Where Can I Source Pub Quiz Questions

Hurling Fan

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Running a pub quiz as a fund raiser next week and need to source questions for it. Does anyone know a good place to get them. Could do them myself but a bit nervous of making it too easy or too difficult. Thanks for your help.
 
Hi

I did a pub quiz a while back and generally just used google and i found a lot of information there.

just do it by rounds - once you have different rounds, e.g. geography, politics, sport etc it can be easy enough to get the questions. Also, a few picture rounds help.
 
Don't forget one or two rounds of niche local knowledge to thwart the sharks!
 
Newspapers are great places to find questions. Most questions you will find here will be topical and not too obscure. I would disagree with the comment above in relation to dedicating separate rounds to particular topics. There's nothing worse than hearing a groan from the audience when you announce that the next round will be on politics/the arts/whatever. If you use a "mixed bag" format, they won't even notice.

If you're worrried that questions are too hard or easy, get someone else to look over them beforehand. You will rarely go wrong if you use a lot of Irish questions (ie Irish sport, Irish politics etc) and a good sprinkling of local questions.
 
Stay away from trivia questions while devising your quiz. You should try to ensure that most of your questions are capable of being answered by most participants, bearing in mind that they will be taking part as teams.
 
Stay away from trivia questions while devising your quiz. You should try to ensure that most of your questions are capable of being answered by most participants, bearing in mind that they will be taking part as teams.

The only problem there is it may become hard to identify a winner. Table quizzes are a magnet for packed teams so you'll have to make some of the question relatively obscure or difficult. And difficult doesn't necessarily mean 'what year was Oppenheimer born in?'...it could be something as low brow as 'how old is Jack Nicklaus?'. Avoid pub quiz regulars like 'Name all the bands and musical incarnations of Norman Cook?' and make sure you don't ask any ambiguous questions with multiple answers, e.g. 'on what course was the 2006 Ryder Cup?'. The answer could be Palmer or K-Club.
 
What I'd normally do when I am setting up a quiz, not a regular occurrence but I have done it once or twice, is get a group of three or four friends around a table and a big pile of encyclopaedia, general interest books, basically anything factual and then set out a few headings to have questions for. They don't have be rounds but it makes it easier to set out questions if you use headings such as Sport, TV, History, Geography, Books, Music, etc. You can mix and match the rounds then afterwards and it helps them stay more balanced if you have already set out a few topics. If you are likely to know a lot of people there a few questions that have a more personal interest reference (say you know a good 30% of the teams will have someone who is involved in the same club as you, then set questions on the activity you do) are good and always ask local questions. If you are organising for a charity or if you are raising sponsorship to do an event, throw in a few questions on that topic too. The other thing is to have a round that people can be playing with as they are chatting between rounds, it takes a few minutes to gather in all the papers and then marking them is a pain (which is why it is also a good idea to have the friends that set the quiz mark it and why it is a good idea to have a set of friends set the questions!!) Generally I will go for a puzzle round rather than a pictures round, the reason being that generally photocopies in black and white are quite poor for pictures and it is more expensive to get the colour copies. Puzzles tend to be printed in black and white anyway so photocopy better. If you do puzzles, the cryptic rebus ones in the Herald AM are ideal, not too much writing in (Sudoku is a bad idea for example) but something a little challenging.
Long-winded...
Short version
1) Don't be afraid to do it yourself, get a few mates together and knock a few rounds up, then shamelessly use them to mark the papers because they won't be able to partake of the quiz
2) Set a few headings/topics to give you some ideas and then once you have enough questions (60-80 max) set up your rounds
3) Do local and personal interest.
4) Do a round that you hand out about round 2 and don't gather until round 7, make it pictorial but generally (unless you want to spend the money on it) avoid pictures of people.
5) Another tip, have three tie-break questions you probably won't need them but just in case.
6) And have a couple of spot prize questions on the rounds, either a sort of best answer wins type of question, no right and wrong to it or really, really hard! Don't mark them as part of a round though. And of course a spot prize for best team name.
7) For marking it is generally easier if the number of points matches the number of questions, so avoid the multiple answer questions because they are just more difficult to mark fairly.
 
Take a look at www.chancetolearn.com - they have tough questions for pub quizzes that are difficult but answerable by quiz teams. They're also pretty unique so none of the usual questions that one can find in a quiz book.
Also, picture quizzes are always crowd-pleasers too.
 
Depending on what you're doing the quiz for it can be good fun to include some event/group specific questions - maybe two or three in the whole quiz. For example, I was involved in raising money for a local choir for a few years and, as most of the quiz teams (but not all) had a member of the choir on them, we'd include questions like "who won x competition in 2005" (knowing it had been that choir), or "what song did the choir finish their christmas concert with", "what's the name of the youngest member of the choir". It was good fun to do that and watch the faces on the few teams who had no connection to the choir and were obviously just there to win as much as possible.
 
There's a great book called "Schott's miscellany" which is great for getting a few obscure questions to throw into the mix.
 
And [broken link removed] is full of information that'll surprise people.
 
Any chance you could tell us where the quiz is? The missus loves them and we'd be happy to bulk up the numbers
 
And of course even if his name was BigSmoke or something he could still be from Achill Island...
 
Absolutely Hurling Fan! Forgive my presumption, and in that case get a couple of bottles of vino and the girls around to do the questions - trust me it is a much better option and a lot easier than it sounds.

Spot on Caveat, hence "bet", I was talking probability rather than possibility.
Actually if the name was "BigSmoke" I probably would think "definitely not a jackeen" :)
 
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