General Quiz Advice
Listed below are some of the things you might want to consider when running a pub quiz to make sure it runs smoothly and is enjoyed by everyone.
Preparation
Print out enough copies of the handout round and answer sheets so that you can distribute a copy to every team taking part in the quiz. It might also be worth handing out some blank paper so that teams can take notes.
Make sure you have enough pens or pencils available - some teams might not have their own.
Print out the quizmaster’s question and answer sheets and familiarise yourself with the content of your quiz. We also recommend that you check the difficulty level of the quiz. Our weekly quiz includes some substitute questions that you can use to make the quiz a bit easier or a bit more challenging.
If you are charging an entry fee, decide what this should be - a typical pub quiz will charge £1 or £2 per person.
Decide on whether or not you should have a limit on the number of people in a team. Teams of two or three people might think it’s unfair to be competing against teams of eight or nine people, so it might be worth doing this. A limit of four, five or six people per team is normal.
Decide how the quiz should be marked. The fairest way is for everyone to hand in their handout rounds and completed answer sheets to be marked consistently by the same person. However, if you don’t have the time or resources to do this, you can ask each teams to swap their sheets at the end of the quiz to mark each others. You should also decide when the quiz should marked. Will you mark everything at the end of the quiz? Will you split it in two by marking the first half, giving teams a run-down of their scores, then doing the second half of the quiz and then marking this? Could you even mark the quiz and give a run-down of the scores after each round? All of these methods have their advantages and disadvantages, so you should consider them carefully before picking the best one for you.
Make sure you know what prizes are available. Typically, prizes are generated from entry fees, but to encourage more people to come to your quiz you may want to increase the prize fund or include extra prizes. For example, the prize for the winning team could be the pot of money from the entry fees, while the prize for the second-placed team could be a bottle of wine. You may also want to consider having a rollover or jackpot round, where the winning team has to answer extra questions to win a jackpot prize. If they fail, then the amount of money in the jackpot fund increases the following week.
Check your timings - i.e. when should the quiz start, and what time should you expect it to finish? Our weekly quiz will probably take around two hours in total. This includes time for a break in the middle and time at the end for marking teams’ answers. However, until you have run a number of quizzes and get a more accurate idea as to how long it will take, it is wise to allow a fair bit of extra time in case it runs over.
With many people owning smartphones these days, cheating can be a big problem in pub quizzes, so you might want to think about how to deal with the possibility of this. There are some more details on this subject below.
Handing Out Material
Our weekly quiz packs always come with a “handout” round. We recommend having at least one in a pub quiz, as it gives teams something to work on at the start of the quiz and also during any breaks you might have. A copy of the handout round will typically be given to each team at the start of the quiz. When doing this, you can explain to teams that they can work on this straight away and continue to work on it until it needs to be handed in and marked - for most quizzes this will be at the end of the quiz.
You should also give teams something to write their answers on. Our weekly quizzes come with sheets you can print out for this, though you might want to use sheets you have designed yourself if you are running the quiz to your own format, or even just use blank paper.
When handing out handout rounds and answer sheets, you can also collect entry fees and ensure that no team is exceeding the maximum number of people allowed in a team (if such a limit exists). If required, you can also hand out scrap paper and pens or pencils too.
Reading Questions
Once teams have had a bit of time, say five or ten minutes, to work on the handout round, it’s time to get everyone’s attention and begin reading out the questions in the main part of your quiz.
Before doing this, there are a few things you might want to mention as follows...
- Welcome everyone to your quiz
- Check that everyone who wants to take part has paid and has a handout round and answer sheet
- Explain the brief format of the quiz
- Give details on what the prizes are
- Give details on your policy on cheating
- Explain that the quizmaster is always right (i.e. your decision on any queries is always final)
Before reading out the questions in a round, we recommend that you make sure teams are clear on the subject or theme of the round. Some rounds will be straightforward and have titles that are self-explanatory, but others might have a bit of a twist to them. In our weekly quiz packs, these are detailed on the question and answer sheets where the instructions are written in italics underneath the main headings.
When reading out each question, you should state the number of the question and then read out the question twice with a short pause in between. You should then allow a longer pause between questions. This should ensure that everyone is clear about what is being asked and that they have a reasonable amount of time to discuss the question within their team and write down their answer. Also, be aware that teams will need a bit more thinking time on some questions (e.g. on a question asking you to unscramble an anagram), so you will need to allow for a bit of extra time before moving on to the next question in these cases.
