5 Easy Ways to Spice up a Pub Quiz Night

I’m taking a break today from my usual posts on corporate event entertainment, employee team building, and brand engagement to pay homage to my roots as a New York City pub quiz host.

I was fortunate enough to see my first bar trivia gig at The Gael Pub, a large Irish bar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, become enormously popular in a relatively short period of time. Being a good trivia host and coming up with clever questions is nice, but to maintain a popular pub quiz you really need to spice things up a bit.

Here’s a list of 5 tricks I used when hosting bar trivia, which helped my events rise to the “best pub quiz in NYC” lists:

1) Bring In Guests Hosts – Nothing makes a bar trivia night more interesting than letting the regular pub quiz guy step aside for a round, and let someone else take the spotlight. Allowing a guest to shine with his/her own questions, personality and sense of humor is a surefire way to keep things interesting.

2) Embrace the Holidays – Whenever a holiday came up, I would embrace it fully: St. Patty’s Day, Mardi Gras, Hanukkah, everything. I’d bring in trinkets to give away, add special questions, and generally make it a more festive atmosphere that it already was. Use the calendar to your advantage when planning trivia nights.

3) Build in an Element of Surprise – I started a habit way back when of making my 3^rd round of trivia a total surprise. While the 1^st 2 rounds would always be the same theme week after week, round 3 was always something unique, different and special – and whenever possible, topical. This is a guaranteed way to keep your attendees on their toes.

4) Change Your Routine – That said, I also took opportunities to turn things on their heads at times. For a picture round, where I hand out sheets to everyone with 10 celebrity faces on them, I would usually give a point for each one they identify, and bonus points for telling me what they all had in common. Sometimes, though, I’d reverse it: instead of what they all have in common, tell me which one doesn’t belong. People will appreciate the change in the routine (and so will you, actually).

5) Give Out Special Prizes – The prize for the winners at The Gael Pub was always a $50 gift certificate; however, to keep things interesting we’d occasionally double that to $100 for no reason whatsoever, which people of course loved. We’d also randomly award drinks to the last place team, give hats and shirts to the best team name and about a thousand other things we could think of, to make the event more fun and memorable.

Are you a pub quiz host / quizmaster, bar owner or otherwise personally invested in a bar trivia night in NYC or elsewhere? What are some things you’ve tried to spice up your event? What’s worked, and what hasn’t?