Capitals are the single most reliable round in the pub quiz. Every setter knows them, they need no explanation, they have exactly one right answer, and there are just under two hundred of them — which makes this the rare quiz topic that can genuinely be finished. Most people know perhaps sixty. The gap between sixty and a hundred and ninety-five is a fortnight of deliberate practice, and it is the highest return available anywhere in quiz preparation.
Where the marks actually are
Not in Paris and Tokyo. A capitals question that separates teams is drawn from three places: the former Soviet republics (Bishkek, Dushanbe, Astana), West and Central Africa (Ouagadougou, Yaoundé, Bangui), and the Pacific and Caribbean microstates (Funafuti, Palikir, Basseterre). Learn those three groups and you will out-answer people who know a great deal more about the world than you do.
Then there are the ones designed to catch you out. Several countries have more than one capital — South Africa has three, and a question asking for "the capital" of it is either badly written or specifically after Pretoria. Bolivia's seat of government is La Paz and its constitutional capital is Sucre. Several have moved within living memory: Nigeria to Abuja, Tanzania to Dodoma, Myanmar to Naypyidaw, Kazakhstan to a city that has now been renamed twice. And a handful of famous cities are not capitals at all — Sydney, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Zurich, Toronto, Casablanca — which is a question setter's favourite shape, because the wrong answer arrives instantly and confidently.
Why a map beats a list
Capitals learned as a list are recalled as a list, which fails the moment the question comes at them from the other direction ("Bishkek is the capital of where?"). Learned on a map they acquire neighbours, and a neighbour is a retrieval cue. QuizMaxx teaches them both ways — as cards and on an interactive atlas that shares one schedule with them — for that reason. On the geography of it, see Istanbul across two continents, enclaves and exclaves, and the world's strangest borders.