At the end of a round, and before moving on to the next round, it’s probably a good idea to ask teams whether or not they want any questions from the round to be repeated.
Breaks
Assuming your quiz is more than just a couple of rounds long, we recommend that you have at least one break during it. As well as giving you a rest from reading out questions and teams a rest from listening and writing down answers, it might also give teams time to get a drink and to work on their handout round and on any questions from previous rounds that they aren’t sure on.
Marking
When it comes to marking, you should have already decided at what point in your quiz the marking will take place, and how the marking will be done. Before doing this, you should give teams a few minutes so they can check back on any answers they have left blank or are unsure of. You can make teams clear on this with a quick announcement (e.g. “you’ve got five minutes to go over your answers before it’s time to mark them”). Then, ask them to either hand in their sheets (remembering to check that teams have written their team name on each sheet so they can be identified) or swap their sheets with another team.
Whichever marking method you are using, you will need to read out the questions and answers. This is obviously vital if teams have swapped answer sheets so need to know the answers for marking purposes, but even if you are doing the marking, teams will still want to hear the answers. As before, you should clearly state the round number and title, along with each question number. This time, however, there is no need to repeat questions, and you might choose to get things moving a bit more quickly by giving answers as a fact instead of reading out the full questions. For example, the question “In the 19th century, what medical term arose from the birthplace and condition of Chang and Eng Bunker?” has answer of “Siamese Twins”. Instead of reading the full question again, then the answer, you could simply read “The medical term that arose from Chang and Eng Bunker was Siamese Twins”, placing emphasis on the phrase “Siamese Twins”.
Whichever method you use, you might find that some answers are queried, with a team asking for something that has been marked as incorrect to be considered as correct. There are a variety of ways to deal with this, such as only accepting the exact answer on your sheet, checking on the internet, or asking another independent person whether or not they think the answer should be given. Whatever you choose to do in cases like this, you should always try to be consistent and you should always emphasise that the quizmaster's decision is final.
Announcing The Winners
Once all of the teams’ answer sheets have been marked, it will be time to gather all the scores together and announce the winners.
For added excitement, it’s best to read out scores in reverse order, leaving the winners till last. However, if you feel that one or two teams might be embarrassed by having their low scores read out, then you might only choose to read out the top few.
Tie Breaks
There is a chance that two or more teams end up with the same score overall, in which case you can use a tie break question to decide which team is the overall winner.
Our weekly quiz packs always include two tie break questions. We recommend that you choose one of these, read the question aloud, and ask the teams involved to write down their guess at the answer on a piece of paper and hand it you. The team whose answer is closest to the correct answer is then deemed the winning team.
In the unlikely event that two (or more) teams guess incorrectly, but that the difference between their guesses and the correct answer is the same, then you can simply state this and ask them to guess again (without reading out either of their guesses or the correct answer) or you can use the second tie break question.
Cheating
With most people having a smartphone, cheating can be a big problem in the modern-day pub quiz. Finding a foolproof way to deal with this isn’t easy, but the following ideas should help.
Firstly, you should make clear at the start of your quiz, and possibly at one or two other points during it, that it is against the rules to use a smartphone (or similar device) to look for answers. Some people may think they are being clever by cheating in this way, so a friendly announcement along the lines of “we all know it’s easy to cheat using your mobile phone, but please don’t as it’s not much fun for anyone else taking part if there are cheats involved” should help discourage this. You might even want to take this further by threatening to disqualify anyone caught cheating.
Also, it might be worth encouraging teams in your quiz to look out for cheats and to let you know if they suspect anything. This might seem a bit harsh, but if one team knows that another team is cheating and doesn’t do anything about it, then firstly the quiz isn’t fair for all of the non-cheating teams, and secondly, the team who know about the cheating could stop coming because of this or may even resort to cheating themselves.
Something else that might help, though it does involve a bit of extra work, is to have a box or container on every table. Then, before the start of the quiz, everyone has to put their mobile phone in the box on their table and the box is shut. Then, if someone genuinely does have a need to use their phone, they can do so under supervision, otherwise the phones remain out of use.
Extra Ideas
Here are a few other ideas you might want to consider including in your quiz...