The whole point of attending a trivia night is to have a good time arguing with your friends and trying to wrap your minds around interesting questions for a couple of hours.

But there are prizes (and more importantly, bragging rights) to be won, and there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of coming out ahead of everyone else.

1) Listen to the damn question

If we asked for five countries beginning with the letter T, don’t stop at four.

Actually paying attention really pays off.

2) LISTEN TO THE DAMN QUESTION!

We pretty much never say anything for no reason. Often after reading the question itself there will be the odd hint thrown in, and if you stop listening your going to miss it.

If we phrase something a certain and unusual way, there’s a pretty good chance that’s not an accident. So listen to the whole question and you may get a push in the right direction.

3) Answer the question we asked

This is closely related to the above two points. There have been many times after hearing the answer that players have said “oh, I thought you meant the largest states” when we asked about the largest state capitals.

If you’re not sure what we asked, you can always ask us to repeat the question (though we may get cranky if we have to repeat it a dozen time because people just aren’t paying attention.) When asked what we mean, we will generally just repeat the question word for word. Recently when we asked for the animals that kill the most human beings, there were a lot of teams who just assumed humans didn’t count, even though we said anything from the animal kingdom was included.

Also, some of our questions may not be how they first appear. We’re never trying to trick you, but we have no qualms about letting you trick yourself.

4) Diversity wins

There have been a lot of teams come through iQ Trivia where everyone on the team knows everything there is to know about rugby league or Madonna songs, or Disney films, but you can’t count on every question being on a subject you know everything about. If your team lacks diversity, you’re going to have a much tougher time.

Bringing along your neighbour who knows about American Presidents, your mum who is an expert on hits from the 70s, and your cousin who has memorised every element on the periodic table is a much better approach.

That said, there is also no need to overcrowd your team. With every new player you add, there is a law of diminishing returns. In general, if you don’t know something with 6 people on your team, you won’t know it with 20 people on your team. Past a certain point new additions are not adding more brain power, but more people to argue with. In general, if you’re whole office turns up, you’ll get a better result by splitting into a number of smaller teams rather than one enormous team (and you can talk smack at your colleagues.)

5) Come prepared

You’ll find things a lot easier if you turn up in advance of the quiz so you can get a good spot, and aren’t crammed into a small corner and struggling to catch up after missing the first couple of questions.

You should also be sure to sign up to the mailing list of whatever show you want to attend. (You can contact homework@iqtrivia.com.au with the venue in the subject line if you want to get the weekly e-mail.) Our homework question is something easy to find, totally unambiguous, but something you’re unlikely to know without looking it up, and given that it’s worth multiple points, it’s tough to win without getting it right.

Also, a number of the Facebook pages of our individual shows will post hints of varying levels of helpfulness prior to the show, and that can mean an extra point here or there if you follow us on social media and pay attention.

Finally, bringing a bit of scrap paper along will allow you to keep track of what’s happening on the quiz and enable you to work out the answers to things you don’t know right away. Which leads us to…

6) Take notes

You may not be able to write the whole question on the answer sheet, so jot it down on a separate piece of paper and you can come back to it later without cluttering up your answers.

7) Don’t let your brain shut down

We ask a lot of questions that we don’t expect you to know right away. We will often ask questions that sound impossibly specific or obscure, but there is an interesting hook to them.

Think your way through the questions. The goal of iQ Trivia is not to have you regurgitate memorised facts, but to figure out things you don’t know. There will be many times where we ask a question we don’t expect ANYONE to actually know, but we’re never going to ask something impossibly obscure for no reason.

iQ Trivia isn’t about finding out what you know, but what you can figure out by debating with your friends and colleagues. So if your first instinct when you hear a question you don’t immediately know the answer to is to throw up your hands and say it’s impossible, you are not only unlikely to win at trivia, you are going to miss the fun of arguing with your teammates.

8) Go with your first instincts

Unless you have a good reason, go with the first answer that came into your head.

You may rethink things from time to time. If you realise the question is not what it first appeared to be, you probably should rethink things. But we’ve seen teams talk themselves out of the right answer more times that we can count.

9) We do frequently give points for particularly interesting wrong answers

If you don’t know the answer and can’t figure it out, never put “?” or leave it blank.

Teams have gotten interesting wrong answer points by listing half a dozen films someone has been in when they couldn’t remember the name of the actor. They’ve written half of the lyrics to a song or mentioned the ad campaigns that have used it when they couldn’t remember the title. One team has even answered a picture question about Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs as being “that guy in that thing”, which got a point both because it’s technically not wrong, and it took guts. (Of course, we’re more likely to be generous with bonus points if you’re struggling.)

10) Don’t be a dick

Apart from trivia, it’s good advice for life too.

We’re here to have a good time. Not knowing the capital of Uruguay isn’t a searing indictment of your worth as a human being. If you don’t know it, do the best you can and hope for the best. Freaking out is not going to help you find the answer, and cheating is going to mean you may run afoul of our cheating policy, and will guarantee that you come away with nothing.

So if you put these suggestions to use, you may find yourself looking as thrilled as these guys.

Sometimes at iQ Trivia we get asked if the existence of smart phones is killing trivia given that the answers to so many questions are just one Google search away.

It is true that smart phones have changed the trivia landscape and have the potential to undermine the inquisitive spirit that makes trivia fun, but it hasn’t killed trivia and it’s not going to.

And here’s why.

