Good Quizzes at the Club just may be catching

Which would you prefer, given the choice? Playing well in a poor or mediocre quiz and playing well in a good quiz?

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a quiz in the club where Claire was the question master. I’ve known Claire for a long time and she was part of the team who, frankly, in the few years before Covid used to bet us more often than my team beat them. She’d never been question master at the quiz before, to the best of my knowledge but she played a blinder and produced what I thought was the best quiz by anyone who is not a member of my team since Covid.

Well, I don’t know if this has had anything to do with it, but last Thursday night it was Dai’s turn, and blow me if he didn’t produce what I think is the best quiz he’s ever made for the club.

I know I bang on about this but making a good, enjoyable quiz really isn’t rocket science. In fact, it’s as much about avoiding doing anything bad as it is about doing anything particularly good. To whit, Dai didn’t ask too many number questions on Thursday, something he’s been guilty of in the past. It’s not that I don’t like guessing, but I don’t like questions that give you no help to guess, where you are expected to pick a number out of thin air and the question itself doesn’t give you the opportunity to use what you do know to help figure out something that you don’t.

Dai didn’t ask any whythe’ells , that is questions that make me ask whythe’ell is he asking us that? He used to ask questions then say, I didn’t expect anyone to answer that one. Why the hell ask it, then? No, I couldn’t pinpoint one question where I thought it didn’t really belong in the quiz.

It was interesting. There were a couple of questions where I thought – I should know this – or – I should have heard this before but I haven’t. There were a number of questions where I didn’t know the answer so I got to feel good about myself for getting it right anyway through a combination of deduction and educated guessing.

Generally the quiz was a bit more difficult than Dai’s usual and this made it all the better for it. I don’t know if other teams would necessarily agree – the gap between first and second place at the end was a large one, but  I feel sure that there was something in the quiz that every person playing could feel good about themselves for getting right.

Well done Dai! You never know, that quiz may even earn you a LAMMY nomination . . .