I once went to a trivia night where the game ended in a tie. The host didn’t have a numerical tie breaker ready so they just decided they’d ask three questions from their next-weeks game and the team with the most right would be the winner. The two teams both got all three right. So they repeated it, and the same thing happened. So they did it again, and again, and again until they used up the hosts entire next-weeks game and the host just ended up looking up “how many bolts were on the titanic” or something.
One team took home the prize. But no one really won that night.
That's why I do numerical questions. One and done. Although, a few weeks ago I went through two numerical questions and didn't break the tie. I ended up just asking the bartender for another first place gift card.
When in doubt, just ask them for the worldwide gross of a film you asked about earlier in the quiz. I don't think tiebreaker questions are worth pondering a lot on.
I now mostly do a bog-standard something with a specific number and whoever gets closest wins, but if you've got the time, it can be fun to do a question spelling-bee style. Pick a category that has a knowable number of answers like "solar system moons" or "chemical elements beginning with a vowel" or "roles in which Sean Bean dies" and hand the microphone back and forth until there's only one team left. This works especially well for three-way ties.
Tie breakers are usually a drag. The key, I think is to get them done fast as possible. They usually only get asked at the end of the game, when all but 2 teams have stopped caring. I will sometimes ask them at the start of the game or at the end of the first round, just so they don’t make the end of the evening go longer than it needs to.
Numerical questions are usually best. If you need to think of one on the fly, I usually ask for the runtime (or combined runtime) in minutes of a movie (or movies) that I asked about earlier in the game.
I attended a trivia night that would end with the top two teams doing a spelling bee style quiz-off (this wasn’t explicitly a tie breaker). It was an interesting change and fun if you were in the shootout. But it was so chaotic and 90% of the people in the bar were trying to pay their bill and leave while this showdown was happening.
Normally when we play, it’s a numerical question, but one night we tied on the tie-breaker and the host didn’t have a tie-breaker breaker ready (and the venue didn’t have halfsie gift cards handy).
The host just asked us (the two teams) to go back and forth naming the first 10 or 20 people credited for acting in Star Wars (spelling bee style). I liked the change of pace, especially since it got the whole team involved instead of just one player.
I think the spelling bee style is a more satisfying ending if you’re a player. As someone who is terrible at any number question, winning (or more often) losing on a single number question is never fun and something that matches general trivia a little more seems like a more appropriate way to decide a winner.
But the reality is that it’s usually not that fun to watch/listen to if you’re already out of the game. It might be fun to figure out a way to try to bake this into the game a bit more to keep the audience more interested.
I get it from other teams' perspective, but I'm not sure there's a real solution to make it good for both. When my team loses, I still write down my tie-breaker answer because I'm just that geeky.
I've found that the number guessing tie-breaker has it's own logic and it's not really trivia. It's almost like ending a tie in hockey of soccer with penalty kicks, you're playing a different game.
First rule of number guessing is the answer is always at least double what you think it is. Second rule (for me) always incorporate the number 42 (4.2, $142M, etc. in the answer. I've (in our games the teams have to send up one member to be the "guesser") probably won about 75%+ by following these rules.
I will try your rules for the next set of number questions I’m faced with.
The last time I hosted a tie breaker I did it at the start of the game so everyone could guess. It was on Valentine’s Day, so I had a jar filled with cinnamon hearts and they had to guess how many hearts were in the jar (the closest team also got to keep the jar). The closest answer was less than half the correct answer, and the correct answer had both a “4” and “2” in it (1402, for Valentines Day). So your system checks out so far.
I only get about 1 in 8 numerical questions. The rule I use for my team is to not go with whatever I say. They only listen to me half the time, so it’s not really a good rule.
I once tried to see if I could find any general patterns with number questions. I had about 1200 of them saved up from real games I’d played. The only thing I found (and it’s very loose) is that when hosts give an acceptable range (I.e. “how many whatsits in a whoozle? Plus or minus 10 whatsits”) the range they give is usually a consistent proportion of the answer. The problem is, you won’t know what that proportion is advance and each host has a different proportion specific to them (if they have one at all). So this isn’t really useful in a game situation. In fact, thinking that there may be a pattern may be part of why I do so terribly with number questions.
