How to Win a Pub Quiz
Team size, who to bring, how to handle the ones nobody knows, and the two rounds that decide most quizzes. Practical tactics rather than "know more things".
Most teams lose pub quizzes on process, not knowledge. These are the things that actually move the score.
Build the team for coverage, not cleverness
Four to six is the sweet spot. Below four you have gaps; above six the discussion gets slower than the quiz. One very well-read person is worth less than four people with genuinely different lives — someone who watches sport, someone who watches television, someone older than the rest of you, someone who listens to chart music.
The single most useful team member is usually the one who is thirty years older or younger than everyone else.
Write the answer down last
Appoint one person to hold the pen for the whole quiz, and let them be the one who decides when to commit. Teams lose points by writing an early confident answer and never revisiting it. Leave blanks and come back; the answer often arrives while you are arguing about question seven.
Know how to argue
The commonest failure in a pub quiz team is the loudest person winning. A useful habit: before settling, ask everyone to say how sure they are out of ten. Someone quietly on eight should beat someone confidently on five, and this makes that visible without anyone having to fight for it.
Equally, if nobody is above a four, stop. Write the most plausible answer quickly and spend the time on a question you can actually get.
Guess properly
- Never leave a blank. There is no negative marking in a pub quiz.
- For a year, guess a round number in the right era. You often get a point for being within a range.
- For "which country", the answer is usually not the obvious one — a setter asking about the world’s largest producer of something rarely means the country you first think of.
- For a person, go for the most famous candidate that fits. Setters write for a pub, not a seminar.
- If the question names an unusual detail, it is doing work. "Which Scottish-born engineer" is narrowing it for a reason.
The rounds that decide it
The picture round. Usually handed out early to work on throughout the night. Teams that leave it until last get fewer of them. Give it to one person immediately and let them chip away while the others handle the spoken rounds.
The music round. Intros are recognised almost instantly or not at all. If nobody has it in five seconds, nobody is going to have it in thirty. Move on and come back.
The wipeout or jackpot round. Where most quizzes are genuinely won and lost. If the format lets you wager, wager on the category your weakest-covered member is strongest in, not the one the team feels best about collectively.
Things that are worth more than they look
- Read the question sheet ahead if you have one. Half the team can work on later questions.
- Write legibly. Points are genuinely lost to handwriting at marking time.
- Hand in on time. Also genuinely lost.
- Check the spelling of names if the quizmaster has said spelling counts. Most say it does not, some mean it.
And the etiquette
No phones. It is obvious from the answers, it is obvious from your face, and the quizmaster has seen it a hundred times. Winning a meat raffle by cheating is a poor way to spend an evening.