"I frequently do pub quizzes in Cardiff, and had wanted to try the Head of Steam 's quiz for a while. Me and my friends found the quiz reasonably challenging, and did not think we stood a chance of winning given how much we 'd struggled. To our shock, it turned out that our 18/35 was the winning score. Even more to our shock, we were immediately disqualified for supposedly having cheated with our phones. Even though we all offered to show the quizmaster our phone histories to prove that we hadn 't cheated, he refused to even look at them. He then explained that he had clear that phones weren 't allowed. I responded that whilst it is very common for quizmasters to say 'no phones allowed ', this is virtually always understood as meaning 'don 't use google ', not that looking at your phone for any purpose is banned, as if we were GCSE students at high school. As I say, I have been at many pub quizzes, and occasionally do check my phone for football scores and to respond to texts etc. This has never been picked up on because it something incredibly common that I always see people do at quizzes. It is worth adding that there is no way the quizmaster could ever hope to enforce this rule, as his seat in the corner of the pub (right next to our party) would not have allowed him to see whether almost any of the other teams were looking at their phones. At the end of the day, it was hard not to be extremely unimpressed with the quizmaster. Not only for the fact that he never made clear that holding your phone (for whatever reason) would lead to automatic disqualification, or for the fact that he allowed us to waste our time completing the quiz despite having clearly decided that we should be disqualified. What was most unimpressive was his refusal to be proven wrong, as he would not look at our phone history as offered. If you are going to have such a ludicrously strict rule, which you could only hope to enforce with regards to less than a quarter of participants, at the very least you should let those you suspect of cheating know that they will be disqualified if they are seen on their phones once again. I have been doing pub quizzes for years, and have never cheated; being accused of having done so leaves an incredibly bitter taste. Simply put, this is defamation of character."
