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George Brown has just asked members of the bar crowd at Flips Patio Grill in north Fort Worth to name eight of the 11 elements of the periodic table that begin with the letter C.
Fortunately, Marilyn, my teammate in this trivia quiz -- and my life teammate as well -- has recently read a book about the periodic table. She quickly comes up with eight: cadmium, calcium, Californium, cesium, chlorine, cobalt, carbon and copper. If I'd been playing solo, I'd have been able to come up with ... oh, those last two. I was, however, pretty good at naming seminal punk-rock songs in another round.
The elements question is just one round of the inaugural Geeks Who Drink pub quiz at Flips. Pub quizzes -- or more simply, trivia contests -- aren't new in Fort Worth, but the Denver-based nationwide Geeks Who Drink is. "It started out just about five years ago," explains Matt Angell, Geeks Who Drink's operations manager, whom I called at the group's headquarters. "John Dicker, the co-founder of the company, noticed that there was a distinct lack of good pub-quizzing going on in the Denver metro area. There was a lot of bar trivia, what he proudly called 'hackneyed Trivial Pursuit,' where it's mundane stuff. Stuff you can play in your living room.... It [wasn't] really something you'd go out to do. So he came up with the [Geeks Who Drink] concept, pitched it to one bar, and it took off from there."
It took off to the extent that now there are Geeks Who Drink events in 20 cities in 11 states. The group came to Fort Worth in the summer, where it held a few events at the Aardvark on Berry Street. But Geeks Who Drink starts its quizzes at 8 p.m., and the Aardvark crowd didn't really get rolling till around 11. So this month, the group began running Wednesday-night quizzes at Flips.
Brown -- who did the quizzes at the Aardvark, but won't be the permanent host at Flips -- worked the Flips bar crowd beforehand to get players for the first Flips quiz. He managed to get 11 teams, although not all of them played all eight rounds. Still, he said, that's more teams than he ever had in one night at the much smaller Aardvark.
"It's free to play," Brown says. "All you have to do is show up and have a few drinks and play trivia. We try to have a format of trivia where anything is possible. Where we might throw a curveball, and it's not a question-and-answer kind of thing. It keeps players on their toes and makes things a lot more interactive."
(Speaking of anything-is-possible curveballs, one of the categories on the first Flips night is an audio round in which players hear clips of Beavis and Butt-head mocking music videos and then are challenged to name the artist or song being made fun of.)
Nathan Hrabal, who lives near Flips, had come in to finish up some work and wound up playing along with a friend, Matt Hynds.
"It's been fun," Hrabal said. "Round 2 was a little bit obnoxious with the punk-music trivia, but everything else has been pretty good. At some places I go to, I'll check out the little [electronic] hand-held machine that you can do trivia on. [But] I'd rather have the MC. He can add some excitement and personality to it, instead of just looking at a screen."
Rounds of randomness
Geeks Who Drink may be new to Tarrant County, but pub quizzes aren't, although sometimes the phrase "pub quiz" results in quizzical looks from people who have been playing bar trivia for several years. The Flying Saucer in downtown Fort Worth, Mellow Mushroom in Fort Worth and Arlington, and Baker Street Pub and Ginger Man in west Fort Worth all have trivia nights.
The formats vary slightly, but the rules are essentially the same. These aren't the "Buzztime" electronic trivia games that continue to be popular in bars, but quizzes in which a host or quiz-master asks several rounds of questions to groups of teams, usually numbering from one to six players. No computer help is allowed, so you can't use your smartphone to Google an answer. Shouting out answers is discouraged, although it's sometimes inevitable when lubricated players get a little rowdy.
"If somebody's being loud because they're just talking loudly in a bar, I can understand that," says Matt Youngblood, the MC for the Flying Saucer's Tuesday-night trivia. "I'm going to let that slide more so than somebody's who's trying to be obnoxious."
