A quiz that shares the screens with the football

Every screen in a sports bar has a fixture on it, and taking one over for a quiz is a decision with an opinion attached. On a big night you will not be taking any of them.

You do not have to. The question and the countdown are on every player's phone, so the quiz can run on one screen, or on a screen in one corner, or on no screen at all. What you lose without a screen is the shared moment when the leaderboard updates, which is worth having, but not worth a row about the football.

The gaps are the opportunity. A round at half time, a round after full time, a round in the flat forty minutes before kick-off when the bar is filling up and there is nothing on.

Because you launch each question yourself, a round can be abandoned mid-way and picked up later without anything breaking. The quiz is not running to its own schedule, so it does not fight the one on the wall.

A sports bar is the one venue where a full Sports round is safe, and it is the round your regulars have been waiting for. The arguments it starts are the product rather than a side effect.

It is still worth mixing. A room of people who know football is not a room of people who know cricket, and a night that is entirely sport rewards the same table every week. One sport round in a mixed night keeps everyone in it.

People arrive for a match and leave after it. A quiz in that room has to tolerate turnover: a team that joins in round two scans and plays from the question that is live, and a table that leaves at full time simply stops appearing at the top.

Individual mode often suits a sports bar better than teams, for the same reason it suits any standing crowd: the groups are not stable enough to score as units.