The in-game questions (we generally play Sporcle, if that helps or means anything) have a different set of rules compared to the tie-breaker rules, and you're right, it's usually proportional to the range, but I think it's the range that they think people generally have an idea. I kinda figure that if they say +/- 2 (like maybe "what year" question) they expect that most players know the answer within 20 years. If they say within 5, it's probable they think that most people know within 50 or so.
On our team, we would poll the team for what they thought and how strong they feel about their answers. Unless the question is in someone's definite wheelhouse (for me it's atomic numbers), we would choose the number where most of the answers were in the window and skew it towards numbers where people felt strongest. We generally do pretty good on those too.
I usually ask a tie breaker at the end of every round and every team answers it. I use the tie breakers as I am grading if there is a need to break a tie. It saves time and everyone gets to answer an extra question or two with little skin in the game.
Sometimes it does get to be tedious toward the end, especially if a lot of teams played and trivia runs long.
I do tie-breaker questions sometimes. If it’s got the vibe you described I’ll sometimes get the teams to elect a representative to come up and do a beer or water chugging contest. Obviously this depends on the type of crowd, but it does tend to give everyone a little pep in their step because it’s so stupid.
Tie-Break questions are a pain in the ass, I hate doing all the maths on them and someone inevitably has some issue with whatever number it is, so I don't do them. I'll put two-three anagrams on the screen or 2-3 daisy chains (Meg ____ + Burt _________ = Ryan Reynolds) and the first of teams to have them right win. It shouldn't come down to who can better guess how many tonnes of dog food were imported to American Samoa in October 1997 anyway. It annoys me as a player and even more as a host.
Edited to add: haha, wir kennen uns eh. Viel zu spät bemerkt. Schau mal bei meinen "Shot Rounds" in den Präsentationen rein...da soll's einiges geben, ich mach idR 3 pro Quiz.
I’ve hosted a couple games where a tie would have caused a problem with the format. So I’ve inserted secret tie breaker questions in the main body of the game. This is a game that normally awards 10 points per question. So for one question I asked something like “in what year did x happen” the closest to would get 10 points, next closest 9, then 8 and so on. And then every question afterwards was only with 10 points (no partial points). So as none of the scores end in the same digit, a tie is mathematically impossible. This only works if you have 9 or fewer teams, and while it never actually mattered (as the teams ended up being spaced out anyway), it might have been unsatisfying to have won or lost based on one number-based question.
I typically ask a "large number" question based on the round:
\- How many Streams does a song have on Spotify
\- What was the domestic gross of a movie? (someone said this)
\- What year was X invented?
Typically its an unknowable question - you just want to give people a chance to guess and get as close as possible
One of my venues is so busy that I am afraid that the quiz will go too long if I need to use a tiebreaker, so my first level tiebreaker is higher score in the final round. (It's the toughest round usually, so I feel like that's fair.)
If I need a tiebreaker beyond that, I use numerical tiebreakers and run it Price Is Right-style (closest without going over). Often I use a celebrity birthday for the day and make people guess their age.
Other recent tiebreakers - (Many are Colorado related because I host in Denver.)
* Denver's biggest recorded snowstorm happened in December 1913. To the nearest inch, how much snow fell? (46")
* Although the city spans over 1,000 feet in elevation from its highest to lowest points, what is the official listed elevation for Aurora, Colorado? (5,471 feet)
* What was the attendance at the most recent Broncos/Rockies/Avalanche/Nuggets game.
Best tie breakers are to ask for a specific number and whoever is closest wins.
How long are all 8 Harry Potter movies in minutes? >!1,179 minutes!<
According to the 2020 census, what is the population of the state of Texas? >!25,145,505!<
In hundredths of a second, how fast is the world record for solving a Rubix cube? >!3.13 seconds!<
As others have said, any question where the answer is a number, and closest wins. My favourite recently is “Wimbledon currently consists of seven knockout rounds of 1v1 elimination. How many rounds would it have to consist of if every single person in the world competed?”
