A pub quiz lives or dies in the ninety minutes between the first question and the last. Get it right and the room runs itself: teams bicker over the spelling of a capital city, the bar keeps moving, and nobody checks their watch. Get it wrong — a question with two valid answers, a marking system nobody explained, a twenty-minute pause while you hunt for the answer sheet — and the energy drains out of the room faster than a pint left on a windowsill.
Here is what to prepare, what to say, and what to keep in your hand before you pick up the microphone.
Write the questions before you write the rounds
Build a bank of sixty to eighty questions, then choose forty to fifty from it. Writing more than you need is the single best defence against a thin quiz: when you have spares, you can drop the question about fourteenth-century Flemish trade routes that seemed clever on Sunday night.
The four-question test
Before a question makes the cut, run it through this:
- Does it have exactly one defensible answer? If you can argue for two, rewrite it or bin it.
- Could a table of four ordinary punters get there, with some thinking and a bit of luck?
- Is it short? Anything over about twenty-five words gets read badly into a microphone.
- Is it interesting even to the teams who don't know it? A good question teaches you something when the answer lands.
Write to your room, not to yourself. A Tuesday-night quiz in a village pub is not the same as a student fundraiser. Watch what your regulars laugh at, and lean that way. Avoid questions whose answers will be out of date in six months, and avoid trick spelling: if the answer is a name, accept any spelling close enough to be recognised.
Build a mix that keeps everyone in it
Four to six rounds of ten questions is a comfortable shape. Open each round with two easy ones so every team gets an early point — momentum matters more than you think — then climb. Put one round in the middle that's noticeably gentler, so the table that's six points behind still has a reason to stay.
Vary the formats: a picture round, a music or intro round, a connections round where the answers share a hidden link. Written rounds all night get monotonous, and monotony is what makes people drift to their phones.
The kit you want in front of you
- Your questions printed in large type, with answers on a separate sheet you can glance at without squinting.
- Answer sheets for each team, plus a dozen spare pens.
- A clipboard or folder, so nothing slides off the table.
- A master scoring sheet with every team name written down.
- One tiebreak question prepared in advance — something with a numeric answer, such as a year or a distance.
- A small prize. Bottles, bar tabs, or a genuinely terrible trophy all work.
Running the room
Explain the rules once, at the top, before question one. How many questions, how many points, when you collect sheets, how ties are settled. Cap team size — six is a common limit — and write team names down as they come in, so you're not guessing later.
Read each question twice, slowly, then let the room sit with it. Thirty seconds for general knowledge, a little longer for anything with numbers. Don't editorialise after every question; it kills the pace. Save the interesting detail for the answer.
Mark round by round, not at the end. Have teams swap sheets with a neighbour, read the answers aloud clearly, and ask them to mark generously. Tell them to flag a dispute rather than argue across the room, and keep a master sheet so you can settle it. If a team produces a second valid answer, give them the point and note it for next time.
On phones: state the rule plainly and without drama. Most teams will respect it if you're matter-of-fact about it, and the ones who don't are usually obvious.
Fairness is mostly about small decisions
Almost every pub quiz argument comes down to a rule that was never announced. Say them out loud at the start: one answer per question, spelling doesn't count, no phones, the host's decision is final but the host will listen. Never change a question mid-quiz unless you explain why. Keep the scores visible, on a whiteboard or a sheet pinned where people can see it, so nobody suspects quiet arithmetic in the corner.
Save the tiebreak for real drama. Ask for a number, take written answers, and announce the closest without revealing the actual figure until the prize is in someone's hand.
The last five minutes, and the notes you keep
Announce the winners, give out the prize, thank the bar staff by name. Then, before you leave, write down which questions landed and which fell flat. Two or three lines is enough. Keep a folder of everything you've written; a quiz that has run for six months has a bank you can reshuffle rather than rebuild.
Finally, if the night went well, ask the venue about a regular slot. Quizzes grow through habit — the same faces, the same rivalries, the same table that always claims it was robbed on question nine. That rivalry is worth more than any single clever question you'll ever write.
Photo: Pavel Danilyuk / Pexels