How to Build the Best Trivia Team (And Dominate Game Night)

In recent years, one of the most popular social games at bars around the country has been bar trivia. Trivia allows you to play a game with several friends at once and enjoy the fun of being a game show contestant while tipping back a few adult beverages.

And while having fun is the goal, being in the running for a win feels great. So thinking about how to build a trivia team is a good idea. There are a lot of factors that contribute to a great team. The most important thing to consider is whether you like spending time with a person — it doesn't matter how smart someone is if you can't stand being around them.

Past that, there are several things to factor in when forming a team and establishing trivia night strategies. So let's look at some ideas for building a strong team and making the most out of your trivia night.

Team Size and Composition

One of the most important bar trivia tips you will ever read is this: limit your team to between four and six people. Any more people, and it will be hard to confer with everyone around your table. And if you have to speak up to be heard by your whole group, chances are good that your competitors can hear you, too.

The other reason four to six people is ideal for a winning trivia team composition is that you can be reasonably certain to have people with at least some knowledge of the kinds of categories that pop up on bar trivia quizzes.

Some team members may have wide knowledge bases in more than one area, but, in general, you want your team to have a member with each of these areas of expertise:

• Pop Culture: Knowledge about film, television, music, celebrity gossip, and even literature is always rewarded when playing trivia. 
• History: While you are unlikely to be asked about specific signatories on the Magna Carta, it's important to have someone on your team that knows a great deal about major historical events over the last two or three hundred years.
• Geography: From knowing the capital cities of every country in Europe to recognizing major landmarks or skylines in an image-based round, a geography expert will always be able to make major contributions to your final score.
• Sports: This category can really trip a lot of trivia nerds up, but having a person that loves the big four American sports and/or the Olympics
• Science: From the shape of DNA to the newest technological advances, there are always going to be questions that require some experience with the scientific world
• Miscellaneous: Often the MVP of the night, a team member that just knows weird stuff can be the wildcard element that propels you to a top three finish.

As you build a trivia team, remember that one person can have expertise in more than one of these categories. Your history expert might be a massive music person with ridiculously varied taste from bubblegum pop to obscure punk rock, for example.

And you may also want to bring in people with similar backgrounds if you know the bar trivia themes and categories in advance. If the trivia provider has announced a Fast & Furious movie trivia night, your friend with a background in actual physics may not be the most valuable teammate.

But above all, the most important trivia team strategy is to bring in people that are fun to be around. These are pretty low-stakes competitions, so trying to tolerate a person you can't stand just to win is probably not worth it.

Preparing for Trivia Night

When you think of how to train your brain for trivia, you might think of movie montages of people practicing their buzzer speed or reading through encyclopedias page by page. That's not really a thing for most game show preparations and it's especially not a thing for bar trivia.

That doesn't mean that you can't prepare, though. The key to individual preparation for trivia is to do or watch trivia. Jeopardy! covers a wide range of subject matter with clues of varying difficulties. Watching it can help you see common answers in certain categories and get your brain used to approaching less linear categories that employ homonyms or combine multiple answers into one. 

Jeopardy! also has an app that you can play on your own. Some of the other best apps to practice trivia are Trivia Crack, Wikitrivia, and Trivia Star. Some of these apps have you play against yourself, some let you play against others — the key is that they allow you to keep your brain sharp between bar trivia nights.

Over time, as you go out for more trivia nights, you'll begin to recognize some common bar trivia questions and gain a bit of a knowledge base in common trivia categories that you may not have been very familiar with before you started playing.

Strategizing Your Way to a Win

Once you have your quiz team dynamics figured out and everyone is good to go to the bar to answer some questions, it's time to think about strategy. This can mean your overall strategy for the game and your strategy for individual situations that are sure to come up.

Trivia night strategies don't have to be complex. They can be as simple as selecting one person to enter your answers, getting used to talking about a potential answer without announcing your answer to the whole bar, and deciding on a way to break ties when the whole team doesn't agree on an answer — rock, paper, scissors is a common decider in these cases.

When no one on your team has a solid idea about an answer, you should have a strategy in place for how to make educated guesses. If you have multiple choices, eliminate the options that you know aren't right, and then go with your gut.

The biggest of all top trivia mistakes that you want to strategize around is overthinking. Have a word or phrase that everyone on the team can use if someone is tying themselves up in knots over a question. Use it as a signal to take a breath, reset, and get back in touch with your instincts.

Finding a Bar Trivia Night Near You

This is easy — come to The Rabbit Hole in the North Loop of beautiful Minneapolis on Tuesday Nights. Starting on February 25th, Trivia Mafia will be bringing their nationally renowned, free to play bar trivia to your new favorite spot every week at 7:30pm. 

You can order from the full menu, get some great drinks, and get a nice sugar rush to power your brains with a top-notch dessert (even if you're gluten free). While overthinking is the biggest mistake you can make playing trivia, going to a bar with weak food and drink choices is the second biggest.

Build a Trivia Team and Play the Game!

Before you go study a paper or two about how to stay calm under pressure, remember that this is a game. You play bar trivia to have a nice time with friends and maybe place high enough to pay for your tab. It's fun to be competitive! Just don't be weird about it.

So do some preparation to build anticipation, work out some strategies to ensure that you don't get stressed out while you play, and build a trivia team of cool people that know a bunch of cool things.

After that, get yourself to the North Loop on a Tuesday night, hop into The Rabbit Hole, have some food, drink some drinks, and enjoy yourself. The trivia is free and the food and drinks are fantastic. What's not to love?

So if the question is, "what are you going to do on Tuesday night at 7:30?" The only reasonable answer is to fall down a Rabbit Hole of trivia for a good time — and see why they say that this is the place where beer meets brains.