The pub quiz
The Pub Quiz is a huge pastime in the UK and I reckon that if done in an entertaining and fun way the fun pub quiz could be huge in other countries like the USA too.
What this article sets out to explain is what a pub quiz is all about and maybe inspire some people to start a quiz of their own.
Some take it seriously and some do not but what ever type of quiz a pub hosts it is fast becoming a very popular event.
Personally, I go for the latter, I think a fun pub quiz is so much better than a serious pub quiz for many reasons.
To start with a fun pub quiz should be easy and when I say easy I mean that anybody should be able to answer about 70% of the questions correctly. Why do you think that The Weakest Link is so popular? It’s for everybody, your every day Joe. Apply this to a pub quiz and you can easily see why a fun quiz will be so popular.
I’ve been a quiz master for 10 years and last Christmas I was gifted a quiz trivia book, called “The biggest trivia quiz book in the world”, containing over 14,000 pub quiz questions. I could easily take any of the questions from that book and put together a tough quiz in a matter of minutes, but to make a fun quiz is a different story.
I had to go through hundreds of questions from this book just to get 20 for my first general knowledge round, it took me well over an hour! From this huge book I was able to use only about 5% of the questions where as with a tough pub quiz I could have used most of them.
A fun quiz needs to have not just questions but picture rounds, speed rounds, Dingbats and brain teasers to name a few things that make fun quizzes so popular.
Of course you will have to find a subject for the picture round first which you should try to vary as much as possible. Try to think of fresh subject matter each week to keep the quiz as varied as possible.
To give you an idea of what I’m talking about here are some picture round themes I have done before. Classic cars, planes, dogs, cartoon characters, logos, mystery objects and so on.. After a while it really does get more and more difficult to think of new picture round ideas, sometimes I can think one up in minutes and sometimes it can take me an hour or more.
You will find that a lot of pub quizzes always do the same subject for their picture round every week, mostly you will see them do celebrities because it’s easy to get the pictures and does not require any thought process and is not time consuming. That’s OK for some people but it can get boring after a short while.
Try to choose questions that anybody can at least have a good guess at
Here’s an example of a question you would find in a typical pub quiz and a question taken from a fun pub quiz.
“Who scored England’s first goal in the Euro 2000?”
“What’s tattooed on Pop-eye’s arm?”
Let’s look at the first question, a typical question from a serious pub quiz, you either know the answer or you don’t, and most people won’t know the answer. If your quiz is full of questions that most people can’t answer then the likelihood of them returning next week is going to be pretty slim.
If you look at the second question, taken from a fun quiz, even if you don’t know the answer you can still have a pretty good guess. That’s what you should try to do, pick questions that anybody can at least have a guess at. By the way, the answer is an anchor.
Can you see how the second question has a fun element to it?
People will attempt to guess the answer to the second one but they will simply leave the first one blank. Think about it. If at the end of the quiz you see that most of your pub quiz answer sheet is empty are you likely to hand it in for marking? Wouldn’t you be embarrassed? More importantly, would you return next week?
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