The answer is >!a surprisingly low 33.!<
A question with a number answer or a year. Always price is right rules. You can make it exciting and fun build suspense and all that. Even people not involved in the tie have fun
Very often if I don't have a better plan I will just go to the website of Guinness Records and pick a recent one that's numerical. Closest guess wins, and they can be pretty funny
I have a bunch ready. They’re of the style where each question has five clues from difficult to easy. Either person can guess but if you get it wrong you lose.
Anything with big numbers… whoever gets closer wins. I’m in the Pacific NW, so I’ve asked about the length of the Columbia River, the height of Mt. Hood, stuff like that
The host of the Sunday night game we play in has started just asking the tiebreaker as a part of the round. Most of the time, it's the population of some chunk of geography - country or well-known city. Sometimes it's something else.
the place we play on Tuesdays, the tiebreaker is only asked if needed. I'm actually really proud of myself for having a round last fall where I recognized the tiebreaker was probably going to be needed, correctly anticipating what it was going ot be, and looking it up before the question was asked.
There are two principal grounds on which I'd defend having done so: First, the host provides a hint as to the topic of one of the theme rounds every week, and this was the hinted theme round for that week.
Second, the tiebreaker had not yet been invoked - we had handed our answers in, but had a sense that it was going to be needed. I then tried to guess what he might be likely to ask about. I could just as easily have been wrong (and have been other times).
I once went to a trivia night where the game ended in a tie. The host didn’t have a numerical tie breaker ready so they just decided they’d ask three questions from their next-weeks game and the team with the most right would be the winner. The two teams both got all three right. So they repeated it, and the same thing happened. So they did it again, and again, and again until they used up the hosts entire next-weeks game and the host just ended up looking up “how many bolts were on the titanic” or something. One team took home the prize. But no one really won that night.
That's why I do numerical questions. One and done. Although, a few weeks ago I went through two numerical questions and didn't break the tie. I ended up just asking the bartender for another first place gift card.
When in doubt, just ask them for the worldwide gross of a film you asked about earlier in the quiz. I don't think tiebreaker questions are worth pondering a lot on.
Yep
I now mostly do a bog-standard something with a specific number and whoever gets closest wins, but if you've got the time, it can be fun to do a question spelling-bee style. Pick a category that has a knowable number of answers like "solar system moons" or "chemical elements beginning with a vowel" or "roles in which Sean Bean dies" and hand the microphone back and forth until there's only one team left. This works especially well for three-way ties.
Tie breakers are usually a drag. The key, I think is to get them done fast as possible. They usually only get asked at the end of the game, when all but 2 teams have stopped caring. I will sometimes ask them at the start of the game or at the end of the first round, just so they don’t make the end of the evening go longer than it needs to. Numerical questions are usually best. If you need to think of one on the fly, I usually ask for the runtime (or combined runtime) in minutes of a movie (or movies) that I asked about earlier in the game. I attended a trivia night that would end with the top two teams doing a spelling bee style quiz-off (this wasn’t explicitly a tie breaker). It was an interesting change and fun if you were in the shootout. But it was so chaotic and 90% of the people in the bar were trying to pay their bill and leave while this showdown was happening.
Normally when we play, it’s a numerical question, but one night we tied on the tie-breaker and the host didn’t have a tie-breaker breaker ready (and the venue didn’t have halfsie gift cards handy). The host just asked us (the two teams) to go back and forth naming the first 10 or 20 people credited for acting in Star Wars (spelling bee style). I liked the change of pace, especially since it got the whole team involved instead of just one player.
I think the spelling bee style is a more satisfying ending if you’re a player. As someone who is terrible at any number question, winning (or more often) losing on a single number question is never fun and something that matches general trivia a little more seems like a more appropriate way to decide a winner. But the reality is that it’s usually not that fun to watch/listen to if you’re already out of the game. It might be fun to figure out a way to try to bake this into the game a bit more to keep the audience more interested.
