America's Pub Quiz brings a live-hosted quiz night to bars and restaurants, free for the people playing. If they do not run in your town, or you want the night to belong to the bar, Quizado is the software that puts your own staff in the host's chair.
America's Pub Quiz brings a hosted show and a national league to your venue; Quizado gives you the same style of pub quiz to run in-house, with the questions on the TV, the answers on phones and the standings under your own name.
Their venue list, checked in August 2026, shows bars in Wisconsin towns including Milwaukee, Green Bay and West Bend, and in Nebraska including Lincoln and Omaha. A hosted show can only be where a host can drive.
Quizado runs anywhere the bar has internet. A pub in a town of four thousand people gets the same night as a bar on a city square.
A paper-and-pen quiz is charming until the halftime break, when the host is squinting at eleven sheets of handwriting instead of talking to the room.
Answers arrive scored. The standings are on the TV the moment the timer runs out, and the break can be a break.
Hiring a hosted show costs the same on the first Tuesday as it does on the fortieth, and the first few are always the quietest.
Quizado has a free plan that runs a full bar trivia night for up to sixteen players. The first month of trying costs nothing but the hours.
A national league is a strong draw, and it also means the table your regulars care about is not one you control or can see.
Leagues and seasons in Quizado run under your venue name. The table on the chalkboard is your table, and you decide what winning it is worth.
A touring host has other bars to be at. Moving your quiz for a holiday week or a big game means asking, and sometimes waiting.
Change the night in the app the same afternoon. Run two in a week if a festival is in town, or skip one without telling anybody.
A show that runs across many venues has to write questions everybody can answer, which rules out the ones about your street, your beer or the local team.
From Trivia Pro you can write a local round yourself, or generate one from a prompt with your monthly AI credits. A question about the shop on the corner gets a bigger reaction than anything from a national bank of questions.
Built from the ground up for modern bar trivia and live events.
Media questions carry an image, an audio clip or a video, on Trivia Pro and above. The whole room looks at the same photo on the TV rather than at a grainy copy on each table.
Teams scan a QR code and answer in the browser. No printing before the shift, no pens behind the bar, no arguments about what a word says.
Teams and players are saved in your account, so the same six regulars keep their name and their history instead of writing it on a fresh sheet every week.
Run a league across a season with your own rules about what the winner gets. A bar tab, a trophy behind the till, or nothing but the bragging rights.
Family Feud and Jeopardy are host-run: you read, the room answers out loud, you award the points. Useful in a holiday week when the usual teams are away. Family Feud, Jeopardy and Music Bingo are on Hospitality Group.
Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, Android and the web app. Host from the office laptop or from an iPad you carry around the room.
The pub quiz came out of British pubs in the 1970s: a host with a folder, teams around tables, several short rounds, a break in the middle and an argument about the scoring at the end. America's Pub Quiz has been running that idea in American bars and restaurants as a live-hosted show. Checked in August 2026, their published format is two halves, three rounds in each half and three questions in each round, with the whole thing running roughly two hours and prizes going to the top three teams.
The pace is part of the format: it is not rapid fire, so people have time to answer, eat, drink and talk. Their site describes the categories as a potpourri including music, movies, TV, sports and history. Playing is free, nightly prizes are usually venue gift certificates for the top three teams, and the free league adds up a team's top twenty scores towards cash tournaments three times a year (americaspubquiz.com, checked August 2026).
If you are building a night in-house, copy that structure before you get creative. Short rounds, a scoring twist that keeps a losing team interested, a real break for the kitchen, and a pace slow enough that people order another drink. A quiz that finishes in fifty minutes is not a cheap night out, it is a room that empties at nine.
Two things make a traditional pub quiz expensive to run: the printing and the marking. A picture round means a sheet per table, photocopied before service and thrown away after. The answer sheets mean somebody reads twelve sets of handwriting, twice a night, while the room waits for the halftime scores.
Quizado replaces both with screens. The picture round becomes a media question: on Trivia Pro and above a question can carry an image, an audio clip or a video, so the photo goes on the TV at a size the back of the room can see. Name That Tune questions do the same job with audio. Nothing is printed, and you can put a picture round together the afternoon of the quiz instead of the day before.
The answer sheet becomes the phone. Each player scans the QR code on the display and answers in the browser, with no app to install. Scoring happens as the answers arrive, so the standings are on screen the second the timer stops. In a Buzzer Race round the host console locks the first buzz it receives, so nobody has to decide who shouted first. Be clear about the trade: Quizado does not print or supply answer sheets, and it has no offline mode. If your regulars are attached to paper, this is the change they will notice.
America's Pub Quiz does not publish venue pricing, so check with them for current pricing if you want to compare like for like. What is clear from their site is who pays: the show is free for guests, and they ask players to support the venue by ordering food and drink. The venue is the customer.
Running it yourself moves that cost from an invoice to the schedule. Expect about twenty minutes to build a two-hour night from question packs, ten minutes on the night for the display and a QR test, and then the two hours of the quiz itself. Nothing is left over afterwards. Three hours a week from a person already on shift, and less once your question library is full.
The part that is not free is the promotion. A hosted company arrives with a following and a listing that sends players to you. In-house, that job is yours: the sandwich board, the social post on Monday, the sign on the door. The hosts who get the best out of running it themselves treat the marketing as seriously as the questions.
A hosted show is worth the money in plenty of rooms.
Four reasons operators give for taking the pub quiz in-house.
Two halves, three short rounds each, a picture round somewhere in the middle and a break for food. Familiar structure lets your host concentrate on the room instead of the running order.
Run it on the free plan with staff and a handful of regulars. Check the TV is readable from the far corner, check the QR code scans from a table, and time the whole thing.
Pick one weekday, keep the start time steady for at least eight weeks, and open a league so the standings carry over. Then promote it like you would a live band.
America's Pub Quiz hires entertainers to host their shows, and their application asks whether you own a laptop. That tells you most of what the job needs: a voice, a laptop and the nerve to stand in front of a full bar. If that is your work, the tools on this page are aimed at you as much as at any venue.
A Quizado account belongs to the host, not to a bar, so it travels with you. Take it to the private bookings a company does not sell: office parties, family reunions, wedding weekends, fundraisers. Build the game once and keep it in your library for the next booking. Hospitality Group holds up to three venues, each with its own teams and season table, which is how a freelance quizmaster with a Tuesday and a Thursday gig needs it to behave.
Keep the shows that pay you well and use this for the rest. The free plan is enough to run a small private game and see how the console feels in your hand before you spend anything.
They send a trained entertainer, they run a free league across their venues, and their FAQ describes cash tournaments three times a year with over $15,000 in cash at each one (americaspubquiz.com, checked August 2026). That is a draw no piece of software can match, and it costs your staff nothing. Quizado has no hosts, no league across other bars and no prize fund. It is a console, a question library and a scoreboard for a night that somebody in your building is going to run.
New to running a night in-house? Start with the bar trivia software overview, then look at the trivia host app if you would rather run everything from a phone or laptop behind the bar.
Start free with the built-in packs, put the QR code on the TV and see how the room reacts. Writing your own question sets starts on Trivia Pro.
Shopping around? Here is how Quizado lines up against the rest of the market.
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