10 Tips For Hosting a Successful Trivia Night

Host your own trivia night
Follow these 10 tips to help ensure your trivia night is a success.

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Everyone needs a little help every now and then. Follow these 10 tips to help ensure that your trivia night is a success!

Tip #10

Have well written questions. You want to make sure that the questions you have strike a good balance for the audience. This includes having questions of varying difficulty. A good target for this is in a set of 10 questions to have 3 easy, 3 medium, 3 hard and one wild card. The wrong balance and your audience will be bored or frustrated. Check out our blog post on writing great questions.

Tip #9

Create clear rules. You want to make sure that all patrons will know the rules of your trivia game before the night starts. You should support this by handing out rules sheets as patrons come to the bar. Clear rules will ensure a smooth night for all.

Tip #8

Come prepared. Practice makes perfect, they say, and trivia nights are no exception. If you want to create the best trivia night for your patrons, you want to make sure to practice so that everything will run smoothly. The more you practice handing out materials, reading through questions, knowing the answers, and closing out rounds and the game, the better it will be for all involved.

Tip #7

Know your audience. The more you know about the bar you will be hosting your trivia night at and the regulars that typically attend there, the better. If you have a feel for what the patrons like, their level of expertise and who may be sticklers, the better you’ll be able to make adjustments as needed throughout the night.

Tip #6

Have good prizes. There’s nothing worse than getting through the whole night, crowning a 1st place winner and not having good prizes for the teams that made it. Work with your bar managers to help secure gift cards and bar swag to keep your patrons interested.

Tip #5

Have enough materials. Always make sure you come to an event with enough materials. The last thing you need during a busy night is to run out of rules, answer sheets, pens or prizes!

Tip #4

Bring backup. Using equipment at an event, including laptop, speakers and potentially a TV monitor are all great ways to create a better experience for the patrons at your bar. Sometimes technology can fail and you will want to make sure you have back-up in the form of paper questions and score-sheets to keep things moving.

Tip #3

Know your answers. Always make sure you review your questions and answers before starting a trivia night. Knowing the answers will help you review answer sheets quicker and will also help you navigate any patrons that may have disagreements over how you’ve scored their responses.

Tip #2

Keep the right score. There is nothing worse that slipping up and recording the wrong score for a team. Make sure you use an automated score sheet like the one supplied with TriviaHub’s on-demand trivia software or find a way to automate your score tracking beyond paper and pencil.

Tip #1

Have fun. There may be no rule more important than this. If you are having fun, your patrons will have fun too. Your energy is contagious so make sure the room knows you are there to have a good time!

In Conclusion

If you follow these 10 tips, we know that you’ll be able to host a successful trivia night. And if you use TriviaHub’s software platform with ready-to-play trivia quizzes, automated score sheets and awesome presentation mode, we know you’ll be even better set up for success. 

If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us… we’re all in this together!

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