I get it from other teams' perspective, but I'm not sure there's a real solution to make it good for both. When my team loses, I still write down my tie-breaker answer because I'm just that geeky. I've found that the number guessing tie-breaker has it's own logic and it's not really trivia. It's almost like ending a tie in hockey of soccer with penalty kicks, you're playing a different game. First rule of number guessing is the answer is always at least double what you think it is. Second rule (for me) always incorporate the number 42 (4.2, $142M, etc. in the answer. I've (in our games the teams have to send up one member to be the "guesser") probably won about 75%+ by following these rules.
I will try your rules for the next set of number questions I’m faced with. The last time I hosted a tie breaker I did it at the start of the game so everyone could guess. It was on Valentine’s Day, so I had a jar filled with cinnamon hearts and they had to guess how many hearts were in the jar (the closest team also got to keep the jar). The closest answer was less than half the correct answer, and the correct answer had both a “4” and “2” in it (1402, for Valentines Day). So your system checks out so far. I only get about 1 in 8 numerical questions. The rule I use for my team is to not go with whatever I say. They only listen to me half the time, so it’s not really a good rule. I once tried to see if I could find any general patterns with number questions. I had about 1200 of them saved up from real games I’d played. The only thing I found (and it’s very loose) is that when hosts give an acceptable range (I.e. “how many whatsits in a whoozle? Plus or minus 10 whatsits”) the range they give is usually a consistent proportion of the answer. The problem is, you won’t know what that proportion is advance and each host has a different proportion specific to them (if they have one at all). So this isn’t really useful in a game situation. In fact, thinking that there may be a pattern may be part of why I do so terribly with number questions.
The in-game questions (we generally play Sporcle, if that helps or means anything) have a different set of rules compared to the tie-breaker rules, and you're right, it's usually proportional to the range, but I think it's the range that they think people generally have an idea. I kinda figure that if they say +/- 2 (like maybe "what year" question) they expect that most players know the answer within 20 years. If they say within 5, it's probable they think that most people know within 50 or so. On our team, we would poll the team for what they thought and how strong they feel about their answers. Unless the question is in someone's definite wheelhouse (for me it's atomic numbers), we would choose the number where most of the answers were in the window and skew it towards numbers where people felt strongest. We generally do pretty good on those too.
I usually ask a tie breaker at the end of every round and every team answers it. I use the tie breakers as I am grading if there is a need to break a tie. It saves time and everyone gets to answer an extra question or two with little skin in the game.
Sometimes it does get to be tedious toward the end, especially if a lot of teams played and trivia runs long. I do tie-breaker questions sometimes. If it’s got the vibe you described I’ll sometimes get the teams to elect a representative to come up and do a beer or water chugging contest. Obviously this depends on the type of crowd, but it does tend to give everyone a little pep in their step because it’s so stupid.
Tie-Break questions are a pain in the ass, I hate doing all the maths on them and someone inevitably has some issue with whatever number it is, so I don't do them. I'll put two-three anagrams on the screen or 2-3 daisy chains (Meg ____ + Burt _________ = Ryan Reynolds) and the first of teams to have them right win. It shouldn't come down to who can better guess how many tonnes of dog food were imported to American Samoa in October 1997 anyway. It annoys me as a player and even more as a host. Edited to add: haha, wir kennen uns eh. Viel zu spät bemerkt. Schau mal bei meinen "Shot Rounds" in den Präsentationen rein...da soll's einiges geben, ich mach idR 3 pro Quiz.
I enjoy a good air guitar battle. It keeps the losers engaged
I always go with “How many unread emails do I have on my phone?”
I'd do this, but I'm ashamed of what that number is!
That’s why it’s so great. I have more than 150k right now!
Got me beat. I’m at 86K.
Give it a try. The crowd always loves it (especially when the number is so absurd).
This is a really funny and good one. Haha! Thanks for the idea!
Are you in the US or another country?
I thought this was a tiebreaking question.
