Bar trivia nights go virtual, chaotic zeal remains intact
You’ll remember this feeling: You walk into a crowded party and experience slight panic as you scan the sea of unfamiliar faces for your friends, to no avail. Making your way into the room with forced nonchalance, hoping no one notices how alone you are, you fumble for your phone ready to text: “Just got here where are you??”
On a recent evening, I experienced this relic of Before Times social awkwardness — but on
Zoom.
Five colleagues and I were attending a virtual trivia night with Geeks Who Drink, a network of pub quizzes that typically pop up in neighborhood bars. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, all the games have been held online.
When I logged on, I was faced with an immediate whirlwind of activity on my screen. The quizmaster, Houston resident Stefanie Blackmon, greeted and pep-talked attendees. The chat buzzed with messages. Dozens of Zoom squares paraded in front of me, but as I searched for my teammates with increasing desperation, I realized I was having one of those moments: I was alone at the party.
As it turns out, my friends had already been placed in a breakout room. After asking the host timidly in the chat if I could please be reunited with them, I arrived in the Zoom room and sighed with relief. The feeling didn’t last long.
Trivia nights are a popular pastime in Houston.
They’re a great way to shake up the usual happy hour and an opportunity to show off extensive knowledge of incredibly niche (read: useless) topics. Pre-pandemic, trivia helped bars and restaurants attract customers on slow nights. Now, it has become yet another event that had to pivot to a new, online format during quarantine. Virtual happenings have been hit or miss — at times, a comfort to feel less alone in lockdown, at others, a magnifier of clumsy human behavior in social situations.
While I tried to figure out what was going on and why my team was reciting African countries when I thought we were meant to guess song titles, they informed me that I would be in charge of submitting the answers, which was done via Google Forms. Of all the mistakes made that night, this was probably the worst one.
I consider myself a pretty technologically savvy person and a fast learner, but virtual trivia made me feel like a 98-year-old grandma competing in a Russian spelling bee — blindfolded. For some reason, juggling between Zoom, Slack messages and Google Forms while following the game proved almost impossible. I messed up at least twice while submitting my team’s answers, at one point prompting the quiz’s producer, Spence from Boston, to publicly admonish the person who had just messed up his perfect system. (It was me.)
I used to really enjoy IRL trivia; it was a regular activity during my college days. In Houston, many venues hosted nights, either through Geeks Who Drink or by creating their own.
Michael Sambrooks, owner of the Pit Room in Montrose, says Wednesdays were the busiest weekday at the barbecue joint because of the crowds that came in for Geeks Who Drink quizzes. Every week, about 20 to 30 people showed up, and the Pit Room team offered trivia-night specials. Sambrooks says they are not ready to bring the events back yet, but he hopes to soon enough.
Pre-coronavirus, Great Heights
Brewing in Garden Oaks hosted a weekly “Pints & Pies Trivia.” This brought in 12 to 14 teams every Wednesday, including many regular players. The top three teams won brewery gift cards and pies from Flying Saucer.
“We intend to bring it back at some point,” says Great Heights co-founder Patrick Christian. “But with our capacity currently limited to just six tables inside, it remains on hiatus for now.”
For Eureka Heights in Shady Acres, trivia has been a big part of the brewery since it opened in 2016. The team held a regular quiz every Wednesday night and a themed one the first Thursday of each month. The former typically attracted about 30 to 40 people, and the latter sometimes had a few hundred people attend.
While in-person trivia has not resumed yet, Eureka Heights did try out an online version via Facebook Live, which was initially successful, then petered out.
“The virtual trivia was great early on, but it has been a little more hit and miss lately,” says co-founder Casey Motes. “It’s still one of our most fun ways to get to chat with and virtually hang out with some people who continue to support us.”
Despite the confusing chaos of
virtual trivia with Geeks Who Drink, there were still some familiar aspects to it — like the regulars. Reporter Julie Garcia, who used to attend the events pre-pandemic, spotted the “Quizzin’ with Myself” team from Little Woodrow’s in Midtown. (They ended up in secondto-last place.)
Then, there’s always the person who is misleadingly confident. “If I’m wrong, you don’t have to listen to me ever again,”
said my colleague Julie Takahashi, doubling down on a firstround answer. (Reader, she was wrong.)
And of course, let’s not forget the teammate who randomly knows the names of subway stops in foreign cities. MVP status for the night went to designer Ken Ellis, who calmly but firmly explained that Alexanderplatz was most definitely in Berlin, not Moscow.
Overall, the folks at Geeks
Who Drink put on a good production, considering the circumstances. Before the game, we had wondered how they keep people from cheating. The website’s FAQ page says: “We have a very, very complex system that detects cheaters with 99.999% accuracy.” Somehow I knew the strategy would be trying to appeal to the human in us.
“There is a prize, but it’s really not worth cheating over,” said Blackmon at the beginning of the game. “We know Google is at your fingertips, and you totally could cheat, but why would you, because that would make you a (expletive).”
While the night’s winner played a perfect game, our Chronicle team, “Subscribe to Our Issues,” came in 16th out of 33.
For an hour and a half, I was completely engrossed in my screen, bantering with my colleagues, letting out yelps of satisfaction or disappointment, allowing myself to be carried away by the game. For a brief while, I felt like I was there there. Then I logged out — overstimulated from the action and slightly buzzed from my beer — and silence fell upon me suddenly. Oh yeah, I was still alone.