The Ultimate Guide to Winning at Pub Trivia
Wiseguy’s tips and tricks for becoming the brightest bulbs in the bar.
There are three reasons to attend pub trivia nights:
1. To have fun
2. Learn interesting new facts, and
3. Make memories with a team of good friends
JUST KIDDING! The most important thing is winning. Pub Trivia is so much better when you win. Glory. Prizes. Little plastic trophies. That’s what matters. Want to know what it takes to be a champion? Look no further than this guide.
Having hosted hundreds of trivia nights at nearly a dozen different bars over the last few years, I think I have a decent idea of what separates winning teams from the rest. The beauty of a well-run pub trivia night is that almost any team can win depending on the categories/subject matter. However, there are some teams out there that will win multiple nights in a row, racking up an impressive trove of prizes and inciting hate and envy from the bar’s lesser teams. These teams don’t win all the time simply because they’re a bunch of nerds (though they probably still are). Many of them legitimately prepare and strategize to get an edge over other teams.
I’m going to go through these methods one-by-one, starting with the most impactful. The real sneaky strategies are near the end, so if you’d like to skip the more obvious stuff just go to point #4. Anyways… Here we go!
1. MORE BRAINS = BETTER
Bringing out more teammates is BY FAR the most effective way to improve your scores and win more trivia nights. If you and your buddy Jeff can never seem to win, try recruiting at least 1 or 2 more people to your trivia fellowship to broaden the area of knowledge that your team covers. Here’s the best strategies to ensure you get the numbers:
MAKE A GROUP CHAT. This is so important. Name it after the team and run all communication through it.
Commit to a single night of the week. Choose a venue/location that makes sense for most people.
Gauge numbers for the night 2-3 days early. If numbers are looking low, get everyone to invite some subs.
Don’t be too picky with who’s invited (as long as they don’t suck to hang out with)
Once you can consistently get a team of 4 or 5 people out to a weekly trivia night, you have what it takes to win. I would also argue that the size of your team doesn’t matter much once you have about 4 or 5 members. There are major diminishing returns for each additional teammate due to knowledge overlap. Which brings me to…
2. DIVERSITY IS STRENGTH
I’ve personally asked almost every really strong team (who’s won 5+ Wiseguy trivia nights) what makes their team so good. Do they have a ringer? Are they just super smart? Do they Google the answers when I’m not looking? Almost unanimously, it’s a no for all 3. The secret is that each member of their team is only really good at a few specialized subjects, but combined, their team has a huge diversity of knowledge and interests.
If you can, build your trivia team like you would a sports team, with different positions and specializations that cover all the bases: Sports guy. Science nerd. Movie buff. Drinker... If your team is severely lacking in a certain area of knowledge, you can either a) painstakingly spend hours reading up on a subject that you’re not really interested in (bad idea), or b) just invite someone who knows and enjoys that stuff (way easier).
However, if you have an unquenchable thirst for winning and you believe that you can improve your knowledge in weaker subjects without falling asleep at your computer, here’s how…
3. QUICK AND DIRTY LEARNIN’
Alright, the hard truth is that if you’ve tried tips #1 and 2, and those don’t seem to work, you’re probably going to need to learn some stuff… Luckily, there’s a somewhat efficient way to do this.
Learning trivia is very different than learning subject matter for a school course, or whatever. Breadth is more important than depth. You must cover a lot of ground, and again, assuming you don’t want to learn entire subjects from the ground up (which could take months), you should focus on easily memorisable facts and bite-sized pieces of information.
If you know what the night’s categories are going to be ahead of time, you can easily nail the basics of a single category by just searching whatever the name of the category is, followed by “trivia questions”. Read and memorize as many as you can. Most trivia hosts/question writers aren’t that creative, nor do they venture too far from the easily googleable core of certain subjects. Some (lazy) hosts literally just copy and paste questions from the first site that pops up in the search engine, or (God forbid) use AI to make their questions. Either way, the same questions tend to pop up again and again and only the most popular stuff even gets a mention most of the time.
