By Rick Good. Updated 2026-10-24.
After years of watching the same tables win, the pattern is clear enough to write down.
- Stay curious. The teams that win read widely and pay attention to what they read. They are not memorizing for trivia night. They are the people who look up the thing they wondered about, and it adds up.
- Follow your own interests. You retain what you care about. A team built from people who each go deep on something different, music, sports, movies, history, science, covers more ground than five people who all like the same thing.
- Read the phrasing. Questions are written carefully. "Which country" is not "which city." "First" and "only" change the answer. The wording usually narrows the field more than it seems to.
- Practice. Play more than one night a week if you can. Different hosts and different formats sharpen different habits, and the wager rounds in particular reward teams that have learned when to bet and when to sit.
- Divide the table. Assign subjects before the game. When a question comes up, the table knows whose call it is, and the team stops losing points to the loudest guess.
And one more: write the answer down before you talk about it. The first instinct at the table is right more often than the debate that follows.
Winning teams are not the ones who know the most. They are the ones who waste the least.
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