Club managers and bar owners alike ask us all sorts of questions about how to run a pub quiz. Here are a few common queries we get, along with some answers that may help you out:
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Pub quiz nights attract a very loyal following of people on an otherwise quiet night of the week for your business. Once established, the night runs itself, as punters know that they will turn up, week after week, and the quiz will be running. It's a highly addictive hobby! Cost-wise, it's also very effective, as the turnover far exceeds the outlay. Many of our clients have been running the quiz weekly now for ten plus years!
Why should I run a regular pub quiz night? -
How often should I run a pub quiz?
99% of our clients pick one night every week and devote it to 'quiz night'. Weekly is best - providing you have a catchment area that can service a regular crowd. The odd small town runs a fortnightly or monthly quiz, but by far the majority find the popularity of the night, along with the minimal costs involved lends well to a weekly event. -
Who do the questions cater for?
The questions are aimed at a wide audience - men and women, young and old, and are designed to cater for as many people's interests as possible. They're also not aimed at rocket scientists - rather, everyday people. We want teams to get more right than they get wrong, or they'll not come back the following week! -
Is it a team event or is it done as individuals?
It's done as a team. All the answers are written, so maximum participation is guaranteed, and no-one is put on the spot, by having to call out answers. -
How long does the quiz take?
A quiz can be run in as little as 90 minutes, or as long as 3 hours. Ideally though, you should aim for 15 minutes per round, so around 2 - 2.5 hours for the 8 rounds. This is obviously affected by additional activities, but if you drag the night out to keep teams there longer, they will become discontented, and seek an alternative venue. -
How many players are in each team?
The most simple answer to this is to say teams of at least two people. There are two good reasons for not limiting team size. If you limit teams to say, 6 people, and a team of 7 arrives and you try and enforce the 6 per team limit, two things could happen. Firstly, they might all turn around and leave. Terrible result - $200 turnover just walked out the door. Secondly, Jane Doe will tell you she isn't playing and move her chair back a metre. Of course the moment old Jane knows an answer in she'll come - and then you have ten other teams moaning that "they've got 7!" At the end of the day, teams will structure themselves accordingly and economes of scale will kick in - after all, the first prize split between 10 goes nowhere, compared to being split between 4. -
Should we charge teams to enter?
We advise against this. If you have 50-120 people in your venue on a night of the week when you'd normally close early, your turnover will far exceed your costs for the night, so charging teams can be both a nuisance in terms of collecting the fee, and may stop some people who happened to be onsite from playing at all. Often, a team who were in the bar just for a drink, can be cajoled into playing if it's free, and often they'll be the last team to leave, despite their protests at the start that they were not "staying for long". -
Another venue across town also runs your quiz nights, but the night before ours. Will the questions be the same?
No. We create four streams of questions every week. We take care to ensure that your questions will differ from any other quiz run on a different night to yours. -
Are the questions accurate? How do we know everything you ask is correct?
We check each question for accuracy when we make it. Once the quiz has been prepared, we ship it to a couple of trivia-heads who then meticulously check each question. They give us feedback regarding accuracy, ambiguity and whether a round is too easy or too hard. We are only human though, and occasionally something slips through the net. Not often though, 99 times out of 100 it's the bloke in the pub grandstanding with ten beers under his belt who's adamant he's right when actually he's wrong. -
Do you supply any bar tabs or prizes?
In short - no. We leave that all up to you. -
What should we offer as prizes?
Bar tabs and restaurant vouchers usually do the trick. There's no need to put any cash up for grabs. Teams are there for the pride of winning, but do expect a reasonable prize. Usually first, second and third, plus perhaps a second-to-last prize, with a couple of spot prizes thrown in. Or you can get a sponsor involved and that's taken care of. -
Do we organise the quiz host or do you?
We can sometimes recommend a quiz host in your area, however we prefer to leave that side of it to you. Our core business is to make the best product we can, and deliver it to your door every week. -
Are the questions New Zealand biased?
Our questions certainly have New Zealand content, but there is enough variety there to keep people from other parts of the world interested. Music, TV, movies are certainly subjects are universal all over the world, and most historical content involves countries from all of the world over! -
What equipment do we need?
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Troubleshooting - What if I cannot get it to work?
See this box for the most common reasons why you cannot see or hear the quiz: -
Why don't we just make the questions ourselves?
Well in short you can. However, economies of scale means we can charge you a really fair price for an outstanding quiz product. Our multimedia quiz takes approximately 25 hours to make from woe to go. But by duplicating it and sending it across New Zealand and Australia, we ensure you get great value for money. If you're running a far superior quiz to what is on offer down the road, then you can also expect the benefits in feet coming in the door too.
The multimedia quiz is a windows based product. We experimented with a DVD format, but it doesn't work, as you either spend the night dancing in and out of menus, or else we have to pre-program the questions to appear every 30 seconds or so. And you then lose control over the speed of the quiz. A DVD might seem easier to plug in, but in the long run it's more work. You will need a laptop or PC which has a CD- ROM, plus a big screen or plasma/LCD TV which all the teams must be able to see. You will also need a VGA/HDMI/S-Video cable which transfers the pictures to your viewing source, plus an audio cable from your headphone socket to your audio output (usually your venue's sound system, or straight into the TV).
