Hi everyone! Brianna here to talk to you about our important British origins. Not the colonization of America, but of pub quizzes! Trivia Mafia wouldn’t be here without ‘em, so let’s look into the history of how they came to be.

Pub quizzes began running on a formal basis nearly 50 years ago by Sharon Burns and Tom Porter. Prior to the founding of Burns and Porter, pub quizzes were occasionally held in northern England on a more one-off basis. And then these nerds came along and said “this is fun, more people should do this.”

Burns and Porter organized 32 teams in three leagues across southern England, which they followed up with a cross-country tour to market their quizzes as a strategy to bring people into pubs on slow evenings. They quickly became a national hit, publishing three pub quiz books (if you’re an Amazon shopper, you can get a 1987 edition in paperback right now!). Toward the 1990s, their acclaim reached the U.S., and here we are today.

In the U.K., instead of trivia hosts, pub quizzes are run by quizmasters — a title this trivia host would personally love to adopt. A quiz night is a quiz night, so the original format and what you are used to playing at our nights today aren’t too different. There are typically one to six rounds of questions, ranging from 10-80 total questions (for reference, if you attend a classic Trivia Mafia night and include each sound round and image round question, we give you 45 total questions across eight rounds).

Some features employed by pub quizzes include the “infinite bounce.” This is often used to accommodate large numbers of teams: One question is addressed to each team in sequential order. If one team fails to answer, the question passes along to the following team. Another is a “pounce,” where the quizmaster may introduce a time limit. If the team being questioned does not produce an answer in time, any other team can pounce on the question.

I was lucky enough to visit England in June with my spouse, and we ventured to The Grapes for their quiz night. The Grapes is a nearly 500-year-old pub currently owned by Sir Ian McKellen, which was my spouse’s main priority when we visited: Gandalf’s staff is featured prominently behind the bar.

The pub has a really neat history written by McKellen himself, with connections to Sir Walter Raleigh, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and more. The pub is featured in Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

But back to quiz night. Unfortunately, we showed up as silly American rubes who didn’t realize that:

“Show up early” for quiz night means more than an hour early, and
Pub quizzes sometimes cost money (insert joke about America and the freedom to free trivia here)

The benefit of paying into a pub quiz is a cash prize, though! Teams who attended at The Grapes were playing for that week’s pot. We did not have 2 pounds each in cash on us, but the quizmaster very graciously whispered “just play along” and snuck us a pen and paper sheets, saying if we won we could use it toward a bar tab.

Because we arrived so late, we were sitting on a set of stairs on the outside back patio and heard maybe one question (which may have been something along the lines of "Ben Affleck will return as Batman in what new DC superhero film?"). So instead, we enjoyed the other great part of a quiz night: Meeting new people and shooting the breeze. Quiz nights are supposed to be fun, and we hit that achievement!

So while some may poke fun at the little island across the pond, we have our British originators to thank for starting a bar tradition that has led many of us to fun weekly routines, new friends, and lifelong memories. And, in the case of this and other hosts, a pretty sweet gig. Raise a pint this weekend to the pub quiz!