The vast majority of our players understand that the name of the game is trivia, not “who can look things up on their phone really quickly” and as a result don’t need us to tell them to stay off Google until the questions are done. Some players, if they need to take a call or send a text, have actually flagged our hosts down so we can witness the fact that they aren’t trying to gain an unfair advantage.

But of course, not everyone is so honest, which is why we generally announce before the first question that it’s time to put your phones away.

Some trivia outfits have instituted total bans on phones during the quiz, and if a phone come out at any time penalties are assessed. Some even have policies that ban players who have gone off to the toilet from returning to their team until after the round is over.

We don’t do that, and we’re not going to do that. Being the phone police or regulating toilet use is beneath our dignity as trivia hosts. (Though if you go to the toilet five times in 30 minutes, we might advise you to consult a urologist.)

Of course, in the jackpot round we will be very strict on phones, and even having one in plain view will result in a disqualification, something we have done and will continue to do.

We do tend to circulate around during the quiz, and if phones are out we will look over your shoulder to find out what you’re doing. In almost all cases, it’s something entirely innocent. (Though we have spotted players watching porn during the quiz. COME ON MAN! You’ve got to focus!)

On rare occasions, however, people are using their phones to find the answer to a question we’ve asked, and that’s when we invoke our cheating policy.

Stated simply, if you use your phone to look up the answer to a question, we will be UNBELIEVBLY strict with marking.

As an example, after asking a question on what country a certain beer was from, ten seconds later we spotted someone googling that beer. Naturally we announced to the room, while standing next to the offender (who still have his phone out in plain view) that it’s more fun to figure things out than to look things up, and went on with the quiz.

But when we were marking their quiz, we spotted that their answer was Holland.

And that is technically wrong. It’s not Holland. Holland is not a country. It’s The Netherlands.

Now normally, if you say Holland when the answer is The Netherlands, we will give you the point. We’re not out to be total hard asses when marking. But if you were cheating, YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE NOT TO GET EVERY QUESTION PERFECT.

So we didn’t give them a point for that. We also denied a point on a question on Tony Abbott, because their answer was Tony Abbot.

In the end we found enough excuses to dock points to ensure that the team of cheaters won absolutely nothing. Not first, not second, not seventh, and not even last, so they didn’t get to choose a subject for the following week.

We also find it tremendously satisfying when cheaters can’t even cheat right.

We asked about the world record for the bench press for men over the age of 80 to the nearest kilogram, and gave four options. One team answered 187. Now if you google “bench press over 80” the first result is about Sy Perlis who holds the record of 187 pounds.

But we didn’t ask for pounds. We asked for kilograms, and we gave you four options, none of which were 187. Also, 187 is a very specific number to get. Sure you might have memorised the world record for the bench press for various age groups, or Sy Perlis may be your grandfather, but it’s far more likely that you cheated. But even when cheating you have to answer the question we actually asked, not what comes up when you google the answer. Naturally, we took great delight in giving them zero points and announcing the oddly specific way they were wrong to the rest of the non-cheating patrons.

Another incident of cheating at a quiz in the UK went viral around the world. When asked who played the role of Skylar White on Breaking Bad, one team answered Nee Lambert.

Go ahead and look up the Wikipedia page on Skylar White. We’ll wait.

Yes the entry is about Skylar White (née Lambert). It seems that the kind of people who cheat on a Breaking Bad question don’t know that née was being used to indicate Skylar’s maiden name.

So often cheaters don’t even get the right answer, or the EXACT right answer even when they cheat, and we give them none of our usual leniency.

Get a single letter wrong? No points. Put an answer in the wrong box? No points. Stray even slightly outside of the box? No points. Give us anything that is not 100% perfect, and we will give you no points. We will find any excuse to deny you points in the pettiest ways we can think of, and we (and the other teams who play honestly) will enjoy it.

But aside from trolling cheaters, there’s something to be said for asking questions that are difficult to cheat on in the first place. Instead of asking questions where the answer can be found with one web search, we might ask how many times you could fit New Zealand into Australia. Cheating on that would require you to find Australia’s area, then New Zealand’s area, then do some calculations. Doing all of that while trying to look inconspicuous, and putting in all that effort might make any cheater conclude that it could actually be easier to actually contemplate the question with pure brainpower.

Not to mention our dilemma questions aren’t something you can look up the answer to at all.

But luckily, it’s only on very rare occasions that cheating is ever an issue at our quizzes. After hundreds upon hundreds of quizzes, incidents of cheating can be counted on your hands.

Nearly everyone who comes to iQ Trivia enjoys the challenge of being asked to work out a real headscratcher of a question. If you just go and look everything up, you’re robbing yourself of the feeling of elation that comes from cracking a particularly dicey question, and dicey questions are our speciality. We like to ask questions that you won’t know right away, but that you can enjoy arguing about. As it happens, those questions tend to be tougher to cheat on, and tend to attract players who aren’t going to cheat in the first place.

iQ Trivia isn’t about being right. It’s about engaging with your friends to try to solve problems we throw your way. If you are really determined to cheat, you can, and you will quite possibly get away with it.

But you are risking making a whole room full of people hate you, and being exposed as a horrible person who should be ashamed of themselves, not to mention losing the chance to debate potential answers with your teammates, all to win a bar tab.

So if you’re going to cheat, go somewhere else. You clearly don’t understand the concept of iQ Trivia.