It is becoming a pet hate of mine in quizzes to be stuck with an anagram question. I do not dislike anagrams at all and am a keen player of scrabble, various on-line word games and indeed anagramming games but finding them in the middle of a GK round in a pub quiz is annoying. "What is the only English Anagram of Stationed?" etc is the common type.
However, I can maybe tolerate the odd one here and there and from a personal point of view it means the non-quizzing fans I usually quiz with get chance to get stuck into it.
This leads me to the worst round of quizzing I have played in. By worst I mean least enjoyable of course. It started with the quiz master completely making a hash of the instructions. What he basically tried to say, was that he was going to ask three questions with a two-word answer only required for each. After three questions you took all those letters and had to make a word with it.
Here's an easy example - (My own as I am not in the habit of reproducing another quizmasters sets)
1. Who is the author of plays including the Crucible and Death of a Salesman? Arthur Miller
2. Who is the lead singer of Aerosmith? Steve Tyler
3. In which TV series did George Clooney play Dr Doug Ross? E. R.
So take all those initials and you are left with AMSTER?
The quiz master then wanted you to to make a word out of those initials. See the problem? There are at least 6 different words you could make but the only way to get the point was if the answer you gave was the same word on the quiz master's sheet. He justified this by saying it stopped Google cheats.
Now, each correct anagram was worth 2 points, he did 5 rounds of this meaning 10 points in a quiz out of 60 points was based on guess work! He also made the questions so easy, pretty much every team will have got all the question answers so even more importance was placed on the questions.
Two remedies to this if he insists on carrying on with he round, which was met with many groans.....
1. Make the anagram answer once in which there is only one possible word
2. Give a crossword style clue to the word wanted and this would allow people to "work backwards" as well as work out which word it is!
Anyway, enough said. Just like Family Fortunes rounds I would rather not see Anagrams in quizzes especially as bad as this!
It actually sounds like a good idea but poorly executed. I'm all for rounds and themes that stop the Google quizzers, and I can see that this might make it harder for them to Google. You're right that this quiz master needs to put a little more thought into it - and then he might have something.
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