. With a good connection, once you’ve got it, this can give you clues to any part of it you haven’t answered. With a good connection, if you have all parts of it correct then it should be gettable for the vast majority of teams. Sadly, though, not everybody does. I always groan inwardly (and sometimes outwardly) when setters from other teams try to do connections. In particular the very, very nice guy that we think of as Captain Slapdash. This is horrible, but pretty much every way you can think of to butcher a connection, he often does it. He is capable of making a perfectly good connection but he just doesn’t seem to be able to filter out the wheat from the chaff, or more precisely, the decent connections from the utter pigswill. I do wonder why he persists in doing them. When you do the quiz you can get a feel for what’s going down well and what isn’t. Is it stubborn bloody mindedness? I’ve no idea and you’ll appreciate that it’s not the sort of thing I could ever bring myself to ask him.