The Bar Exams

Unlike the narcotic for which it’s named, (*Cocaine = benzoylmethylecgonine, a tropane alkaloid harvested from coca leaves), the popular mobile app “Trivia Crack” loses its luster after about 48 hours.

What’s the story with all these coins, for instance? No one cares about the coins. No one cares about the “levels” or the “achievements” they’ve eclipsed or unlocked. No one, as far as I’ve observed, harbors any urgent desire to post their results to Facebook, despite the routine urgings of the app’s six cartoon icons; especially when the user-generated questions tend to plumb the depths with head-scratchers like: “What does PG stand for in the sport of basketball?”

It’s all wrong. Part of the enduring appeal of trivia, since the Trivial Pursuit board game first appeared –(*in 1979, *in Montreal, Quebec, *created by Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, a photojournalist and a sports editor, respectively, at Canadian newspapers)– is self-edification, the idea of quote unquote “feeling smart,” of tapping into your Sherlockian mind palace and summoning the name of an 80s movie director or a Turkish strait or a weird food product from your youth. This is a personal sensation that’s been corroborated by live trivia hosts across the region. We love the thrill of specialized knowledge, is the gist. And there just isn’t any when you glumly thumb the button between “Power Guard” and “Point Guy” and rack up some phony currency.

I can’t get no satisfaction from this stupid app, is what I’m trying to say. And in practical terms, I can’t get no time. The developers have programmed a ticking-clock component — in one-on-one match-ups with Facebook friends, users must play their turn within 48 hours — so the addiction element inherent in the crack branding is in large part prefabbed. Plus, if you’re anything like me, when you whip out the old iPhone and surrender to Trivia Crack’s siren call, most of the screentime is commandeered by Kate Upton and her breasts, which undulate in slo-mo through the World of War ads that interrupt play at every wrong answer. (*World of War’s budget for the Kate Upton ad campaign: $40 million).

After the first furious salvos, when the format is new and exciting and one’s introductory supply of coins hasn’t yet been exhausted, the whole experience gets old. Maintaining even three simultaneous games becomes a chore. Everything’s way too easy, or else way too hard. With the ads, the rigamarole, the rainbow graphics, the social media proddings, Trivia Crack may as well be FarmVille, (*Developed by Zynga, *in 2009).

But people continue to download it at unprecedented levels. At the end of January, Trivia Crack was far and away the most downloaded app in both the paid and free sections of Apple’s App store, averaging about 750,000 per day in the U.S. alone. (*To date, the most downloaded app in history is Angry Birds).

The fact that people are interested in trivia shouldn’t come as a surprise. NBC’s “Jeopardy,” which began as a daytime show in the ‘60s, has been continuously syndicated with host Alex Trebek for three decades since its nighttime debut (*Show #1 for Trebek: September 10, 1984). Trivia Crack could be interpreted as just another iteration of that addiction.

Or maybe folks are practicing.

In Northeast Ohio, after all, live bar trivia has also become one of the most popular and continuously growing pastimes for the pubbin’ crowds. And after a few weeks on the live circuit, it’s easy to see why.

MONDAY

Seats are scarce at the Happy Dog in Detroit-Shoreway. And if you’re a trivia regular, you know that this is to be expected. Tables are a hot commodity on game nights, and hosts generally encourage you to arrive 20-30 minutes before play. At the Happy Dog, in particular, with limited floor space and a loyal weekly contingent, you’re better off arriving even earlier.

[Note: Platform Beer Co. on Lorain and W. 41 tends to have a bit more availability, if you’re looking for a Monday night game on the West Side with a gentler learning curve (*Term “Learning Curve” originally coined by German memory psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, *in 1886).]

One thing to be mindful of upfront, though, here and elsewhere: Don’t strut in, armored in your graduate degree(s), touting GPAs and resumes, and expect to compete at a high-level. People take this very seriously. People are very good at trivia.

I asked my brother, an encyclopaedic movie watcher; my friend, a history and sports buff; and my fiance, a walking compendium of pop culture tidbits and Food Network politics, to join me this evening. I’m pretty solid on my Nobel laureates and geography stuff, (What up, Dardanelles?) and we’re all college graduates. We’re all employed too, which means we spend several hours each day browsing the internet. Was I wrong to feel pretty confident?

