Quizmasters

Channel 4 are looking for contestants with good general knowledge to take part in a new show.

The Production company is called Shine TV and they're looking for quizzers based in London to turn out for evening auditions.

Shine have been responsible for such shows as

Sky Sport prices are going up and publicans are considering other options, including hiring pub quizzes, according to this great article on The Publican website.

From a quiz perspective there are some interesting figures from a pub called the Three Compasses in North London where the landlord found that “Sky-related customers” spent £4.50 per head, about a pint and a half, per event (gross profit £2.25) compared to quiz night customers, who spent

Jamie Miller from Quiz-Genius.com was in touch recently telling me about his book. ‘How To Become A Quizzing Genius',

The book claims that anyone can become as good as a professional quizzer in a short amount of time.

The book includes Miller's ‘brain tricks’ and

TIE, the company building Edinburgh's trams are under criticism in this spending-outrage article in the Herald, but an interesting detail is that in April 2007, they spent £1032 on a staff quiz night at

There were plans to reclassify SWP (Skill With Prizes) machines, aka quiz machines as gambling and therefore make them subject to other taxes but the HMRC have now ruled that quiz machines "do not contain an element of chance" and therefore are not subject to Amusement Machine Licence Duty (AMLD).

What do they mean by no "element of chance" Do they mean that there's no chance of winning?

Story originally reported in Morning Advertiser

I got an email today which came from a disgruntled Eggheads contestant applicant.

It said:

"Eggheads is a farce, we auditioned, thrashed the team we played against. Few days later we were told we didn’t get on the show. That was that, but a few weeks later who should be on the show but the team we thrashed. So when they say is there anyone out there that can beat them, yes us but they wont put strong teams on!!!!!"

Dr Paul's Reply

It might be as simple as… they didn’t like you!

Unfortunately TV quiz shows are entertainment rather than sport, and the producers of Eggheads (as in all game shows) are always looking for contestants who they think will make good and interesting telly rather than setting out to apply Olympic standards of  fairness.

I’m not defending their decision to not have you on the show by any means but it’s worth remembering that there are other factors. For instance, profiling.

This means that if there are already too many applicants with a similar gender, race and age profile as your team, then you may struggle to get on. The producers want to see on-screen variety.

I recently promised you a  review of Quiz Night Chief, which is a piece of software designed by an Australian company called Oakfocus and intended for use by quizmasters.

The full price version costs $35 USD but you can also get a free trial.

I gave it a whirl this week and discovered that

A lot of quizmasters will now organise their questions with a dizzying array of software, none of which is

Alarm bells rang when one of my quizgoers said to me at Jenny Ha's the other day: "Here's a good pub quiz question for you:

Thanks to all who entered the best quiz question in the world competition. Here are the 2 winning entries, plus some of the most interesting runners-up.

Winners

The winning text question comes from