From Tai Chi to Bingo and Senior’s Fitness, Canada Bay Club offers a host of activities to keep you happy, healthy and connected during the week. New to Thursdays, we now have fortnightly trivia nights, which are fun, interactive and team-based. Read on to find out how you can get involved and how to prepare to perform your best.

Hosted by Time for Trivia, you’ll enjoy a fun night with three rounds of questions that test your general knowledge. While the enjoyment is certainly in the participation, there are also food and drinks vouchers up for grabs, plus bottles of wine and GEM Points as prizes. To help you get started, we’ve put together this guide on how to prepare for trivia night. Read on for our insider tips on how to be a quiz whiz.

What topics does a trivia night cover?

The content at trivia nights is exceptionally broad and can cover anything from sports to history and geography. The bad news is that it could take a lifetime to master all of these varied topics. However, the upside is that there are certain steps you can take to build enough general knowledge to make yourself a trivia pro.

One of the best ways to learn trivia is by simply keeping up with current affairs.  And one of the easiest ways to stay abreast of what is going on in the world is to watch the news on TV, listen to topical radio programs or podcasts, or read the newspaper. As you stay informed, you’ll find yourself gradually learning more about various people, places and events around the world, adding to the vast bank of knowledge you already have. 

If you are having trouble figuring out where to start, the best tip is to begin with topics you are interested in. Perhaps you’re a fiction fiend, a lover of language, an art aficionado, or a pro when it comes to politics. While trivia is about general knowledge, it’s ok to specialise in a specific area. Just be sure that you have a good mix of expertise when it comes to putting together your trivia team. It’s OK if you specialise in sports and know who won gold in the 100m sprint at the 1968 Olympics as long as you team up with other players you can rely on to name the capital city of Botswana or the third president of the United States.

Check out this list of questions from Legends Trivia to give you an idea of how broad trivia topics are and the most popular types of questions.

How to prepare for your next Trivia Night?

Sporcle is the world’s largest online trivia website. In their article on how to prepare for trivia, they recommend watching game shows to brush up on your skills ahead of your next trivia night. They also recommend using trivia websites and apps to help learn and practice trivia. Using a website such as Sporcle is a free and vast resource for finding trivia quizzes on virtually every topic. They also recommend reading online articles as a great way to keep in prime trivia shape. Read about current events, or take yourself down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and learn about things that are interesting to you. Of course, there are always classic trivia board games too, such as Trivial Pursuit.

Sporcle also recommend fuelling up for the big event. “Teachers will tell you not to take a test or exam on an empty stomach, and being hungry at trivia night will only make focusing on the trivia harder,” they say. Fuelling your body and mind is important if you’re going to have success at trivia night, so why not have a bite at The Brasserie or Baysia before the action starts.