Short answer there is Yes.

The Happy Dog game is distinguished, according to devout players, for the obscurity and difficulty of its questions. Ryan Gohmann, founder and host at Cleveland Awesome Trivia, (which does not host the Happy Dog game but does have a fiendishly attended Movie/TV Trivia Night at Parma Tavern on Mondays) says that his goal is never to award the smartest team in the room — “I don’t care who wins,” he told me. “Every night, I hope for a 20-way tie for first place. Everyone should have a chance to pull off the big upset.”

At the Happy Dog, no such egalitarianism obtains.

Players whisper of a rogue genius, a solitary player who calls himself “The Champagne of Trivia” who wins with startling frequency. He hasn’t revealed himself this evening. Another team with a reputation around here is “Danny DeVito.” (*Famous for playing Louie De Palma on Taxi, *Married to Rhea Pearlman, *Middle name: Michael). They’re a couple who live a few blocks over in Detroit-Shoreway, and they clean up tonight, landing in first or second place in each of the evening’s six rounds. You would not confuse them for athletes.

Strictly speaking, there is no strategy to the Happy Dog’s brand of live trivia. It’s one point per question, and you either know this shit or you don’t. The purse, as one player described it, is naught but “pure glory” and kitschy door prizes or occasional shots for victors of individual rounds.

The opening round, which begins promptly at 8 p.m. (standard trivia start time) is a “picture round,” which tonight asks teams to identify 10 U.S. states by their shape. In the past, the picture round has presented images of British punk bands, flags of Asia, ferns, so tonight’s struck me off the bat as a comparative breeze. But it’s much harder than it sounds. The outlines on the page are not to scale, nor are they presented in the context of their neighbors. Florida and Texas and Ohio are not among them. To give you some idea, Indiana is the easiest. Pennsylvania and South Dakota are pictured next to each other and are virtually indistinguishable.

My team — “Molson XXX,” which sounds douchey but was intended as a non-sequitur — scores a middling 6 out of 10.(*Molson was founded in Montreal in 1786, making it North America’s oldest brewery, and merged with Coors Brewing in 2005). We confused Alabama for Mississippi, Oregon for Washington, and South Dakota for Nebraska. As I’m looking at the sheet now, I still can’t figure out what this fourth one we missed was. Something on the East Coast.

The balance of the evening doesn’t bear mentioning, other than to say that music trivia is not fun at all if you’re just kind of a casual listener. Also, we did manage to nab four out of 10 points on the the final round, which was, appropriately perhaps, beer-themed.

TUESDAY

Bar Trivia has remained, by design, pretty much a Monday through Thursday affair. It’s not even a disguised attempt to attract business on slow nights. That’s the whole point. But, as Ryan Gohmann pointed out, the idea of trivia can still be a tough sell for new venues.

“They can’t wrap their head around it at first,” Gohmann told me, of the scant remaining bars without designated trivia nights. “They can wrap their head around a band that brings in fans on a Friday. But Trivia on a Tuesday? They don’t see the long-term picture.”

That long-term picture, Gohmann and other hosts have argued, is loyalty. Once teams find a game (i.e. a location and/or host) they like, they’ll start coming every single week. Gohmann said that even during a brutal snowfall earlier this month, he had twenty teams at Parma Tavern’s Wednesday night game.

The trend to note is that bar trivia is becoming less and less an “occasional night out” type of deal. We’re talking, now, about leagues. Teams are no longer angling for the $25 gift certificate. They’re amassing points, eyeing their rankings, climbing the standings for seasonal tournaments and serious prize money ($2,500 being much more serious than $25).

“It’s an alternative to adult softball or basketball leagues for those people who don’t or can’t play anymore, or who never did,” Gohmann said. “Plus you get to go out and hang out with your friends. There’s a huge difference between telling your spouse, ‘I’m going out to the bar’ and telling them, ‘I’m going out to the bar for my normal trivia night.’”

For Last Call USA, a national live trivia company with a strong Ohio presence — also, no joke, some serious representation in Idaho (*Capital and largest city: Boise, *Admitted to Union: 1890, *Total area: 83,574 square miles (14th among 50 states), *Pop: 1,567,582 (39th among 50 states)) — Tuesday’s their biggest night in Northeast Ohio.

