Blackpool

So the European Quiz Championships have been and gone. The crème de la crème (plus me) of European quizzing assembled on a very very windy, grey, wet, November weekend in Blackpool for as intense a quizfest as you could possibly hope. I'd not spent that long in Blackpool since my days as a Students' Union activist. It hasn't improved.

FRIDAY
You know it’s going to be a memorable a weekend when you go into your hotel room and find a stick of Blackpool rock with Quizzer written through it, and a QUIZ ME KWIK hat on your bed.

Sadly, what was missing was my nice bright red polo shirt, the team colours of the Welsh Quiz team. For I am a member of Cymru’s B team. Yes indeedy. Don’t be too impressed though. The first quiz of the weekend was the qualifying tournament for the international team tournament. Wales B didn’t qualify…..by a long way. By the end of this quiz some of my teammates were losing the will to live. We beat Hungary’s first team who put in a valiant showing on their first outing, and 3 other scratch teams. In one round we even outscored the Welsh A team. But at the end of the qualifiers we were left out of the reckoning. Shame.

I enjoyed the qualifier so little that I am seriously contemplating not putting myself forward next year. But there is plenty of time for me to talk myself round.

Later that evening we had an icebreaker quiz where teams were drawn at random so as to let everyone mix with people of other nationalities. It was great. On my team was Tom, European quizzing’s true prodigy. A fixture of the Belgium international team, Tom is an exceptional quizzer. His knowledge of European tv programmes came in handy when the xenophobia of British tv programming executives became increasingly apparent throughout the quiz. How do all of the other nationalities know about German soap operas? Because they aren’t so close minded about such things as the Brits. Shame on us.

We did fairly well. Certainly well enough to partially erase the trauma of the earlier quiz. The evening’s quizzing finished with some buzzer quiz action. The questions were supplied by a contingent of North Americans who had joined us for the weekend. Sadly a lot of the questions were so US-centric that no-one had a clue. Still, my knowledge of Buffy the Vampire Slayer won my team a few points.

SATURDAY
This was the big day, the highlight of the weekend for most. Saturday morning saw us file in for the Individual Championship. Allotted to tables, your finishing position owes almost as much to the arbitrary draw as it does to your answers. There was a top table, then 3 columns of tables. I started on table B1, one table below the top. To be in with a chance of winning the tournament you need to be on the top table in the last round. So I felt that I had a slight outside chance of being there or thereabouts. Certainly a lot better than in 2006 when I started on table 9. I just needed to get promoted up one level and then hope there were always 3 people worse than me each round.

I didn’t do well enough in round 1. I ended up moving sideways. Still there was always round 2. I stayed where I was. But by round 3 the best players were starting to appear near in greater numbers in the higher tables. I got relegated. After some table pingpong I finished on table 2. One row below where I had started. Officially I came 36th, although if you go by points scored I was 49th out of 92. I’m not unhappy with that, although it was tough. Oh yes it was tough. I scored a whopping 10 points less this year than last. At this level that’s a lot! The winner was Nico Pattyn – for once not the bridesmaid. It completed a bad year for Kevin Ashman who has lost his British, European and World crowns in the space of 12 months.

At this point it is sad to note that Lieven Van Den Brande, who was this year’s runner-up, died about three weeks after the event. A great loss to the quiz world, and of course to his family and friends.

In the afternoon there was the team (club) competition. Not having a club I tagged onto the Finnish national team. There were only 3 of them but they are phenomenal. It was probably the toughest quiz of the weekend but they were so good that we came 6th. I probably contributed a half dozen answers at most. Those guys are simply awesome.

It’s at events like these that the whole ‘big fish small pond’ thing comes to mind. I’m a good pub quizzer, and probably one of the better players at the pub quizzes I go to. At Grand Prix events I am a medium sized fish in a bigger pond. Always somewhere in the middle of the pack. But at the European Championships the sheer quantity of information that I don’t know (or even knew existed) astounds me. What is more astounding is that people for whom English is at best a 2nd language are so incredibly good. While I may still finish in the middle of the pack the gap between me and the best is huge. Admittedly some of the best players do have 20+ years on me, but still….

Saturday evening saw the final of the International Team tournament, and England edged out Belgium to retake the crown for the first time since 2004. But look out England and Belgium, the Finnish and Norwegians are on the cusp of becoming genuine contenders!

A trip to a pizza restaurant, some ‘beat the intro’ music quizzing and Singstar karaoke saw the night to an inevitable drunken conclusion.

SUNDAY
Despite a 3am finish, at 10am on Sunday morning my partner JR and I were in our seats ready for the Pairs quiz. It was good fun and probably the most enjoyable quiz from the formal programme. We could have done better than we did, but we kept talking ourselves out of answers when actually we should have gone on gut instinct grrr.

The ‘gala’ dinner and presentations rounded off the main part of the event. After which a bunch of us experienced Blackpool at its best. Tacky amusements and the Doctor Who exhibition. On the way back to the hotel David Stainer gave us the benefit of his quiz machine expertise. Our winnings went some way to paying for a curry we stopped off for on the walk back.
Drinks were had at the final pub before the hotel. We met the Norwegian contingent there who were amazed to find that they were no longer serving food. Well it was 8.01 and the restaurant shut at 8. Great customer service! What do you call somewhere where the beer is warm, the staff are rude and they have just stopped serving food. An English themed pub!

Still Jenny got her Bamber Gascoigne quiz book out an impromptu buzzer-less buzzer quiz began. I was doing rather well, second only to Stainer when we were joined by the Norwegians, and some more Brits. It was tougher but I still managed to hold my own, despite some ill-informed barracking from a member of the Wales A team.

At kicking out time we headed back to the hotel. But that wasn’t the end. Oh no. We found some buzzers and carried on. At some point the evening morphed into an episode of QI, with people venturing supplementary ‘interesting’ facts in an attempt to garner extra points. With the added spice of innuendo bingo the evening carried on until 3 am. At which point we all retired to our respective rooms.

MONDAY
Monday was all about farewells. Next year we head to Oslo. It can’t come soon enough!