Pub Quiz around the World: Belgium

We’ll take you on a bar trivia world tour to find out how they do quizzo outside of New Jersey.

First stop: Belgium!

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s largest pub quiz happened in Belgium in 2010. Nearly 2,300 participants gathered at the Flanders Expo Halls in Ghent for the “Quiz for Life.” If that sounds surprising, it shouldn’t be – the country actually has its own brand of bar trivia, known as Quizzing in Belgium, or Belgian-style quizzing. 

Between 20 and 50 teams of four to six people each participate in a typical Belgian-style quiz. Some games can run up to a total of 180 questions – that’s almost three time's the size of a Quizzoholics quiz. What’s known as a “plain” round includes questions that cover a number of topics in a single round – similar to what we call a general knowledge round. They also do themed rounds and rounds where each answer is linked to another.

Belgian quizzes utilize “ABC” rounds, where 26 questions are asked and each response starts with a different letter of the alphabet. They also have acrostic rounds, where the first or last letters of each correct answer form an acrostic (you might remember writing one of these as a poem about your mom in elementary school). The trivia nights generally end with “super” rounds, which are harder than the rest of the quiz and offer up questions with different point values.

Rounds can be long and intense, so it’s no wonder that Belgian-style quizzing has developed a reputation for being among the toughest in the world. Belgians routinely occupy one or more top-five slot at the World Quizzing Championships, held annually in Europe since 2003.