The egos have (crash)landed

Last Sunday, I allowed myself one of my 'exceptions' to the regime I am attempting to impose on myself this month of only eating and drinking in cheap Chinese restaurants.

The pretext for a 'Western'-style blowout on this night was The Beijinger magazine's Super Quiz. I am a semi-reformed quiz junkie, and have recently begun indulging in the vice again - on an intermittent basis. And on this occasion, The Weeble and a couple of other friends were keen to give it a try with me.

Amongst the particular attractions of the event were... It was on a Sunday, when there's nothing else to do. The host venue - Tun - was offering drinks specials, including two-for-one on draught Stella (my favourite!) all night. And this did seem like a definitive opportunity to establish one's quizzing credentials, to stake a claim to being the most formidable quiz team in the city, since the same two considerations (and the fact that quizmasters from each of the 6 main pub quizzes currently being run here had been invited to host the event, and could be expected to bring along several of their 'regulars') would be likely to attract a large turnout of the city's strongest and most regular quizzers.

And so, indeed, it did. There were around three dozen teams, and many of them were of an impressively high standard. The competition for top honours looked set to be fierce.

Ah, but there's the problem, you see - that whole '6 guest quizmasters' thing.

You know how officials in any sport tend to get those high-and-mighty airs and graces about them? How they succumb to those delusions of omniscience and omnipotence that introduce a strut to the walk and a patronising edge to the voice? Being a quizmaster is rather the same - only more so. People just love to have a microphone in their hand, and to lord it over their captive audience for an hour or two every week. They start to think that they are the show.

You are not, guys. You are a necessary evil. An unavoidable irrelevance. Your only duty is to irritate people as little as possible. And to come up with some good questions.

Unfortunately, the quizmasters we had up on the podium last weekend seemed to think that it was a competition between them: that each of them had to try and demonstrate that they were more charismatic and funny behind the microphone, more quirky and creative in their question-writing, more ruthless and devastating in their putdowns of quibblers than any of the others. Oh, for chrissakes, guys, leave those egos at home. It's not about YOU, it's all about the questions. Oh yes, and the answers, of course.

Josh Lally of Lush didn't get things off to a great start. He had a decent enough range of question topics, but none of them were especially difficult; and he threw in not one but two mystery links, which effectively made the answers accessible to just about everyone. Now, it's nice to have one or two easy-ish rounds at the outset to get people's confidence up; but a round with just about no discrimination at all is not a good idea - we don't want 37 teams separated by only 1 or 2 points.

Paul Eldon of The Bookworm quiz, lovely guy though he is, was guilty of a similar fault. His round was all on literature, but again they were almost all very easy. However, most people these days are fairly shite even on easy literature questions, and this tends to be a topic where I steam ahead of the opposition. It was, therefore, rather galling to have Mr Eldon repeatedly throwing out additional 'clues' that made some of the questions even easier.

In these days when pub quiz questions are almost invariably displayed on PowerPoint slides, it is, I submit, rather important to have your complete question on the slide. I'm not usually much of a fan of modern technology - and I loathe PowerPoint with a passion - but in this one area it has, I admit, been a godsend. Poor acoustics, poor quizmaster diction, poor sound systems (and the PA and acoustics at Tun are really terrible) and high background noise have always made it difficult to hear pub quiz questions clearly. Now that problem is completely obviated by being able to display the full text of the question. But that's the thing - it has to be the full text. If you elaborate on your question, giving extra information that may help people to recognise the answer, you are giving an unfair advantage to those who happen to be able to hear you clearly - which is almost always (and especially so in the conditions we had to suffer in Tun last week) going to be only a minority.

Another advantage of this recent shift in the culture of quizzing is - or should be - that it should focus quizmasters more on careful writing of their questions. If you find yourself improvising an elaboration of your question that isn't in your displayed text of it, then it's a poorly worded question. If quizzers start challenging you to define your question more clearly, then it's a poorly worded question. If there is any possibility of your question being interpreted in more than one way or yielding more than one answer, if "it depends on..... something or other", then it's a poorly worded question. A question should be short and simple, clear and unambiguous.

