We Analyzed 2,847 Trivia Games: Here's What the Data Says About Winning
We analyzed 2,847 real pub trivia games across 129 teams. The results reveal surprising patterns about win rates, optimal days to play, venue competition levels, and what actually separates elite teams from the pack.
We looked at 2,847 trivia games logged across 129 teams on MyTeamTrivia, and we did not expect what we found.
The data covers real pub quiz nights spanning multiple cities, dozens of venues, and thousands of rounds of competition. Teams on our platform log their scores, track their placements, and record how many competitors they faced. That creates a dataset with enough signal to answer the questions every trivia captain asks but never has data to answer: Does it actually matter what day you play? How many teammates do you really need? Which venues give you the best shot at the trophy?
We crunched it all. Here is what the numbers say.
The Baseline: It Is Harder Than You Think
First, context. These 2,847 games were played against an average of 14.3 competing teams per night. That is not a small local meet-up — that is real competition, with the average table fighting for a first-place finish against 13 other groups who also want to win.
The overall win rate across all games in our dataset is 8.9%. Teams finished first in 254 of 2,847 games logged.
That number needs to sit with you for a moment. Even strong, consistent teams should expect to win roughly once every 11 outings when they are in a field of 14. Trivia is a game of variance, knowledge, and — as we will show — timing. If your team is winning 20% of the time or more, you are genuinely elite.
The placement distribution tells the same story. The average finishing position across all games was 5.7 out of 14.3. The best recorded finish was 1st place. The most brutal recorded night saw a team finish 19th out of the pack. The median team is not dominating — they are battling for the middle of the leaderboard most nights, which means even small edges matter enormously.
Finding 1: Friday and Saturday Are the Best Nights to Win — By a Lot
This is the finding that surprised us most. When we broke down win rates by day of the week, the weekday players who dominate the raw game count are not the ones winning at the highest rates.
| Day | Games Played | Win Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Friday | 32 | 18.8% |
| Saturday | 27 | 18.5% |
| Sunday | 39 | 12.8% |
| Monday | 317 | 11.4% |
| Tuesday | 909 | 9.2% |
| Wednesday | 935 | 7.8% |
| Thursday | 588 | 7.7% |
Friday and Saturday players win at more than twice the rate of Thursday players. The caveat: weekend trivia nights in our dataset are rarer — only 59 games total. These could be smaller, more intimate events with fewer competing teams, or they could attract a different kind of player. But the signal is consistent: if you have a choice of nights, the weekend data leans toward higher win rates.
Wednesday and Thursday — the powerhouse weeknights for pub quiz culture — are also the toughest nights to win. Wednesday has 935 games in the dataset (the single most popular night) with only a 7.8% win rate. Thursday is nearly identical at 7.7%. The hypothesis: these are the flagship trivia nights that attract the most teams and the most dedicated regulars, making competition stiffer.
Monday is a sleeper. With 317 games and an 11.4% win rate, Monday trivia punches well above average. The fields may be smaller or the competition less cutthroat. If your city has a Monday option, it is worth considering.
Finding 2: Team Size Almost Does Not Matter — Until It Does
Every captain has an intuition about optimal team size. Some believe more brains equals more wins. Others swear that a tight four-person squad with complementary knowledge beats a larger, redundant group.
Our data mostly says: in the 3–5 player range, it barely matters.
| Team Size | Games | Win Rate |
|---|---|---|
| 3 players | 1,139 | 8.7% |
| 4 players | 911 | 9.1% |
| 5 players | 645 | 9.0% |
| 6 players | 149 | 9.4% |
The difference between 3 players (8.7%) and 6 players (9.4%) is less than one percentage point. Over 100 games, that rounds to roughly 1 extra win. Statistically meaningful over a long career, but not a night-to-night difference maker.
What this means practically: stop agonizing over the roster. Stop pulling in that extra friend who you think will "cover sports" when you are already at four. The data suggests the knowledge gap between a 3-person and 5-person team is smaller than the gap between a well-prepared team and an unprepared one.
The bigger lever is not how many people — it is how prepared they are, which leads us to the next finding.
Finding 3: Winners Score at Nearly the Same Rate as Everyone Else
This was our most counterintuitive result. We compared the average score percentage (score divided by max possible score) for winning teams versus non-winning teams:
- Winners: 68.2% average score
- Non-winners: 68.3% average score
Virtually identical. A difference of 0.1 percentage points across 2,840 games with score data.
The implication is profound: winning trivia is not primarily about absolute knowledge — it is about relative knowledge on a given night. A night where every team scores around 68% is a night where placement comes down to tiebreakers, wagers, and the random distribution of who happened to know the three specific questions that separated 4th from 1st.
This is actually liberating. It means you do not need to be encyclopedic. You need to be consistent and show up. The teams with the highest win rates in our dataset — detailed below — are teams that play often and know how to maximize points on the categories they own, rather than teams that somehow know everything.
