The Rule of Six

We came second again at the quiz last Monday night, though we were missing Tony. Well we weren't missing him in the sense of longing for his presence, just that, as he was acting as quizmaster, he wasn't on the team. Obviously if he had been on the team we'd have won easily, as he was the one who knew all the answers, as our most recent signing wittily pointed out.

So we were reduced to 5 players, while our eternal rivals, who like to call themselves The Old Farts, though they aren't any of them actually old at all, well not in my book anyway, sailed home again. The other team we consider to be dangerous rivals have taken to bringing girlfriends and wives from time to time, and this week they almost all did, which meant that they ended up with more than the maximum permitted of six. So they had to split into two smaller teams and thus did not come anywhere near winning, which is the problem with the desire to make the quiz a social event on the one hand, but also to win it, on the other. Luis says that any number who can squash themselves round a table should be allowed, provided the final points score is divided by the number of players in the team, and while this seems not unreasonable, it does conjure up a vision of one of our genial quizmasters tapping away at a calculator and announcing the scores with up to four decimal points, which would perhaps be a trifle bizarre.

In fact there was a team with eight or nine players, but as they are relatively new, and always come last, we turned a blind eye to this, but in general the rule of six is fair enough, I think, even though it means that sometimes friends and colleagues of ours who say things like "I'll drop down to the quiz tonight" have to be told that if they do, they might find themselves in a scratch team of complete strangers. What they think is that it is a social event and their presence or absence is relatively immaterial; what we think is that we are a carefully evolved team who want to win. Therein lies the difference. And we haven't won for a bit, but like Alan Curbishley at my beloved Charlton, I still think the mix is perfectly all right. It is just that, as the current cliché has it: 'you can't win 'em all'; and you can't. It doesn't mean that anything is seriously wrong.

I am making no predictions for the Charlton v Bolton match, due to start in 15 minutes, beyond remarking that Charlton always do better when people haven't been assuming they will roll the opposition over, so fingers crossed.