We wrote a Tip a while back about prizes and related the story of a venue that only had prizes at the end of the year. The monthly quiz had no prizes at all, just points for first, second and third, and the top teams at year end won the prizes.
Now we don’t advocate prize-less quizzes, but can see some merit in a year-long league. Although none of us here have actually organised one.
The obvious advantage is that it encourages teams to keep coming. Perhaps not to every quiz night, but it does provide an extra incentive to go on a cold, wet night when the football’s on.
Equally obviously, if one team keeps winning most weeks the incentive for the other teams to turn out starts to diminish, but we’ve covered a few methods of containing that problem before.
There needs to be an adequate prize at each quiz, and bigger prizes for the overall league. But not too big. We’ve cautioned before about big prizes attracting big hitters, and driving away normal quizzers.
If you’re considering this, a simple way to test the water might be a shorter league (rather than going the whole hog of a year-long league straight away) and the quieter post-Christmas months might be a suitable time for this.