Professional quizzers

Is it unfair for seasoned quiz masters – i.e. proper quiz professionals who get paid for running quizzes – to take part in another pub quiz?

My own quiz hosting schedule doesn’t give me much spare time for taking part in pub quizzes, but there are two local to me on Wednesday nights which have generally excellent questions, and good food to enjoy during the quiz.

We were a team of two last night, in an unusually busy pub, and prospects didn’t seem great. Despite doing this professionally, I find that my actual quiz knowledge has deteriorated (or at least not improved) over the years. Most of the time I’m thinking about quiz questions that non-quizzers would enjoy answering, rather than picking up on new things that I should know more about.

Nevertheless, we were in luck, as the pub’s sound system wasn’t working which meant that the music questions had to be scrapped. This is almost certainly why we won, as we are ordinary, at best, on music questions. The quiz master did a remarkable job shouting over the crowd (and even singing one of the music questions well enough for most teams to get it, before he started losing his voice and gave up on the other music questions. If you’re wondering: he sang the theme tune from ‘The Crystal Maze’).

The quiz master suggested that we looked like we might have been genetically engineered to win pub quizzes, the other teams seemed happy enough, and our food bill was taken care of by the prize fund.

Sample questions:

1. How many points is a drop goal worth in Rugby League?
2. Solve the anagram: NONDIALECTIC
3. How was William Joyce better known in World War II?
4. Identify the only actor or actress to feature in all of: Talladega Nights, Sweeney Todd (2007 film), Madagascar
5. Identify the book that begins with the line: When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.