With new shows at Backstage Bar in West Park and Barmacy in Akron, Last Call now has seven games in the region on Tuesday. In Ohio City, Nano Brew has become a jam-packed weekly game, and features (if you’re in the mood to hustle) a higher-than-average percentage of non-regulars. West Side suburbanites might try Blue Turtle Tavern in North Olmsted if they enjoy getting their asses handed to them without mercy or pause. That’s the home turf, after all, of “Team FamDoc” a legacy squad started by two family physicians. Team FamDoc is famous in Last Call circles for being the only local team to win consecutive seasonal championships. Winning multiple crowns has been described as an almost unthinkable feat given the deliberate diversity of subject matter.

“You can’t really hustle,” Tim Schifle told me when I asked him directly about the idea (back when I thought assembling an All-Star team would be fairly straightforward). Schifle is Last Call’s Northeast Ohio regional coordinator and a fan-favorite host. He’s got a voice made for arena announcing.

“It’s not like we’ve got teams who go from bar to bar making a living,” he said. “But it’s true that the longer you play, the better you get.”

“So who do you recommend I bring as teammates?” I probed. “My smartest friends. My parents’ smartest friends?”

“People you trust,” Schifle said, more gravely than I expected. “People you’re close with. Our game measures not just knowledge, but confidence in knowledge. So you need to have people who are comfortable calling you out when you’re bullshitting.”

WEDNESDAY

Schifle was surprised, and said so, that I was who I’d said I was when I showed up to his Wednesday-night game at Tremont’s Flying Monkey. He said when I asked to “pick his brain” over the phone, he’d presumed I was a rival outfit, looking for insider intel.

(*The work of Father Francois Xavier d’Entrecolles in Jingdezhen, China to reveal to Europe the manufacturing methods of Chinese porcelain in 1712 is sometimes considered the first official case of industrial, or corporate, espionage).

Bar Trivia has taken off with such unimpeded fervor over the past three to five years, Schifle said, that he estimates there’s now close to 20 small companies hosting games in the region, all trying to get an edge over their competitors. Last Call USA knows it’s not the only game in town.

To separate itself, it hosts seasonal tournaments. They even host a national tournament, which this year will go down in Cincinnati in April (*”The cruellest month,” according to Line one of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” *Published in 1922). League tourneys are city wide, and feature the area’s top teams. Teams are ranked and invited based on their six highest scores, so to even be eligible for the tourneys and the big prizes, you’ve got to play six times.

“That keeps them coming back,” Schifle said.

As Schifle indicated, Last Call measures “confidence in knowledge” via a wagering system (similar to Sporcle’s, if you’ve played at any of the region’s BW3s). (*First BW3 location: Columbus, *Current national headquarters: Minneapolis). In each of the game’s six rounds (three questions per round), a team must assign a point value for its answers: one, three or six in the first half; two, five or seven in the second. The strategy isn’t complicated or anything, but it can result in some devastating losses if you presume knowledge in an upcoming category and bet low until then.

The team to beat at Flying Monkey is “Mooseknuckle Sandwich.” They’re a team of six local attorneys, four of whom are here this evening, and Schifle said they’ve won a league tournament recently as well.

“It was an insane comeback,” he said, favoring the language of competitive sports. “They were in eleventh place at halftime [out of a total 21 teams] and then got every question right in the second half.”

What’s their secret, I wanted to know.

“I’m pretty sure they just got really, really drunk.”

The attorneys of Mooseknuckle Sandwich, via team captain Jeremy Adell, confirmed those tactics at halftime, admitting that they seldom remember their wagers or strategies and tend to just focus on the drinking. Allow the uninhibited gut to override the intellect, seems to be the philosophy at hand.

Thus advised, I returned to my table where Scene colleague Eric Sandy and his girlfriend were sussing out the likelihood of a possible comeback for our newly anointed team, Ludmilla & The Mandroid (#1481 in Last Call’s official records).

Team names this evening range from genitalian puns (“Mooseknuckle Sandwich,” obviously, “Tom Brady’s Deflated Balls”) to alcohol- and trivia-related sentiments (“Just Ask the Dog,” “My Drunk Irish Friend.”)

