Kiwanis Hunt 2008—In vs And

GAMES OF STRATEGY—there must be millions of them. Examples are chess, scrabble, football, badminton and squash, to name just a few. In fact most, if not all, games and sports involve some sort of strategy one way or another, albeit to varying degrees.

Who, then, is responsible for the planning in a game of strategy?

Q7) You'll find a person responsible for planning in a game of strategy, studying here?

I have mentioned before elsewhere in this blog, that in my opinion, a good treasure hunt clue should contain only words which are necessary; they are included in the clue for the purpose of assisting the solver to arrive at the answer. But sometimes they are also included for the purpose of misleading the solver!

To repeat the question: Who is "a person responsible for planning in a game of strategy"?

The most straightforward answer is the word mastermind. However, I couldn't help but wonder the necessity of the words "... in a game of strategy," in the above clue. If indeed the intention of the setter was to find the word mastermind, then "a person responsible for planning" was quite good enough to do the job. The continuation with "... in a game of strategy," was not really necessary. For example, the clue could have been perfectly OK like this:

Q) You'll find a person responsible for planning, studying here.

Therefore, "... in a game of strategy," must be there for a reason. For if those words are not there for a special reason, why, then, it would mean that the setter had included words which play no significant role in the riddle.

Considering the calibre of Grandmaster Chong as the Clerk-of-Course (CoC), one must be careful when dealing with "useless" extra words in the clue. It is not like a Grandmaster CoC to violate such a "rule" in setting hunt questions. If this clue was set by other CoCs, say, Mr Baskaran, then I wouldn't have wasted my time to think twice about this clue; because I happen to know that Mr Baskaran has a peculiar style of including many, many meaningless and useless words in his hunt clues!

Therefore, perhaps there is another twist to the above clue? Looking at it from the cryptic point of view, that word "in" might be a container indicator. In such a case, "... a person responsible for planning in a game of strategy," might mean the solver has to find two words before the container operation.

For example,

a person responsible for planning = COACH

a game of strategy = CHESS

Hence, COACH in CHESS = CHECOACHSS

Of course they need not be COACH and CHESS. Maybe they might have been other words too.

However, there is another possible reason why the CoC had included "game of strategy" in the clue. Could it be possible that he was overwhelmed by generosity; and then decided to provide an additional clue to help the solver find the word mastermind, just in case he can't think of that word with "a person responsible for planning" alone?

Let's investigate this idea for a bit.

"... a person responsible for planning" is a mastermind. But "... a game of strategy" also agrees with the word mastermind. It seems that the CoC has intended to fashion out a "double-definition" clue. But in that case, the word "in" adopted in the clue is inaccurate. A better alternative is the word "and", so that the clue would become something like this:

Q) You'll find a person responsible for planning and a game of strategy, studying here.

Although the clue would look awkward due to a dubious surface reading, but now we have a different scenario. "A person responsible for planning" is a mastermind; and mastermind is also a "game of strategy".

The word "and" is most certainly a superior word when compared to "in". However, during the hunt, we did not find anything that would agree with the COACH/CHESS idea above. Therefore, the moment we saw Pusat Tuisyen MASTERMIND, we immediately took that as our answer. And of course that was indeed the required answer. I made no big deal about it during the hunt, and passed it off as an irrelevant inaccuracy. But during the answer presentation, the clue was presented like this:

Q7) You'll find a person responsible for planning and a game of strategy, studying here?

I did not realise this different version of the clue during the answer presentation until Master Teck Koon, my team member, pointed it out to me. Sometimes things like that can happen. The CoC sets the questions. Then when he prepares the answer presentation, he makes modifications to the questions, only to forget to make the corresponding amendments in the original question papers!