Quizmasters at Hong Kong Brew House
Ben Appleby
The first time I went to a pub quiz, I was in England. A bunch of us arrogant, entitled boarding school kids went down to a pub, underage. We assumed we were going to absolutely destroy, and then they asked some questions on sports. The result was… well, let’s just say we did a lot worse than we expected.
In Hong Kong, I joined a quiz team founded by some of my friends and so far we’ve had a pretty impressive track record. I think the key to pub quiz success is to have a group of people that covers a wide area of interests. Also, if somebody has a proper feeling about a question, go with it—trust your instinct, don’t overthink.
When I was asked to be quizmaster at Brew House I was immediately on board. I’ve been doing it for two months. I prepare questions with my girlfriend Ailee, whom I could not be doing it without. We are each other’s sounding board for whether or not something is a piece of information other people may have heard of. We need to make sure that the questions aren’t too hard or too obscure.
As a quizmaster, you have to be completely perfect with your answers and you have to check everything. Because in a pub quiz, when people think there’s injustice or the quizmaster has the wrong answer, they can get very, very angry about it. They feel like they’re getting robbed. Once I forgot to announce the round score of a team, and by the end of the next round, they handed over their answer sheet— instead of answering any of the questions, they wrote “This pub quiz is a farce and is a tragic reenactment of the recent re-election of Vladimir Putin!”
It’s really hard to tell cheaters because everybody can be on their iPhone and you don’t know whether they’re just texting someone or cheating. We can’t have a “no phone” policy, putting cell phones in a bag till the quiz finishes and stuff like that, so we just have to trust the participants. The thing is, why would anyone go to a pub quiz and look up the answers with their phone? I don’t understand it. That practically takes the fun out of being in a quiz.
Why aren’t there female quizmasters in Hong Kong? That’s an excellent question. It actually never occurred to me until Ailee pointed it out just recently. I don’t really know why there aren’t quizzes run by women but I feel like there should be.