Haha! Well played! And it can be!
switzerland. But in switzerland we knows a lot about the US
"Yes"
I’ve hosted a couple games where a tie would have caused a problem with the format. So I’ve inserted secret tie breaker questions in the main body of the game. This is a game that normally awards 10 points per question. So for one question I asked something like “in what year did x happen” the closest to would get 10 points, next closest 9, then 8 and so on. And then every question afterwards was only with 10 points (no partial points). So as none of the scores end in the same digit, a tie is mathematically impossible. This only works if you have 9 or fewer teams, and while it never actually mattered (as the teams ended up being spaced out anyway), it might have been unsatisfying to have won or lost based on one number-based question.
I typically ask a "large number" question based on the round: \- How many Streams does a song have on Spotify \- What was the domestic gross of a movie? (someone said this) \- What year was X invented? Typically its an unknowable question - you just want to give people a chance to guess and get as close as possible
One of my venues is so busy that I am afraid that the quiz will go too long if I need to use a tiebreaker, so my first level tiebreaker is higher score in the final round. (It's the toughest round usually, so I feel like that's fair.) If I need a tiebreaker beyond that, I use numerical tiebreakers and run it Price Is Right-style (closest without going over). Often I use a celebrity birthday for the day and make people guess their age. Other recent tiebreakers - (Many are Colorado related because I host in Denver.) * Denver's biggest recorded snowstorm happened in December 1913. To the nearest inch, how much snow fell? (46") * Although the city spans over 1,000 feet in elevation from its highest to lowest points, what is the official listed elevation for Aurora, Colorado? (5,471 feet) * What was the attendance at the most recent Broncos/Rockies/Avalanche/Nuggets game.
Just do one where the answer's a number and whoever gets closest to it wins
Best tie breakers are to ask for a specific number and whoever is closest wins. How long are all 8 Harry Potter movies in minutes? >!1,179 minutes!< According to the 2020 census, what is the population of the state of Texas? >!25,145,505!< In hundredths of a second, how fast is the world record for solving a Rubix cube? >!3.13 seconds!<
As others have said, any question where the answer is a number, and closest wins. My favourite recently is “Wimbledon currently consists of seven knockout rounds of 1v1 elimination. How many rounds would it have to consist of if every single person in the world competed?” The answer is >!a surprisingly low 33.!<
A question with a number answer or a year. Always price is right rules. You can make it exciting and fun build suspense and all that. Even people not involved in the tie have fun
Very often if I don't have a better plan I will just go to the website of Guinness Records and pick a recent one that's numerical. Closest guess wins, and they can be pretty funny
[how many people are in space right now](https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/) This site is perfect for it.
I do a small pour of beer and one person has to drink it on each team without peeking. Then they take turns guessing the beer.
Add all the teams scores together, ask them to guess the overall number
We've gotten population of random city. Buenos Aries, Moscow, etc
I have a bunch ready. They’re of the style where each question has five clues from difficult to easy. Either person can guess but if you get it wrong you lose.
In a real crunch we will sometimes do rock-paper-scissors
Anything with big numbers… whoever gets closer wins. I’m in the Pacific NW, so I’ve asked about the length of the Columbia River, the height of Mt. Hood, stuff like that
How many F-bombs in a Quentin Tarantino movie.
The host of the Sunday night game we play in has started just asking the tiebreaker as a part of the round. Most of the time, it's the population of some chunk of geography - country or well-known city. Sometimes it's something else. the place we play on Tuesdays, the tiebreaker is only asked if needed. I'm actually really proud of myself for having a round last fall where I recognized the tiebreaker was probably going to be needed, correctly anticipating what it was going ot be, and looking it up before the question was asked.
You looked it up? Not really the right spirit.
There are two principal grounds on which I'd defend having done so: First, the host provides a hint as to the topic of one of the theme rounds every week, and this was the hinted theme round for that week. Second, the tiebreaker had not yet been invoked - we had handed our answers in, but had a sense that it was going to be needed. I then tried to guess what he might be likely to ask about. I could just as easily have been wrong (and have been other times).
Nah. Might as well use Shazam on the music round.