Polo Trivia
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58 free Polo trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This polo trivia quiz covers the sport of kings from every angle: the four-player teams and seven-minute chukkas, the ten-acre field, the line of the ball, ride-offs and hooks, the handicap scale from minus 2 to 10, and the ponies, mallets and balls that make the game. It also traces the history — Persian chovgan and Sasanian princes, Byzantine emperors, Tang dynasty women, the Mamluk sultan who died in the saddle, Manipur's sagol kangjei and the tea planters who carried it to Britain, the first American match of 1876, Argentina's Olympic golds and Triple Crown, Adolfo Cambiaso's cloned horses, the Westchester Cup and Guards Polo Club, plus elephant, cycle and Segway polo. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation. Enjoy this one? Try our Horse Racing and Olympics quizzes next.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In polo, what do the numbers one to four given to players stand for?
Positions
Positions: the star usually plays at 3, not 1, because Number Three is the tactical leader who feeds the forwards, while Number One leads the attack and Number Four guards the goal.
Q 02What is the name for a period of play in polo?
A chukka
A chukka: riders swap tired ponies for fresh ones between chukkas, and sometimes during them, so each player brings a whole string of horses to a match.
Q 03Roughly how many American football fields would fit on one full-size polo field?
Nine
Nine: at 300 by 160 yards, about ten acres, it is often called the largest field in organised sport, with room for ponies to reach speeds of up to 35 miles an hour.
Q 04What do polo's goal posts do if a horse crashes into them?
Give way
Give way: the posts, set eight yards apart, are kept light enough to break or topple when a pony runs into one, and a goal counts however high the ball flies between them.
Q 05Which ancient equestrian game, played in Persia, is the ancestor of polo?
Chovgan
Chovgan began as battle training for Persian cavalry before it became the nobility's sport; UNESCO listed Iran's chogan, played to music and storytelling, in 2017.
Q 06'Polo' is Balti for 'ball', akin to pulu in which Himalayan land's language?
Tibet
Tibet: Balti is a Tibetic language of the Indus valley, and English borrowed its word for the ball in 1872, later lending it to water polo, which needs no horse at all.
Q 07Which designer started his fashion empire in 1967 by selling neckties under the name Polo?
Ralph Lauren
Ralph Lauren was working for a tie maker when he launched a line of his own under the Polo name, and the mesh shirt with its polo-player emblem only followed in 1972.
Q 08In The Great Gatsby, which character moves East with a string of polo ponies?
Tom Buchanan
Tom Buchanan: the narrator can hardly believe a man his own age is rich enough to do it, and at a party Gatsby keeps introducing Tom as 'the polo player' over his objections.
Q 09Shah Abbas I watched polo from a palace balcony above the vast square he built in which Iranian city?
Isfahan
Isfahan: Abbas made it his capital in 1598 and laid out Naqsh-e Jahan Square, with the high balcony of the Ali Qapu gate-palace as his grandstand for the polo below.
Q 10Which playing-card suit did Europeans create from the Mamluk polo-stick suit?
Clubs
Clubs: polo was an obscure sport to Europeans, so the card makers who copied the Mamluk pack redrew its polo sticks as batons or cudgels.
Q 11The former slave who ruled northern India and died after a polo accident in 1210 began which Delhi landmark?
Qutb Minar
Qutb Minar: Qutubuddin Aibak, once a slave in charge of the royal stables, began the tower but died of injuries from a polo game, so his son-in-law Iltutmish finished it.
Q 12Tomb figures show women playing polo around the 8th century in the capital of which Chinese dynasty?
Tang
Tang: polo was wildly popular in the capital, and Cui Shi, a general's wife buried in 878, took donkeys to her tomb, probably her mounts for a slower, safer form of the game.
Q 13Players from which Indian state taught polo to British tea planters in the 1850s, launching the modern game?
Manipur
Q 21Which New York Herald publisher, who sent Stanley to find Livingstone, staged what was billed as America's first polo match in 1876?
James Gordon Bennett Jr.
James Gordon Bennett Jr. brought the game home after seeing it played, staging it first indoors at a Manhattan riding academy before his new club took it outdoors to Jerome Park racetrack.