Finding 4: The Best Teams Win One in Three Games
We filtered to teams with at least 10 logged games and ranked by win rate. These are the top performers:
| Team Name | Games | Wins | Win Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Know It Ales | 20 | 6 | 30.0% |
| Factual Attraction | 20 | 5 | 25.0% |
| Liberty Bell Brains | 21 | 5 | 23.8% |
| Pour Decisions | 13 | 3 | 23.1% |
| The Quiz Wizards | 20 | 4 | 20.0% |
| Quizzical Minds | 20 | 4 | 20.0% |
| Smarty Pints | 20 | 4 | 20.0% |
| Philly Fact Checkers | 20 | 4 | 20.0% |
| Ctrl Alt Defeat | 25 | 5 | 20.0% |
| Tequila Mockingbird | 23 | 4 | 17.4% |
Know It Ales sits at 30% — more than 3x the platform average. Factual Attraction and Liberty Bell Brains are north of 23%. These are genuinely exceptional results in a competitive environment.
But look at the absolute numbers: even Know It Ales, the best team in the dataset, wins 6 out of 20 games. They lose 14. Trivia is hard. Variance is real. The difference between a good team and the best team in the room is not always obvious on any given Tuesday night.
Want to track your own team's win rate and see how you stack up? Our free trivia tracker makes it one tap to log a game.
Finding 5: The Venue Makes a Measurable Difference
We looked at venues with 88+ logged games — enough data to draw real conclusions — and the win rate spread is significant:
| Venue | Games | Win Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Wild Heaven Beer | 96 | 13.5% |
| The Goat | 94 | 12.8% |
| Celis Brewery | 95 | 11.6% |
| Flatstick Pub | 91 | 9.9% |
| Sidetrack | 116 | 9.5% |
| Six Bridges Brewing | 92 | 8.7% |
| Fado Irish Pub | 90 | 8.9% |
| Cooper's Craft & Cocktails | 95 | 8.4% |
| Ladd & Lass Brewing | 105 | 8.6% |
| TailGate Brewery | 88 | 6.8% |
| Bar 508 | 137 | 7.3% |
| Sticky Wicket Pub | 112 | 6.2% |
| Bruz Beers | 98 | 6.1% |
| Murphy's Bleachers | 94 | 3.2% |
Wild Heaven Beer logs a 13.5% win rate — more than double Murphy's Bleachers at 3.2%. Part of this is field size: some venues run larger weekly events with more competing teams, making wins statistically harder. Part of it is the regulars — some venues attract dedicated trivia communities that have been showing up for years.
The practical takeaway: know your venue's competitive landscape before deciding whether to treat a loss as a setback. Finishing 4th at Murphy's Bleachers, where only 3.2% of games result in a first-place finish, might actually be a strong performance. Finishing 4th at Wild Heaven Beer, where 13.5% of games are won, might mean you have real room to improve.
Use our venue directory to find trivia nights near you and check how competitive each location tends to be.
Finding 6: Top-3 Finishes Are More Common Than You Think
First-place wins are only 254 of 2,847 games. But the picture looks different when you zoom out:
- 1st place: 254 games (8.9%)
- 2nd place: 237 games (8.3%)
- 3rd place: 305 games (10.7%)
Combined, teams in our dataset finished in the top 3 in 796 of 2,847 games — 27.9% of the time. More than 1 in 4 nights ends with a podium finish.
This matters for team motivation. If you are judging your season only by wins, you are ignoring the 19.1% of nights where you came in 2nd or 3rd in a field of 14. That is an elite result. Many venues give out prizes for top-3 finishes. Many hosts acknowledge all three. Tracking placements — not just wins — is essential to understanding whether your team is actually improving.
Finding 7: Fall Is the Hottest Season for Trivia
Seasonality emerged clearly in the data. September saw the highest win rate of any full month at 11.2%, with October not far behind at 7.6%. The summer months (July at 8.2%, August at 10.3%) show healthy activity. February is the coldest month for wins at 7.2% — fitting.
December — despite being the holiday social season — holds a respectable 9.0% win rate across 412 games, the highest single-month game count in the dataset.
One pattern worth noting: teams that log more consistently across months tend to see their win rates stabilize. The variance is highest for teams that play sporadically. Regularity is its own edge.
What the Best Teams Actually Do Differently
After looking at all of this, one finding stands out above the rest: the teams with the highest win rates are not the ones that play more or have larger rosters. They are the ones that track, reflect, and improve.
Know It Ales, the top team at 30%, has 20 games logged. The teams with the most games played — Squid Game Survivors with 41 games, Barbie's Dream Team with 40 — show win rates of 7.3% and 10.0% respectively. Volume alone does not win games.
What correlates with elite win rates appears to be strategic self-awareness: knowing which venues you perform well at, which category types you crush, and which nights give you the best field. That is information you can only have if you are tracking it.
The teams in this dataset who win at 20%+ play more intentionally than the average team. They are not just showing up — they are building institutional knowledge about their own performance.
Start Tracking. Start Improving.
The data is clear: pub trivia rewards consistency, self-knowledge, and strategic venue choice far more than raw roster size or absolute score. Most teams are leaving wins on the table simply because they do not know what their numbers look like.
Start tracking your team's games free — it takes less than 30 seconds to log a night, and after 10 games you will start seeing patterns that change how you play.
If you are still looking for the right name to strike fear into the competition, we have 1,000+ trivia team names organized by style and category. And if you are scouting for a new regular venue, our pub quiz venue finder covers thousands of locations with real activity data.
Good luck out there. May the variance be in your favor.
Analysis by the MyTeamTrivia Research Team. Data drawn from 2,847 games logged by 129 teams on MyTeamTrivia as of March 2026. Win rates reflect first-place finishes only. Venue win rates are calculated per team-game logged at that location, not per unique team.