These aren’t bad, as names go, but if you start attending enough of these games, you’ll stumble upon some gems. Most fall within similar categories. There’s the rhyming and word play: “Wombat Combat,” “Beer and Loathing;” the trivia puns: “Wisdomless Teeth;” the anatomical non-sequiturs: “Third Back Nipple;” the team names which an express an idea: “The Service Here Sucks,” “We Thought this was Speed Dating”; the Team [Blank] convention: “Team Brain,” “Team Trivia,” “Team Fear Itself.”

On Mondays at Platform, there is nothing to fear but “Skis & Krauts” and “Moon Rock Diesel, Ph.D,” a team that host Kevin Oxendine said was formerly known as “Bag of Dicks.” Or, and I’m loathe to admit that I never clarified, perhaps literally “The Team Formerly Known as Bag of Dicks.”

The math was tight for our Ludmilla trio at Flying Monkey, and even with the one-point, shot-in-the-dark bonus questions at the end of every round — “Into how many languages has Trivial Pursuit been translated,” for example. Answer: *17 — and a final question worth as many as 15 points, we didn’t land in the top three.

Nor, in shocking news, did Mooseknuckle Sandwich.

Like Gohmann’s approach, the Last Call game structure allows for late-game heroics. The attorneys of Mooseknuckle, leading for most of the evening, fell to third place on the final question, which asked teams to identify the object associated with four -phile terms. “Ailurophile” is a lover of cats, not gold, for the record. “Forget Me Nows” soared to first place by not wagering a single point.

“We played it safe,” a team spokesman said when asked to comment on the victory. “That’s how we role.”

(Note: When we returned the following Wednesday, and two Wednesdays after that, Mooseknuckle Sandwich won by significant margins).

THURSDAY

“It’s absolutely a show,” said Ryan Gohmann, when asked whether or not he felt like he’s “performing” as a host. “Depending on the crowd, I’ll tell jokes, I’ll tease teams. The one big downfall of some trivia nights is when a host doesn’t completely buy in.”

With the local companies, it’s not uncommon for hosts to befriend their regulars. Gohmann said he’s done private birthday parties for trivia players with whom he’s become close. Tim Schifle said he plays in volleyball leagues with people he’s met through hosting.

“They’re here to socialize,” Gohmann said. “You can’t forget. So I can’t be a professor.”

Indeed, the personality of the host is key. When Schifle handed the mic off to Joanna, “making her Last Call debut” Thursday Night at Lakewood’s Richland Cafe — Ludmilla & the Mandroid couldn’t say no to $2 whiskey — the mood shifted.

It’s not that she was a bad host. Quite the contrary. She was great. She read the questions with gusto and clarity. She certainly seems to have a bright trivia-hosting future ahead of her. But she’s no Tim. Which is to say, she’s not these people’s friend yet. She can’t, off-the-cuff, substitute a question when one is very obviously beyond the pale; she can’t yet sense when certain questions need to be repeated, when teams might need 30 extra seconds to confer, when certain individuals need gentle reminders to put their cell phones back in their purses or pockets.

The cell phone thing is one of basically two rules which are imposed at trivia nights across the board, the other being “don’t shout out answers,” and it’s the one that most routinely trips people up (seeing as we’re all alive in the 21st century and all).

Hosts argue, though, that people cheat with much less frequency than some might expect. And they know all the tricks by now: “Going to the bathroom” and returning with a sudden epiphany, keeping the phone wedged in your crotch, etc. Gohmann estimated that he “catches people” only about once every 10 games, and it’s almost always from non-regulars who get frustrated when they fall behind.

“I just remind everyone that we’re not playing for Super Bowl endorsements here.” Gohmann said. “This is free bar trivia.”

But with the increase in the number of regulars, it’s becoming less of a problem. People self-police. Teams dreaming of the postseason can’t risk disqualification, not when every night could be the night when the categories and the questions seem almost mystically aligned with one’s personal knowledge-base.

Ludmilla & The Mandroid attended the requisite six Last Call trivia nights — four at Flying Monkey, one at Platform and one at Richland Tavern. I attended several others for the sort of deep anthropological research necessary for this story like: The Happy Dog, BW3’s Fairview Park location, Parma Tavern.

My bar tabs were extreme. My penmanship was always legible. And I didn’t win once. Not one single time. (*The record for the longest losing streak in NBA history is held by the Cavs and the Philadelphia 76ers: 26 games.)

This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2015.