Q 22After American players swept England aside in 1909 with fast, long passing, English polo abandoned which rule?
Offside
Offside: the English rule made for a game of short passes, while Harry Payne Whitney's Americans, who played without it, hit long passes to riders galloping ahead of the ball.
Q 23In a polo handicap match, what does the lower-rated team receive before play begins?
Manipur: planters in neighbouring Assam learned the game from Manipuri riders, who called it sagol kangjei, and founded the first European polo club at Silchar in 1859.
Q 14Which Swiss resort staged the world's first snow polo tournament, on its frozen lake, in 1985?
St. Moritz
St. Moritz: the idea caught on, spreading to resorts such as Aspen and Cortina, and the original is played on the frozen lake each January.
Q 15The world's oldest surviving polo club was founded by British officers in 1862 in which Indian city?
Calcutta
Calcutta: two British officers founded the club in what was then the capital of British India, years before polo was first played in England, and its Ezra Cup dates from 1880.
Q 16British cavalry officers who staged England's first polo match called the game which sport 'on horseback'?
Hockey
Hockey: the 10th Hussars and 9th Lancers lined up eight riders a side with almost no rules, and the name polo caught on only later.
Q 17British polo's governing body is named after which London club, where the game's first English rules were written?
Hurlingham Club
Hurlingham Club: it wrote English polo's first rules in the 1870s, but its polo fields were compulsorily purchased for building after the Second World War, so the name outlived the game there.
Q 18Which British royal was an executive producer of Polo, a 2024 documentary series about the sport?
Prince Harry
Prince Harry, a keen player himself, made the Netflix series with Meghan through their company Archewell Productions, following professionals through the U.S. Open Polo Championship.
Q 19The Argentine polo team won their nation's first Olympic gold medal at which city's Games in 1924?
Paris
Paris: the title came down to one match between the two favourites, which Argentina won 6-5, and the team took gold again when polo returned to the Games twelve years later.
Q 20Polo made its fifth and final Olympic appearance at which city's Games in 1936?
Berlin
Berlin: Argentina beat Great Britain 11-0 in the final, and polo then stayed the last sport dropped from the Olympics for 72 years, until baseball and softball followed.
A head start in goals
A head start in goals: each player carries a rating, the four are added up, and the weaker side begins with goals already on the scoreboard to cover the gap.
Q 24How did Sue Sally Hale play in US polo tournaments for nearly two decades before women were admitted in 1972?
Disguised as a man
Disguised as a man: she taped her chest, tucked her hair under her helmet and wore a moustache from film make-up artists, entering as 'A. Jones' until the USPA gave in.
Q 25Which Disney character leads a polo team against Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy in a 1936 cartoon?
Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse: Walt Disney's own love of polo inspired Mickey's Polo Team, in which caricatured film stars take on Disney characters until the horses end up riding the players.
Q 26The Argentine Open, final leg of polo's Triple Crown, is played at the 'Cathedral of Polo' in which Buenos Aires neighbourhood?
Palermo
Palermo: the Campo Argentino de Polo, opened there in 1928, earned its nickname as the sport's most important stadium, and a team that also wins the two earlier Opens takes the Triple Crown.
Q 27Argentina's Open polo championship was founded by an association named after which river?
Plate
Plate: the River Plate Polo Association, formed in 1892 among the English-speaking settlers who had brought the game, created the tournament a year later, and Argentina's own polo association took it over in the 1920s.
Q 28Which Argentine 10-goaler co-founded La Dolfina and pioneered polo horse cloning?
Adolfo Cambiaso
Adolfo Cambiaso had skin cells frozen from his dying champion stallion Aiken Cura, which was later reborn as a clone, and his favourite mare Cuartetera has since been copied many times.
Q 29What do the two teams do after every goal in a polo match?
Switch ends
Switch ends: the teams change direction after each goal, so that neither side keeps the better of the wind or the state of the turf for long.
Q 30What imaginary path governs right of way in polo?
The line of the ball
The line of the ball is simply the path the ball is travelling along, and it works like lane markings on a road: riders following it have right of way, so cutting across in front of them is the commonest foul.