Anyway, in a quizzical nutshell, here’s how the jackpot round – SLASH QUESTION – works:
1) In order to be in with a chance of winning, the team must buy one or more raffle tickets at a cost of £1 each. Of course, the more tickets a team buys, the greater the chance of me picking their ticket, and thus the greater the chance that they will be the team that gets to answer the jackpot question and possibly win a BIG cash prize!
2) At the end of the night, I pick a raffle ticket at random from my little bag (there’s a running joke about this part of proceedings, and it involves the word ‘sack’, but I won’t elaborate on this until another time). Whichever team has that ticket gets to answer the jackpot question…
3)…The question ALWAYS starts with the three words ‘IN WHAT YEAR…’ Many teams new to my quiz (and some who should know better 🙂 ) ask me what the question is, and I’m more than happy to tell them the first three words, but no more than that, of course! If the team gets the question right, then huge celebrations (rightly) abound, a polite and respectful (but possibly somewhat peeved) round of applause breaks out from the teams whose number wasn’t picked, and the jackpot is won.
4) If the team gets the question wrong, then I throw it open to all the other teams for fun, not for any money – I make this VERY clear (!) – and, once I’ve found out what everyone all around the pub thinks (often including some people who didn’t take part in the quiz, but, now, suddenly, wish they had), I reveal the correct answer. The jackpot rolls over until the next quiz, and I emphasise the rollover prize to give people yet another reason to return next time! The team whose number was picked won £5 as a consolation prize.
As they say, change is inevitable though. As I said at the start, the jackpot round has proven popular among my quizgoers. On occasions, though, I have made a few modifications for a range of reasons. Here are three that instantly spring to mind, in chronological order:
1) There was a period of weeks where the jackpot was being won more regularly than might normally be expected – the luxury of being able to confer with your team-mates to reach a final consensus (‘the wisdom of crowds’) was proving to be a huge advantage. My initial thought was to make the jackpot questions harder, but I didn’t want to diminish the ‘fun’ factor. So I changed the rule so that teams could either select one – and ONLY one – member of their team to answer the question individually for the WHOLE jackpot, or they could answer as a team – allowing conferring (/arguing) – for HALF the jackpot. I would say that since I implemented this new rule, between 90-95% of the time, the team has chosen to answer as a team to improve their chances of winning. If the jackpot is large, say £500 (which isn’t unheard of), then they’re more than happy to win a still-not-too-shabby £250 for their trouble. And the beauty of this dynamic is that, even if they answer the question correctly, there’s still plenty of money left in the jackpot ‘fund’ to roll over to the next quiz.
2) As I mentioned earlier, if a team answered a question incorrectly, they received £5 back as a consolation prize. One night, I was hosting one of my quizzes as normal, and there was a team of two lads in their early 20s taking part that night. They weren’t doing as well as they’d hoped in the main quiz, and decided – quite fairly – that their best chance of winning some money would be to enter the jackpot round. They decided to buy 10 tickets each at a total cost of £20. This gave them a significant proportion of the tickets in the bag. Needless to say, the odds were in their favour, and I drew one of their tickets at random. They got the question wrong (if memory serves, I think they were just one year out with their answer), and I gave them the consolation prize of £5. Somewhat sheepishly! They left soon afterwards. I decided that this wasn’t fair. From the quiz after that night onwards, I decided that whichever team had their number picked would receive their money back for however many tickets that team bought. So, if a team bought one ticket, then they’d get £1 back. If they bought 10 tickets, then they’d get £10 back, and so on. This is a much fairer way of doing things in my opinion, as it means that, provided your number is drawn, you can’t lose money – the worst you can do is break even.
3) A more recent thing I’ve started doing applies only when teams decide to answer as a team for half the jackpot (so most of the time!). Because of the money involved, and the lively debate that can ensue from discussing the question, lots of people can shout at me at once. To whom do I listen? Whose answer do I take? A situation arose recently when one team member looked me directly in the eye and told me an answer to the question, only to be instantly shot down in flames by the whole of the rest of the team, who told me to disregard his answer as they hadn’t fully discussed it properly. In the end, another team member looked me in the eye and said, “Olly, our final answer is…(year).” Now, as it turned out, if they’d have gone with their team-mate’s ‘maverick’ initial answer, they would have got the question right and won the money! So, to stop this from happening again, I ask the team to appoint an official (for want of a better word) spokesperson before I ask the question. Once they have done this I tell them that I will ONLY accept the FIRST answer from this person once they have discussed the question as a team, and I will ask this person to give me the team’s answer shortly. This eliminates any possible ambiguity about whose answer to accept, and, of course, when the stakes are high and the jackpot is a very tidy sum indeed, this becomes very important for the integrity of the jackpot round (sorry, jackpot question!)
