Results?

About as fair as Ken Jennings joining his local pub trivia.

Thread,

Do your answers change if PGUK was a pub quiz fiend who had been to 5 quizzes in the last week and had seen 1/5th of the questions each time?

I still want an answer on where the line is for people that think OP shouldn't play. A single re-used question? A section of re-used questions?

It's trivia. If you know the answer, you know the answer.

She wouldn't be the first party girl with a penis running around here.

Partygirl wouldn't be able to know the questions were the same until AFTER the game was played. Trivia organizer is to blame. Play the game and hope you remembered all the answers from the previous game. Pub trivia is just something to do while drinking anyways.

perfectly fine but more likely to win?

knowing answers and being likely to know more answers are completely different. and as said above, if they arent all the same questions, is it still an issue? if you know the first 10 but the next 30 are different, do you speak up right away? if the last ten are different, do you still give up?

I didnt recommend one way or another initially.

Its possible for choosing to play to be morally tenable yet maintain that choosing not to play is the more honorable decision.

I dont see the situation with not knowing the entirety of the quiz as being relevant.

You can always play, listen to all the questions, fill it out, then not turn in your answer sheet if you find all the questions a repeat.

This is a weak ethical dilemma, and I agree one exists but not exactly for the reasons given so far. How you learned the answers only matters if you cheated. Everyone who gets them all correct learned them somewhere in their life. Having recently been exposed to them in the same Trivia game isn't the crux of the dilemma and narrows the issue too much. What if you heard the questions a year ago? 10 years ago? At an unaffiliated bar? So I would define the problem differently to clarify it.

Perhaps not a perfect example, but when I was younger I was a semi-professional pool player and could have made a nice living doing so. I would not play with friends or friends of friends for money unless they knew exactly what they were getting into and were near my level. The reason was that I knew in advance that I would win, meaning it was no longer a game, it would be a hustle.

The same thing applies to the scenario given here. If you know for sure in advance that you will either win or tie the winner by getting every answer correct, it is unfair for you to play for money. The reason you know this is not relevant to the Dilemma. Having heard the questions before is only one of many ways you could have this knowledge.

NOG,

What if he doesn’t know any of the questions in advance, but knows for sure he’ll win because he knows all the other people at the bar are complete idiots?

I don't think that is really knowable in a typical scenario is it? At any rate it wasn't the scenario given.

NOG,

It’s pretty typically knowable at places where you’re a regular at pub quiz.

Then I would say don't play. Or do it once to show off and split the money with the rest and buy them all drinks, then never play again.

This is an interesting question. What are your thoughts? I'd feel bad playing (we win often enough to have broached this issue but not so much as to seriously push the matter) but then, what if the jackpot is $1,500 or some amount where it would be 'worth our time' to win? What if we decide not to play and some other similarly strong team turns up, which presumably we wouldn't know about?

To the actual matter: we played and won. Missed the jackpot but won ~$55. Host said we got the highest score ever (quiz is fairly new at the sister pub). Marking team neglected to give us five points for acing the final rounds but we didn't point this out lol.

I'm still not sure what's right to do, but I regret playing. For one, it was really ****ing boring. We knew we wouldn't get any interesting questions we haven't seen before and knew we'd win.

People approached us to comment on our ace trivia knowledge and if felt really dirty. e.g 'You guys are amazing. How do you know so much?' - if what we were doing was fine shouldn't we have felt comfortable giving the honest answer either then or at a later date?. Also I wanted to tell the pub about the loophole but how do I do it now without 'fessing up'? Send an anonymous email next week?

We won by ~10 points (actually 15). Got at most ~6 more points than the first time we did the quiz so doing the quiz before didn't help us. But it could have.

Questions we got wrong: i) What year was the Cuban Missile crisis (off by one year both times)?, ii) Who wrote Escape (The Pina Colada Song) (went for Rupert Brooke both times), iii) Band/Title of one of the songs in the music round (can't recall what it was but one of those songs you'd recognise if you heard it), iv) My idiot friend hasn't heard of Salman Rushdie so we proffered Simon Rushdie (can make an argument they'd accept 'Rushdie' so Simon Rushdie is acceptable but didn't think it was right to push it...).

Q. Why does Pub B repeats an old quiz from Pub A rather than doing the same questions (the pubs' quizzes occur simultaneously)? Doing the same questions seems like the default option - what am I missing? I'm confident the first time we did the quiz at Pub B was also a repeat (we hadn't seen before), so this occurrence probably wasn't a one off error. Any ideas?

If it means anything, the fact that you still are thinking about it and made a thread about it after the fact means you are likely a good person.


Happy to have co piloted the music festival band draft with you many years ago.

You sure that was me?

8 years ago in EDF, yup.

What is often enough, and is first the only spot that pays? Obviously you could just play along without officially entering, but that's somehow not as much fun, even if the prize is pretty trivial. I've only played free ones, but it seems pretty common that a couple of teams are always at the top. From your description of the win, they don't seem to resent you.

I would just go to the next quiz night at A and say to the host "hey, we were at B last week and the questions seemed really familiar, is it always like that?" Since you didn't win the huge jackpot and you haven't had some Chinese swim team type turnaround, I wouldn't be worried about being anonymous.

If nothing else it will be entertaining next week when you go back to being the doughnut crew.

Actually we're switching to a different pub next week because we're bored the quiz at our regulars. We've never managed to take down one of the $750+ rollovers which I'd really like to do so we'll eventually go back (both pubs post the rollover amounts on Instagram).