HOW TO CREATE A GREAT PUB QUIZ: PART 2

In my first blog, I wrote about how I select what categories to use for each quiz. Making sure there is a wide variety to cater for all participants is vital in creating a fun and interesting quiz for everyone.

After deciding which topics I am using, the next stage is to devise a round of questions for each subject. Anyone can find a set of questions on the internet or in a book and throw them in to a round on music for example. But getting the right structure I find is crucial to keeping people interested. I try and start out with a question that almost everyone should be able to get, regardless of the topic. The round will then get gradually harder and question ten should be the hardest to answer. Obviously, what is easy for some is difficult for others and vice versa so it will never be perfect but generally it works well, and players seem to enjoy this structure. Finding ten questions that only experts on a chosen subject will have a chance of knowing will freeze out most of your participants and make them lose interest. Likewise, ten questions that a six-year-old could answer isn’t going to keep people entertained for very long. It might be that you are doing a quiz for a group of Harry Potter buffs, in which case you might want ten difficult questions in each round but as a rule I find a mix of difficulty levels for each round works best.

Finding questions where the answers cannot be contested is also important. For example, a question on ‘Which is the odd one out’ can be tricky. Let’s say you give the players four possible answers. The answer you are looking for might not be the only thing that makes one of the potential answers the odd one out. I avoid using these types of questions and concentrate on questions where the answer is definite. No quiz master likes to be told by a player that they are wrong!!

So that is how I structure my quizzes, all quizzes you see on this website will be set out in this way so have a look at some of our free trial rounds and see if you like it. Feedback is always welcome so let us know your thoughts or just ask if you need any more information.

One last thing on the questions you use for your quiz. If you intend reusing the quiz at a later date, always read through and ensure questions are still relevant. For instance, you may have asked ‘Who is the only player to have scored a goal in four World Cups?.’ This type of feat may have been repeated since you last used the quiz so always check for questions like this.

Thanks for reading and I hope this has helped you if you are planning on hosting a quiz in the near future. If you would like any more advice on setting a quiz please don’t hesitate to get in touch.