Dulwich OnView

After working their way through the finest local pubs Steve Slack, and his brave team of knowledge-smiths, ponder their quizzing top tips.

We won some and we lost some. (In fact we only won one). But we had a great time. Here are our collective pointers for an fun night out at the pub quiz.

Who’s in the team?
Your team will need a good balance of personalities, knowledge and skills. It’s important to have all the bases covered. Something we learned through bitter experience as we trawled the local pubs was that while we could cope with questions about geography, history, science and the arts, we were stumped whenever it came to sport. We should recruit someone soon.

It’s also useful to have people who are good at guessing and someone with nice handwriting.

Do your preparation
Now, I’m not saying you need to put in hours of revision before a quiz. It is a bit of fun after all. But there are certain facts a quiz team could do with knowing reasonably well: British Prime Ministers, US Presidents, recent Oscar winners, sporting champions etc. Although these facts might not be direct questions themselves, they can often help when deliberating over an answer.

Eg: that can’t be right cos Lloyd-George wasn’t PM until 1916.

It’s also worth taking a flick through the headlines that week, to make sure you’re up to date on what’s going on in the world.

Where to sit?
Locating the best table for a quiz team to sit at is an art. I’m afraid – like a good brainteaser – there’s no easy answer. It’s perhaps more useful to think about where not to sit:

• Not too close to the bar – people buying drinks might see your answers
• Not in the middle of the room – your discussions will be overheard easily
• Not next to the speaker (if there is one) – you’ll be deafened
• Not too far away from the speaker – you’ll be straining to hear the questions
• Not in a dark corner – you won’t be able to see the picture round easily

In the name of …
A strong team name is important. It’s your identity throughout the quiz. You will probably have your name read out at least twice over the course of the evening, so make sure it’s a good one. Some people like to stick to the same name every week, but we prefer to come up with a topical team name each time we play. I’d recommend keeping it short, funny and not rude, perhaps linked to one of the more comical stories in the news that week. Sometimes you get extra points if your name gets a laugh from the crowd.

How much should we drink?
Alcohol – in moderation – is a mental and social lubricant and therefore a friend of the quizzer. And remember, the whole idea of a pub quiz is to get you in the door and get you spending at the bar, so make sure you have a glass or two. But consume too much hard liquor and you’ll find that
a) you’ll be loud and rowdy and everyone will hear your hitherto carefully guarded deliberations; and
b) you’ll give up after a while and write Fatima Whitbread for every answer.

I didn’t hear the question
It’s perfectly fine to ask for questions to be re-read. Just don’t make a habit of it or the quiz master will start to resent you. And certainly ask for clarification if the question is ambiguous. It’s probably not best to start answering back though, and likewise challenging the authority of the quiz master isn’t going to get you extra points.

Cheating
It’s not big. It’s not clever. And it takes away from the whole point of the pub quiz. We say stamp it out.

In the age of the Internet, if I ask you Who was Prime Minister in 1800?, you’ll just turn to Google. If you start texting a mate who’s sat in front of a computer, that takes the fun out of it.

Marking
Some quizzes will ask you to swap papers and mark another team’s answers. Don’t cheat here. If you anger the gods of pub quiz by marking answers incorrectly or deducting half points for spelling, they will come back and have their revenge on you.

Likewise, when the answers are read out, don’t shout ‘YESSSSS!’ when you’ve got one right. This isn’t the answers to a Latin vocab test. And neither is it your A-Level results.

Those are our top tips for quizzing. Do go and try them out in a pub near you, and let us know how you get on.

And if you want to pit your wits, but don’t like pubs that much, the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery annual quiz takes place this year on 15 November, at the Gallery.