Funny -- and usually off-color -- team names are recommended. Perhaps because it was the first night, Flips team names were a little tame, although Down With Amsterdam does have a ring to it. The same night, teams in another city included We Want to Poke the Queen and one that we can't print that sounded like a blunt message from Conan O'Brien to Jay Leno. You know, the kind of message you might yell at someone who cut you off in traffic.
Sometimes the teams come together organically, forming from people who came to a bar without any advance knowledge that a trivia night is going on -- but then they play and they get hooked.
"I started coming to the Saucer first," says Steve Jones of Haltom City, who began playing with his wife, although she doesn't play as often now. "We just started playing because we were here, and it's gotten to the point where we stopped that and kind of joined a team. It's fun to win, but it's more of a bonding experience."
Jones, who plays on a team named Man Bear Pig (a reference to a South Park bit), says he doesn't take the quizzes very seriously, but he does like the challenge of testing himself.
"It's no self-worth test, but it's 'How much trivial [stuff] do I know?'" he says. "You get a huge amount of presidential questions -- what president did this, what president did that. There'll be questions like, 'How many Academy Awards did Wizard of Oz win?' Now, if you don't know The Wizard of Oz, you have no clue. You can take a stab and guess, but those ones I back out of."
The Flying Saucer has a busy trivia-night scene. On a rainy November night that made things relatively slow, it had teams playing in an upstairs bar, in the downstairs bar and on the patio. Youngblood held court on the patio, with his questions broadcast via screens and a P.A. system into the other rooms.
"I try to ask as random stuff as I possibly can," Youngblood says. "We used to have themed rounds. Those rounds are fun, but some people would be really into them, and some people wouldn't. It's just a much more competitive game if you ask different questions. I try to ask a sports question, a science question, a history question, a literature question. I try to keep them as varied as possible per round, because it kind of provides the best spread."
Chris Dominy, who was playing on the patio with a team called L7, says his team was developed to respond to that randomness.
"It actually started out with me and one of my co-workers," Dominy says. "We'd get out here, and we'd argue a lot, so we wanted another person. And then we looked for someone who knew something about literature, or someone who knew something about sports. So we built up our team over the years with that in mind."
Looking for questions
The quiz-masters come up with their questions in different ways. Brown says that Geeks Who Drinks questions are the same nationwide, but Youngblood says he comes up with his own questions, although he says that in the past he has sometimes just read from Trivial Pursuit cards. Wilson Armstrong, who hosts the quizzes at the Mellow Mushroom on Bluebonnet Circle in Fort Worth, says that he gets his questions from Mellow Mushroom's corporate office. But he does do some editing.
"There's about three or four times as many questions as I need to run the game," says Armstrong, a former Mushroom employee who is the principal stage hand for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. "So we get here about a half-hour before the show, pick which ones we like, structure the game based on 'start easy, get harder' kind of stuff.... We know how people play, we know what people's strengths are."
But there's more to being a quiz-master than just asking questions -- they have to keep the game going at a good pace, and add a little personality to it. Armstrong, who like most hosts played the trivia games before becoming a quiz-master, says he doesn't claim to be a trivia-head, but he does like doing his "trivia-announcer voice." Brown works to start quizzes in different bars, including Dallas' Barley House, which was Geeks Who Drink's first Dallas-Fort Worth stop. Social networking via Twitter and Facebook helps spread the word about the quizzes, but mostly, it's word of mouth that gets trivia nights going.
"I would say a lot of dedication from the people involved," says Angell, the Geeks Who Drink operations manager. "I know it's kinda cliché to say we can't do this without our hosts, but really, we can't. A lot of our hosts are kind of ambassadors for Geeks Who Drink, including George Brown. We've really branched out into other cities simply because we have a host that moves, or we have players who are fiercely faithful. They'll contact us and say, 'Look, I just moved to Salt Lake City, they don't have Geeks Who Drink here. What can I do to get you here?' They plant a seed."
Robert Philpot, 817-390-7872