How to run a pub quiz when the Wi-Fi is bad (or there isn't any)

Bad Wi-Fi is the most common way a well-prepared quiz goes wrong. The questions are good, the room is full, and then the slides freeze on question three because forty people just connected to the same router to look up the answer to question two.

This guide covers how to run a pub quiz when the venue's internet is patchy or missing altogether. Most of it applies whatever you use to show your questions: PowerPoint, a quiz app, or a clipboard and a loud voice. At the end there's a section on Offline mode in quizquiz.co, which we built for exactly this situation.

Find out what you're dealing with before the night

The worst time to discover the Wi-Fi is bad is ten minutes before you start. If you can, visit the venue at the same time of day as the quiz and check a few things.

• Is there Wi-Fi at all, and do you have the password? Some pubs have a guest network that cuts you off after 30 minutes, or a login page that won't open on a laptop.
• How does it cope under load? An empty pub on a Tuesday afternoon tells you very little. A room full of phones on quiz night is a different network. If you can, ask the staff how it behaves when the place is busy. They'll know.
• What's the mobile signal like? Check it on your own phone in the spot where you'll actually stand. Old pubs with thick stone walls and cellar bars are notorious dead zones.
• Where are the plugs? A long extension lead is worth more than any amount of Wi-Fi advice.

If the honest answer to all this is "it's a village hall and the router has been unplugged since spring", that's fine. You just plan for no internet from the start, which is much easier than hoping for the best.

Have a backup connection in your pocket

For most venues, the realistic backup is your phone. Both iPhone and Android phones can share their mobile data with your laptop as a personal hotspot (this is called tethering). Set it up at home once so you know where the setting is and what the password is. Fiddling with menus in front of a waiting room is not fun.

A few things to bear in mind:

• Keep the hotspot private. Don't share the password with teams. One laptop on a phone connection is fine; fifteen phones on it is not.
• Plug the phone in. Hotspots drain batteries fast, and your phone is probably also your timer and torch.
• Check your data allowance. Slides with pictures barely touch it. Streaming video clips for two hours can eat a surprising amount.
• It only helps if there's signal. In a basement bar with one flickering bar of 4G, a hotspot won't save you. That's where the rest of this guide comes in.

Get everything onto the laptop before you leave home

The general rule: anything that comes from the internet on the night is a risk. Anything already on your laptop isn't.

Music and video

Music rounds are the first casualty of bad Wi-Fi. A streaming clip that buffers for twenty seconds kills the round, and a track that stops halfway gets a groan from the whole room.

The safest option is plain audio files saved on the laptop. If you use Spotify, Premium lets you download playlists to listen offline, but check the download actually finished before you leave, and remember you'll be skipping to the right part of each song by hand. We compared the options properly in our guide to the best tool for quiz music rounds, and the short version is that downloaded files win whenever the connection can't be trusted.

Video clips and YouTube links are the hardest to rescue. If a round depends on them and the venue has no internet, swap it for something else rather than gambling.

Pictures and slides

If you build your slides in PowerPoint or Keynote, make sure the images are embedded in the file rather than linked from the web. Open the file once with Wi-Fi switched off to check nothing shows as a blank box. If you use a browser-based tool, find out what it does when the connection drops. Some keep going with what they've loaded, some freeze.

The questions themselves

Print them. A paper copy of every question and answer, in order, in a folder. If everything else fails (laptop, projector, power), you can still read the quiz out loud and the night goes on. Our guide on how to host a quiz calls this the cheapest insurance in hosting, and it's true.

Check the hardware, not just the internet

Plenty of "Wi-Fi problems" turn out to be something else entirely.

Stop the laptop going to sleep. Change the power settings so the screen doesn't dim or lock after a few minutes. A laptop that sleeps during a long marking break can drop its connection and wake up asking for a password, with the lock screen showing on the projector.

Bring your own cable and adapter. Most venue screens take HDMI, but many laptops don't have an HDMI port anymore. Bring the right adapter, plus a spare cable long enough to reach from where you'll stand. Don't rely on the pub's cable that's been behind the TV since 2014.

Test the screen and the sound together. Plug in, put a slide up, play a few seconds of audio through the speakers. Do it before people arrive, not during round one.

Bring a charger. And use it. A two-hour quiz with the screen at full brightness will flatten some laptops.

Answering and scoring without phones

If the internet is unreliable, don't build the night around teams answering on their phones. Even in a venue with decent Wi-Fi, a full room can overwhelm it, and the teams who can't connect will feel cheated.

Pen and paper still works brilliantly. Printed answer sheets with a numbered line for each question make marking much faster than scraps of paper, and they stop arguments about whether the scrawl on the back of a beer mat says "Lima" or "Llama".

For scoring, a printed sheet or a whiteboard with team names and round totals does the job. Read out the standings at the halfway point and before the final round. It builds tension, and nobody minds that it isn't animated. Our list of quiz hosting mistakes has more on keeping the marking quick, which matters even more when you're doing it all by hand.

How Offline mode works in quizquiz.co

If you use the quizquiz.co quiz maker, Offline mode lets you run the slides without depending on the venue's Wi-Fi. It's a Pro feature (see pricing for what's included).

Starting it

When you go to run a quiz, the host's Run view shows a prompt that asks "Worried about the venue Wi-Fi?" with a Run offline button. Clicking it opens a short dialog explaining what changes before you commit.

When you start, quizquiz.co opens the presentation window and saves every picture in the quiz into it while you still have internet: question images, picture rounds and your logo. If you've uploaded your own audio or video files to music and video questions (also Pro), those are saved too. The Run view shows the progress and then tells you when it's ready.

From that point the Wi-Fi can drop and the slides keep working. That includes the controls on your laptop, because the editor tab drives the presentation window directly in the browser. Nothing has to travel over the internet to move to the next slide.

The two rules

Open it while you're online. Do it at home before you leave, or at the venue before doors open while the connection is still working. Offline mode can only save what it can download first.

Keep the presentation window open. Don't close or refresh it until you're back online. That window is where everything was saved, so closing it throws that away.

What changes on the night

Offline mode is built around a pen-and-paper quiz, so a few features step aside:

• Teams answer on paper. There's no join QR code, and team phones and the phone remote don't work offline. You can print answer sheets from the editor's print option, and they're free.
• Scores live on paper too. The on-screen standings slides aren't shown in Offline mode, so keep a scoresheet and read the totals out yourself.
• YouTube clips won't play. Music and video clips linked from YouTube stream, so they need internet. The question slide still appears, but the clip won't. The fix is to switch those questions from a YouTube link to an uploaded file: in the question editor, pick Upload a file, choose an MP3 or MP4 (up to 50 MB), and trim it the same way you would a YouTube clip. Uploaded files are saved with everything else and play offline.

That last point is worth planning around rather than discovering on the night. A picture round works perfectly offline, and so does a music round built from uploaded files; one built from YouTube links doesn't.

A quick checklist for no-Wi-Fi quiz nights

• Visit the venue or ask the staff how the Wi-Fi copes on a busy night
• Set up your phone's hotspot at home and keep the password private
• Download music as files, not streams, and check they play with Wi-Fi off
• Embed images in your slides, or load them before you leave home
• Print the questions and answers as a paper backup
• Print answer sheets and a scoresheet
• Turn off sleep and screen lock on the laptop
• Pack an HDMI cable, the right adapter, a charger and an extension lead
• If you use quizquiz.co Offline mode, start it while you're online and leave the presentation window open

None of this is complicated. The hosts who never seem to have tech problems aren't luckier than everyone else; they just stopped trusting the pub router a long time ago.