Alas, we had quite a few last Sunday that did not meet these criteria.

Such lapses, however, we can - albeit grudgingly - forgive.

The guy from Frank's Place, however, whose geography round included at least two 'answers' that were egregiously wrong, will find little forgiveness amongst the flabbergasted quizzers who were robbed of points by his laziness and arrogance in not bothering to check his answers. He has only succeeded in ensuring that a couple of hundred Beijing quiz enthusiasts will now NEVER venture out to the Lido to try the quiz at his bar.

He might well have been lynched that night, had not Karl Long, the manager of Paddy O'Shea's, committed an even more outrageous sin soon afterwards.

Mr Long thought it would be fun to have what he termed a 'wipeout round' - by which, he said, he meant that any team that got one answer wrong would register a score of ZERO for the round. Now, first, that condition was unclear, ambiguous (does 'no answer' count as a 'wrong answer'? will people be penalised for having more than one 'wrong answer'?); and people who'd never come across this particular species of novelty round before were likely to be perplexed. He meant, I believe, that offering no answer to a question was OK, but writing down any mistaken answer would result in the loss of all points for the round. Not all the teams sussed that out.

Second, this kind of naff 'trick' rule might be OK in a small and friendly quiz, where there are only a handful of teams who play each other every week, and the best teams don't mind the odd bit of capricious randomization to try to give the weaker teams a leg up. But that does not apply in an environment like this Super Quiz, where most of the teams are of a high standard, and are chasing the top prize very competitively. And, moreover, you can only get away with this kind of gimmick in an early round - where any teams who do find themselves harshly treated by it at least have plenty of time to try to claw back the deficit on the leaders. Doing this in the penultimate round is unbelievably f***ing STUPID: it just guarantees that a significant number of participants are going to lose interest and walk out before the end.

Oh yeah, and third, I don't really think there's any merit to this kind of rule at any stage in any sort of quiz. The penalty - of potentially (as my team did) losing 8 or 9 points, and losing that much ground on the top teams - is disproportionate, draconian, preposterous: there is just no way to recover from a setback like that.

But..... if you are going to preen your ego by inflicting such a pointless, contentious, inequitable rule on us, Mr Long, you have to make bloody damn triple- and quadruple-SURE that your answers are all RIGHT. And Mr Long fucked up on that: one of his answers on this 'wipeout' round was WRONG (and yes, it was the one that my team got 'wrong' - actually, our answer was right, and should, I think, have moved us up into 1st place, rather than unjustly relegating us to mid-table obscurity).

I would guess something like 20% to 30% of the teams 'wiped out' on this idiotic round; and a few others were probably able to register a strong score they didn't really deserve by agreeing with the quizmaster's wrong answer. In that one moment of madness, the bloody man torpedoed the entire fucking quiz, and prompted a good number of us to quit the room in disgust without even listening to the final round of questions. (And I can't be sure, of course, but I suspect we might just have been the only team with a high score on that round, who were vying for the lead, and who were unjustly penalised for having a right answer! Yes, that twat cost us a chance of winning. Although, to be honest, I think we would have been completely shafted on the final music round, anyway. But still, it's the principle of the thing....)

I have long been complaining that one of the reasons I don't feel the urge to quiz very often these days is the shortage of decent quizmasters in Beijing. The utter fiasco at The Beijinger quiz last week reinforced that pessimistic impression most emphatically.

I may, at some later date, discourse further on the essence of a good quiz..... but for now, just try to remember, quizmasters: Check your egos at the door. It's all about THE QUESTIONS.

[Oh yes, and Tun was a shit venue as well. I suppose it's about the only place big enough for that kind of crowd. But the staff are not good enough to cope with that kind of crowd (not on a Sunday night, anyway). And the 'special offer' Stella ran out in less than an hour! Now, I know the draught beer suppliers in this town can be a bit cranky and unreliable, but, really..... couldn't you have secured a bigger supply for a massive special event like this?? And if you couldn't, couldn't you have transferred the offer over to bottled Stella? Or some other beer? Running out of your main promotional item and not offering any alternative is completely unacceptable. I've never much cared for Tun anyway, but I now doubt if I shall ever be going back there.]