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 A Pub Quiz ... in Graz? Yep, I know this is the question you're asking yourself. What on earth did this quiz come from? Well, a pub quiz is nothing new - at least in Britain and Ireland, where in fact it's a
tradition going back to Liverpool and the late 1960s. In that tradition, the local pub opens its doors earlier in the week
than maybe normal and friends meet up to challenge each other on trivia... and maybe have a beer. Now, you have to add to this background a couple of friends (Tim & Ross) who were opening a pub in Graz. One comes from England, the other from Canada and they want to introduce something from home. So, the idea of the pub quiz was born. And why me? Absolutely no reason, apart from the fact they were mega busy
sorting out the new pub and I was there... As the first quiz in Graz, it wasn't quite as glamourous back then as I know you realise it is today. In fact
it all started with questions being bellowed out from behind the bar at the Office. That was also when the Office was very
small. There were no mics and no fancy sounds checks. And only 6 or 7 teams. Nobody thought it would last more than a week
or two. That was in January 2005. The league began in October that year, and the rest, as they do so often say, is history. The fact that the quiz has been running for so long (at least if you count in dog
years) means that the quiz itself has spawned its own history. We have champions, ex-champions, sore losers and all the rest.
You'll find all of that stuff in the stats pages. The Format As much as I'm sure you can all believe it, the quiz didn't begin life with it's current format. If you go to a quiz today, you'll be used to more or less the same thing every week - pictures, then general knowledge, blockbusters, anagrams or music and finally the connections round. Hence, you might be surprised to discover that for the first 6 months or so of the quiz, the connections round didn't exist. The Accumulator also came much later (but please don't ask me exactly when). Anyway, in the early days, the quiz had the basic format of pictures, general knowledge and a staff round. The Staff Round was themed on a subject chosen the week before by a member of staff. It could be anything, but the big difference was that everyone knew what the topic was to begin with. And there were ten proper questions. The Staff Round later morphed into a Mystery Round, but here, the theme often had nothing to do with the actual answers, but rather the link was to be found in the first letter of each word of the first nine answers: these then made up a 9 letter anagram to be solved for the tenth question. Another version of this round was a kind of inverse Connection Round, where the theme was given at the beginning of the round and served to help teams find the correct answers. Now, this might all sound like it was a very straight-forward, chronological evolution to what you see every week today, but it was actually the start of the leagues in October 2005 which prompted the final round to be fixed as one particular style of round. The Anagram Round actually came into being in much the same way - at various times it's been a mathematics round, a science round, even a languages round. As I remeber, it was only included in the quiz originally to give me time to collect and count the scores before the final round! The Music Round is much more recent due to technological issues. Until a couple of years ago, I didn't have the software to chop up the songs and buying them online was hideously expensive. Famously though, Mostly Harmless (these days Murphy's Outlaws) came to the rescue with some free software that even a dummy like me can use. Anagrams were too popular to do away with though and music also takes a long time - this is why it takes place at the end of each month. The Accumulator
Definately the most recent addition to the regular pub quiz season, having been around for a couple of years at the most. History can still be seen in use in the summer leagues however, as the old system of 20 points if you get 10 out of 10 on the Blockbuster Round still applies. In fact, for a while the 20-point rule and the Accumulator overlapped, until I realised that a 20-point bonanza meant that the team would almost certainly also win first place. So, the 20-point rule was done away with in the regular season to at least make it more interesting for everybody after an Accumulator win.
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