For example, I recently wrote a “rom coms” category, and though I always try to write fascinating and unique trivia questions, there’s only so many rom coms people actually know much about. I just googled what the top rom coms of all time were, picked a random 15 of the top 30 or so, and wrote a trivia question on each. Many of these questions were very simple plot-to-movie or movie-to-actor associations. A quick and dirty 20 minutes of research would have netted your team at least 3 or 4 extra answers, which is more than enough to make or break a trivia night if the scores are close.
If you’d like to improve your overall trivia chops by broadening your knowledgebase, the best way to do this is to PLAY MORE TRIVIA. Watch Jeopardy! Download trivia apps. Do Sporcle quizzes. Again, I don’t recommend just sitting around reading books and Wikipedia articles. Though these are great sources of useful information and insight, they’re not great bang-for-your buck sources of “trivial” knowledge.
4. STRATEGIZE
Finally, here’s a few ways to get an edge through strategy. Sometimes, these little strategies could get you that point or even half-point needed to clinch the win. Enjoy these mini-tips:
Shut up and listen – As soon as the host starts reading a question, make sure everyone on your team shuts their damn mouths and opens their ears. Often, other teams will say the answer (or major hints) out loud. As a quizmaster, I hear teams blurt out the answers ALL THE TIME, and sometimes I even have to warn teams about it. If I can hear them, then so can you! Conversely, ensure that when your teammates know an answer, they try to say it as quietly as possible as to not give it away to other teams.
Don’t brood. Talk it out. – If you think that sitting there grimacing with your head in your hands is going to help you remember the name of the actor who played the Green Goblin, then you’re wrong. It’s better to chat with your teammates and use them to help sus out the answer on the tip of your tongue. Sometimes, they will even know it once they understand what you’re thinking of. Communication is key.
Clarify with the host – Do we need a first name? Which Star Wars movie are you talking about? Trudeau Sr. or Jr.? Don’t assume. Just ask! It may save you from a wrong answer or two.
Solve disputes rationally – Vote. Veto. Flip a coin. Whatever works. Don’t argue. Don’t gaslight. Use reason and evidence to prove your point.
Process of elimination – Relating to the above point, if you’re really stuck, write down all the possible answers to the question on the back of a napkin. Go through them one by one and cross out the least likely ones. Sometimes it’s better to deduce why something can’t be the answer rather than trying to justify why it can. Use Occam’s Razor.
Throw a hail Mary – I have to remind teams all the time to NEVER LEAVE ANYTHING BLANK. At least once a night I’ll hear a team celebrating because their WAG (wild-ass-guess) ended up being correct. Just write down something. A last name, a city, a metallic element. Anything! You never know.
Be nice to your quizmaster – Though it’s super-important to be impartial as a host, bias does exist. Your quizmaster is probably more likely to award your team a tricky half-point or rewind a question if they don’t hate you. Never harass or antagonize them. You attract more bees with honey than vinegar.
5. THE FINAL TIP
Alright, alright. Though winning is still super awesome, I suppose it isn’t everything... Unless it’s a very slow night, the odds of winning a game of pub trivia are overwhelmingly against you. You can follow all the above advice and still lose because of the categories, competitors or because you blanked on stupid frickin’ Willem Dafoe.
If you’re stressed about winning and putting too much emphasis on the outcome, you’ll actually become dumber, and here’s why: Pub Trivia is basically like golf. It’s a game of millimetres. Teams can have good rounds and bad rounds, and even the best players shank it into the woods sometimes. In Wiseguy’s 45-question format, the winning team usually only wins by 1 or 2 points. That’s it. They only knew 1 or 2 more things than the next best team, so there’s a ton of variance.
There’s also an inverse correlation between how hard you try and how well you do. The yips are real and being nervous or angry can make the difference between pulling that obscure answer or not. This is why it’s important to just relax. Remember the 3 reasons to attend pub trivia I mentioned at the start of this post? Fun. Facts. Friends. Paradoxically, if you nail the 3 Fs, your chances of winning will improve, and at the very least, your night will be more enjoyable regardless.
So that concludes this guide. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe to our newsletter if you’d like a reminder of when new blog posts are released. Also, we will have monthly schedule updates and free quizzes to help you prepare for the real-deal.
Cheers!