How can you manage to balance Team Sizes at trivia events?
How can you manage to balance Team Sizes at trivia events?
“Ideas, pros and cons on how to, and the importance of, balancing team sizes in a trivia events to ensure fairness and to make sure the players all get involved”
Welcome back to the blog and as we approach the end of the week I hope you are having a successful and profitable week in your trivia hosting escapades. I hope the blog this week has helped you with some ideas and I am going to change my original plan today to tie in with a post I made yesterday regarding the team sizes in serious quizzes. Now, the issues of team size is one which affects any quiz no matter what size or type of venue you are running. However it is a very hard matter to approach as we are going to find out throughout this blog.
How can you manage to balance Team Sizes at trivia events? – Making it a fair contest
The first thing to consider is that your ultimate aim as well as making a fun and profitable trivia night is to make one that is largely fair. If there is too much cheating or the players feel like the contest is not fair then they will loose interest and go elsewhere. I know as a player than one thing that always annoys me is when there is a team of 12 competing and all the other teams average 2-3. I often played in small teams would hate to loose by 2-3 points to a huge team. Annoying.
You have to be diplomatic about it here though. Obviously if you have a team of 12 that’s too many so as a host you would have to be encouraging that team to divide into 2. If there is a team of 8 competing against teams of 6 and 5 then it makes it harder. The very bottom section of this post should give you an idea of how to manage this well…
How can you manage to balance Team Sizes at trivia events? – Serious Events
If you are running a serious trivia event then there is no doubt that you need to set team sizes. The smaller the better usually and the average good size for a team is 4. There is not even much to discuss here as you simply need to do it or your serious players wont be taking your serious quiz very seriously at all!!
How can you manage to balance Team Sizes at trivia events? – The Bar Manager!
One thing you have to constantly bear in mind throughout this whole decision on team size is what the bar manager/venue owner is going to think. At the end of the day you are there for the purpose of making money for the bar and the venue owner. If you start bossing people around and saying who can play with who and you isn’t allowed to play and trying to fix team size then you always run that risk of getting people who are going to walk out and find their trivia kicks elsewhere. People who turn up to play a quiz don’t necessarily want to be forced into not playing with friends etc. Plus if you are too rigid and say…no more than 6 players……what do you do if a team of 7 mates turn up? Tell them to exclude someone from their team? That’s only going to have one outcome
How can you manage to balance Team Sizes at trivia events? – Ideas to make it fair
Now here are the ideas I promised….
- I have only ever seen this used once and I cant say its totally fair but it is an option. What the quizmaster did was divide the overall score of the team by the amount of players in the team to give the winner. So for example –
Team A scores 100 points but has 10 players = 100 divided by 10 players meaning Team A Scores 10
Team B Scores 50 points but there are only 2 players = 50 divided by 2 players – Team B Scores 25 and wins
2. The other method to use is have a separate prize for the team with the highest points per person score. Even a bottle of wine, vouchers, a small cash prize or just anything to keep them interested and give the smaller teams something to aim at.
3. The third method, which I kind if like is a handicap. Each team is deducted one point for every player……so a team of 12 would start on -12 and a team of 2 would start on -2. I figure this is the better option than the points per person and this makes it fairer on everybody. I have used this several times and it has worked a treat and produced some close scores. In a normal quiz teams of 12 will always beat teams of 3 but throwing in that handicap will mix things up.
All in all, that hopefully this has given you all an idea of what is involved in the issue of how to manage team sizes at trivia events. It is an issue worth considering as even if some of your trivia players are not openly vocal about this concern it will be something that the smaller teams will be thinking of. As mentioned above there are ways to handle this and control to so as it make the night run smoothly without risking ruining it.
Thanks for reading and remember to keep the ideas coming if you have any suggestions you want me to cover. I have been in this industry for quite some time so always have ideas that I have tried and tested to share and I also have an open ear and a desire to hear your ideas so if you have any better ideas than I have presented then please feel free to send them across. Until next time, happy trivia hosting……
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