A Pub Quiz At Home – Host Your Own

Everyone loves a quiz, the chance to flex the old gray matter and show others how clever we are at answering general knowledge questions. If the quiz is put together well, then it can be fun as well as interesting, and a great way to spend time with others.

You may be wondering what a quiz has got to do with your home bar, well the connection is with the great pub quiz or trivia night held at bars across US and the UK, and the rest of the world for that matter. Why not have a pub quiz at home with family and friends in your home bar.

What an excellent idea.

The Best Game

 

There are a host of bar games that are played in bars and pubs across our lands, like darts, shuffleboard, the ring game, pool, pinball, cards and an array of board games. That is just skimming the surface, there are way more than I have mentioned here.

Those are all great games, but a trivia night or pub quiz always draws the crowds, we love the idea of competing in teams against other worthy groups of people and we love to come up with a unique quirky team name.

There doesn’t seem to be an official timeline of when and where the pub quiz began, there are references to the late 60s and early 70s linked with breweries in the UK, but nothing concrete.

There is reference that the pub quiz was started in the UK by a company called Burns and Porter and the initial idea was to get more people to visit the pub on quiet nights boosting business for pub landlords.

Who or where they started as I said is unclear, but the point is that the pub quiz took off like a super car stretching its legs on a race track and now it has to be one of the most popular bar games in the world and around the world.

The Quiz Structure

There is a structure to a good quiz and you have to get the balance right when it comes to the questions being asked. If the questions are too easy, then nobody will find your quiz challenging, but too hard and most questions will go unanswered.

Get it right and people will find it challenging and fun and there will be an air of healthy competition.

Divide your quiz up into different rounds, so you will have between 5 to 10 questions on one subject, then the same on other subjects which will make up the different rounds.

The typical subjects that make up these rounds are a Music round, a sports round, a TV & movie round and of course the general knowledge round. These are just the obvious subjects, but there can be many more like science and nature or the picture round.

The more rounds you include the longer your quiz will be, so it is best to workout how long you want the quiz to go on for and set the number of rounds and the number of questions in those rounds to suit your timeline.

Teamwork

 

A quiz held in a bar can have a lot of teams competing for a prize which normally consists of a bottle of wine or spirits, a small cash prize or even a round of drinks for the winning team.

Holding a quiz at your home bar will probably not be on the same scale so the teams may be smaller and the amount of teams will be less too.

If you are the quiz master, then you only need two other people to commence with your quiz, obviously the more people the better and the more competitive and fun it will be.

In our modern world you can even hold a quiz over the internet through the popular video software like Zoom. This means that you can invite family and friends that live a long way away to come to your quiz nights, not all your quizzers have to be present at your home bar.

The Prizes

In the main, most prizes offered in a bar quiz are not that great, especially if it is a small quiz in a small bar, and because they are held mainly for fun.

There are other extremes though, where the prize can be a pretty large sum of money, especially if the prize money rolls over to the following quiz night. You may be wondering how that can happen because surely the winning team wins the prize.

There are some quizzes that will ask the winning team a question at the end of the quiz to get the prize. If they get the question right, then they get the prize money, if they get it wrong, then it will roll over to the following week. This means that the prize money can grow into a pretty sizable amount.

Holding a quiz at your home bar doesn’t mean you have to award a prize, you are doing it for the fun. There are many prizes you could offer for an incentive for your quiz guests like a box of chocolates, a bottle of wine, or even a cheap medal or cup, or anything that you can think of.

This is easy if all your guests are in attendance, but gets tricky when you are quizzing via a video call.

A good idea is to all pay a small fee to be in the quiz, which can be paid online, so everyone can pay whether they are at your home bar or in another country. The quiz winner then gets to choose to donate there winnings to the their favorite charity.

Helping others while having fun, it’s a win, win.

Quiz Help

It can take a fair amount of time to put a quiz together from scratch, it involves a lot of research, and if you like to hold regular home quizzes, then you will become exhausted pretty quick.

There is an array of places you can get questions and answers for your quiz from, such as websites that just list questions and answers, or buy quiz sheets from a company that specializes in setting quiz questions.

There are online companies that run quizzes virtually, that you can join in with, or companies that will set up a quiz for you and run it through an internet connection. These companies mainly operate on a commercial scale for bars, but do have basic plans that are not to expensive.

A cheaper alternative is to buy some quiz books, or a pub quiz home kit which are perfect for a home quiz. You will get question cards, an answer pad, scoreboard, rules of play etc.

It takes the stress out of hosting your own home bar quiz.

Get Quizzing

A quiz is a great thing, you interact with your family and friends, whilst competing against each other and having fun all at the same time.

This is not all, you will be learning at the same time too, just like crosswords the more you do the better you get at them. The same goes with quizzing, the more you do the better and more knowledgeable you will get. Even if you are always the quiz master, you will learn and grow in knowledge.

Remember to make sure you hold peoples cell phones whilst the quiz is in progress, otherwise there may be a few cheeky people sneakily looking up the answers, and we don’t want that.

All that is left is for you to organize a pub quiz at home, it is that simple, set a date, invite your guests and get your home bar quiz kit, and you are away. Share you home quiz antics with us below and what prizes, if any that you decided on, it will be interesting and give ideas to other readers.