Quotes »

"It’s a cynical thing for me to say, but in my experience  if we’re talking about a pub quiz rather than a one off special event, then the higher the prize, the more cheating will go on, and the worse spirit the quiz will be played in"

Exclusive Interview With David Clark - Part 5 »

Interview by Jamie Miller

Have you ever been tempted to play a quiz machine at your local pub?! 
Yes. 

Although not in my local since they’ve never had one. 

Back in about 1990 my team and I found an old Dave Lee Travis Give Us A Break machine in a rugby club in mid Wales. We emptied it of cash. I’ll be honest, I was a little bit late into serious quizzing to really make the most of the quiz machine boom. I have a quiz friend who used to go to Blackpool every weekend in the mid 80s, and he reckons you could easily make several hundred pounds playing the old quiz machines. The original machines had tiny memories, so they could only store a few hundred questions. So if you were prepared to put a little time, effort and start up cash into it you could pretty soon get to the stage where you could clean out a machine in every visit. Well, quiz machines have become a lot smarter and trickier since those days. 

I have very rarely played quiz machines since. Even as a serious quizzer the odds are now stacked very much against the player. They have huge memory banks for thousands of questions. You have to answer so many questions before you get a sniff of any money. Not only that, but most machines it seems will shove in a ‘stopper’ , that is a ridiculous question you will definitely not know the answer to, before you get any cash at all. So I don’t tend to play them. However I did play a machine which had a version of 1 versus 100 on it last year, and pulled about £10 out of it more by luck than judgement. 

On a wider note, the fact is that making money out of playing quizzes is becoming increasingly hard in my opinion. For one thing fewer and fewer pubs and clubs seem to be giving cash prizes for their quizzes. The ‘bottle of wine for first or second place’ is pretty ubiquitous now. Even in those places that still offer a cash prize there’s no guarantee that the best quizzer or team is going to take the prize. This has a lot to do with using internet phones to cheat, and unfortunately unless they’re really blatant its very hard to prove that someone is using one. It’s a cynical thing for me to say, but in my experience  if we’re talking about a pub quiz rather than a one off special event, then the higher the prize, the more cheating will go on, and the worse spirit the quiz will be played in.

INTERESTING FACT! »

Back in about 1990, Dave and his quiz team found an old Dave Lee Travis Give Us A Break machine in a rugby club in mid Wales. They emptied it of cash!

Contact me: jamiemiller@quiz-genius.com