Cheating Never Pays

23Mar07

Here’s a good moral tale for the kids. Last night, myself, my house-mate Dave and our friends Alex and Dan took part in a pub quiz. However, it was no regular pub quiz trip. Such was our desire to find a pub quiz that we travelled quite a distance to reach a pub at which it was quiz night. I won’t mention the exact pub or location owing to what I am going to say next, however it was certainly not a ‘student’ pub. Nevertheless it was a nice enough place and the quiz was on so we were sorted. We picked a suitably hilarious name (‘The Trolley Bandits’ – might give you a clue to the location), the quiz kicked off, and we proceeded to rattle our way through the first few rounds of questions. Overall we were doing alright. We managed to name the five cities in England whose names end with the letter ‘y’ and we managed recognise a picture of Steve Ryder when we saw one. However the final round was ‘Wipeout’, in which a full set of ten correct answers would win five bonus points, but any incorrect answer would lose all the points for that round. So basically if you didn’t know the answer you had to leave it blank.

Well, as it happened we ended up with nine near certain answers and one for which we didn’t have a clue. The question was about a sitcom from the seventies or eighties that none of us had any idea about. All we needed was the name of the show and the five bonus points would be ours. But we just couldn’t risk it. Or so it seemed. However thanks to the wonders of modern technology, a couple of minutes surfing the net provided us with a possible answer – Duty Free. The thing was, could we take the chance. If it was wrong we’d lose all the points, and even if we got the answer right surely everyone would be suspicious of our top marks score. In the end, after much tactical discussion it was decided not to take the risk, and despite protestations from Dave, we stuck with our nine points. And thank goodness we did.

As with all pub quizzes the teams all swapped papers for scoring. We marked the paper of the genial locals sitting next to us who proudly claimed to have quote, ‘done rubbish’. The quiz was out of 60 and the locals scraped themselves a respectable 31. Not bad, but pretty much in line with their own assessment. More important however, was the fact that Duty Free had turned out to be the correct answer and when our sheet returned with a relatively impressive 44 Dave couldn’t resist reminding us that it could have been 50. Overall though, we were relatively happy with our performance. Indeed we were quietly confident of a top three finish. The quiz master announced the top three starting in reverse order and in third place was the team of locals we had marked. In second place was a team with barely anymore points than the locals. Therefore we knew we had won. At the same time we were both very surprised, and slightly embarrassed by the margin of our win – a whole ten more points than the team in second. Imagine if we had cheated!

Even as it was the quiz master was clearly very suspicious of our victory and spent the best part of two minutes questioning Dave about the sinking of the Belgrano. This was not as a result of any personal interest, but because the subject had come up earlier in the quiz and he was obviously anxious to check we knew our stuff. And fair play to him, the prize was a generous £15 bar tab for the next week. Nevertheless, even after this interrogation I think he was less than convinced. But we were innocent – just. So there’s the lesson for the day children: cheating never pays.

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Tags: pubs, quiz