[quote name=\'Clay Zambo\' date=\'Mar 11 2006, 09:01 AM\']Surely it didn't hurt; he knew first-hand what the players were going through. But if he'd never played the game on-air, I'm sure he would have been fine. He'd've been coached on the rules, and he'd have producers cueing him. What more would a host need?
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I think Bert needed a little more poise to deal with unusual situations, for one thing. He seemed to be clueless when, for example, a celebrity gave an illegal clue during the Cashword segment, in which case it ends at that point. He also never explained why things were so; for instance, when Constance McCashin was faced with the word "often" during a bonus round in the fall 1986 Tournament of Losers, she said what I thought was "a lot" and I thought she was going to be flagged for an illegal clue, but she wasn't. It was not until some time later, when I was taking a business education class in college, that I saw the word "allot" written on the blackboard, and at that point it hit me. She might have been saying "allot" instead of "a lot", and in cases like that, the clue giver is given the benefit of the doubt, but Bert never bothered to explain it to the home audience. (Tom Kennedy had a similar explanation during a main game on "Password Plus".)
Unusual clues sometimes threw Bert off, too. When Rip Taylor gave the clue "Episcopalian" for the word "testimony", and the contestant guessed "clergyman", Bert somehow thought that he was guessing the overall puzzle instead of the password, and that eventually led to Rip's taking off his toupee.
