Pub Quiz Poll: Strangers joining your team

After my last fairly unexciting poll about when people quiz, I thought I'd ask about something a little more exciting this time: stranger danger!

Melodramatic, perhaps, but at a quiz in Montreal earlier this year a never-before-seen event interrupted our evening: someone asked to join our team.

I'll admit, we were both caught completely off guard, and in our painfully British attempt to work out what to say the unwitting invader quickly decided (or, rather, worked out) we were a pair of weirdos and that maybe they were better off finding a more normal group to ask. Nevertheless, we were staggered: the idea of asking to join a random team seemed unthinkable, and we put it down to North American friendliness (or, perhaps more accurately, British stand-offishness) and got on with the quiz.

Still, I wanted to know if others had had this experience, and if so, what they do about it. The poll below presents a few options, so do please take a moment to select the one that applies to you. What's more, if none seem quite right there's a free text 'other' field for all your descriptive needs.

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Pub Quiz Poll Results: Day of week

While the Ones That Got Away are still on holiday as we continue our tour of the UK, here's a rundown of the results of the latest Pub Quiz Poll: when do you most often attend a quiz?

While not the largest sample size (currently 77 votes) a three-tier structure seems to be emerging. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are the most popular evenings for a quiz, with Friday and Saturday predictably quiet. Sundays and Wednesdays, meanwhile, make up something of a middle ground.

It's surprisingly hard to find good data on when pub quiz nights are held. I've only managed to dig up one source that offers a day-to-day breakdown, but that's from eight years ago and based on just 230 Scottish pubs. In that survey Thursday was by far the most popular night for a pub to host a quiz, with Wednesday the least popular of the Sunday-Wednesday options. It's hard to say how strongly pub quiz attendance will correlate with which nights pub quizzes are on offer (market forces would perhaps suggest they should match up pretty well, at least), but it's certainly difficult to draw many conclusions from such limited data.

My own answer to this poll would have been Monday, but mainly because that happens to be the day of the week when our preferred Montreal quiz takes place. Back in the UK we would regularly quiz on Mondays and Tuesdays, with Wednesday a very occasional treat, so there at least my own experience matches up with the poll results.

As always, thanks to those who voted - a new Pub Quiz Poll will be up very soon!

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Pub Quiz Poll: When do you quiz?

Following my Pub Quiz Poll about team sizes, here's another data gathering exercise. Pretty simple: when do you quiz? Please vote for whichever day of the week you most often attend a pub quiz. If you regularly attend more than one quiz a week, please choose the day you quiz more often or, if you attend more than one equally regularly, pick which you'd continue to attend if you could only go to one. (Sorry if that gives you a hard decision - I've kept the poll to 'one vote per person' so that people who regularly attend multiple quizzes don't skew the results too much.)

Results will be discussed in due course (and hopefully with a slightly quicker turnaround than the last poll!).

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Pub Quiz Poll Results: Team size limits

Earlier this year I ran a poll asking what you think the team size limit should be at pub quizzes (if, indeed, you thought there should be a limit at all). Five months later I've remembered to have a look at the results, and they were fairly conclusive. As you can see below, a team size of six seems to be the prevailing opinion, picking up precisely half of the votes to date. Around one in five voters preferred to see quartets of quizzers, while one in seven think five heads are the perfect number.

I can't say I found these results all that surprising; in my experience of quizzing the most common team size limit is six, and I doubt that's a coincidence. Still, it's mildly interesting to note that even numbers seem to be preferred, while it's good to see the often under-represented non-integer team size getting a mention as well.

Not pictured: pretending it isn't a problem

All of this does raise the question of what to do about levelling the playing field between smaller and larger teams. The simplest solution to me is to have a size limit, and a six player cap (at least for a normal pub setting) is a good balance between letting people have a good social experience without too many players feeling they have no chance. There are times when this isn't necessarily practical though, be it a long-running quiz with long-held traditions, or simply a cultural issue (as noted on the original post, it's quite rare to encounter team size limits here in Montreal). There's also the question of what a quizmaster faced with an unexpectedly large group should do - your landlord won't be happy to see a large group heading out the door regardless of the quizzing reasons.

The latter case is probably more easily dealt with: one ad hoc fix is to let big groups play but explain they can't win the top prize (or, as I've seen at some venues, have a separate 'big team prize'). Another quite common choice is to ask the big team to split in two, although this needs a quizmaster who's either alert to collusion or good at persuading them to be competitive.

Handling a situation where large teams are an established part of the quiz requires more creativity. A careful balance has to be struck between the smaller teams feeling hard done by without the larger teams (and their all-important larger spending power) feeling unfairly targeted. The one successful solution I've seen (and discussed in the comments here) are multi-answer questions where the number of required answers is the same as your team size. ("For five points, name as many landlocked African countries as your team size", for example.) Choosing the correct questions for this is difficult, but it ties the difficulty directly to your team size making it feel perfectly fair.

If you have any other suggestions to balancing team sizes do let me know, either in the comments or on Twitter, and keep an eye out for another Pub Quiz Poll coming soon!

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Pub Quiz Poll: Team size limits?

It's common for pub quizzes to have strict rules about team sizes. After all, it can take the fun out of an evening if your team of four has to do battle with a group three times the size. Nevertheless, this isn't universally the case (and is particularly uncommon here in Montreal). This got me thinking about what people think of team limit rules, and naturally that called for a poll.

Do you think there should be a team limit? And if so, how big should that limit be?

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