Quotes »

"Decide for yourself how good you want to be, and how hard you’re prepared to work for it. I honestly believe that almost anyone could become a quiz champion"

Exclusive Interview With David Clark - Part 4 »

Interview by Jamie Miller

What tips do you have for anyone who wants to be as good as you?! 
Please! You’re embarrassing me! I’m not actually THAT good in real terms. So my advice is don’t try to be as good as me, try to be much better than me. Still, for anyone who wants to become, lets say, the best quizzer that they can possibly be, here’s some tips : - 

Whatever level of quizzer you are, if you want to improve then you will have to do some work, I’m afraid. This requires a certain level of commitment, and you may not be prepared to put so much into something that is, for the most of us, a hobby. So do bear this in mind. 

You’ll get a certain part of the way there just by playing in quizzes. Lots of quizzes and lots of different quizzes. Different quizzes mean different question masters, different formats, and above all different questions. If nothing else widening your quiz experience like this will help you to identify your stronger areas of knowledge, and your weaker areas. Likewise it should, over time, build up a bank of ‘old chestnuts’ for you , that is, questions which come up time and time again, which really aren’t worth more than a second or two’s thought. How serious would you want to be about all this ? If you are desperate to improve, then go as far as jotting down the questions that you had wrong. Then, lets say if 9 out of the dozen questions you had wrong were all about sport, then its pretty obvious you need to work on Sport. Watch TV quizzes as well. Watch the Weakest Link, for example. Until you can answer almost every question on the show , then you’ve still got some work to do. 

Making up your own quizzes is both fun and useful. There’s very likely to be a local pub or club near you that hosts their own quiz, where the question master will be pleased to let you chip in a quiz now and again. 

Read a quality newspaper every day. There really is no substitute for this. 

If you have a particularly retentive memory for facts, then you’ll go a long way just by doing these things. However if you want to take a further step, then you’re going to have to learn things formally. There are many ways of committing facts to memory – I’ve already mentioned flashcards, but there are also mindmaps, mnemonics and so on. None of them is inherently better than the others, it is simply a question of finding what works best for you. 

Of course, if you could learn Trevor Montague’s The A to Z of Almost Everything from cover to cover then you’d have cracked it ! But that’s going too far. You could always use quiz books, and they do have their place. However unless a quiz book is very, very, very good I can’t just sit there and work my way through it. 

So basically, decide for yourself how good you want to be, and how hard you’re prepared to work for it. I honestly believe that almost anyone could become a quiz champion, but I also think that for most of us, the amount of work involved would kind of take away a lot of the fun. Which is certainly why I started pub quizzing in the first place.

DAVID CLARK'S TOP TIP »

"...Making up your own quizzes is both fun and useful. There’s very likely to be a local pub or club near you that hosts their own quiz, where the question master will be pleased to let you chip in a quiz now and again"

Contact me: jamiemiller@quiz-genius.com