Trivia Nights By Fritz Hahn washingtonpost.com Staff Writer Thursday, January 24, 2002

(Design by Eric Telchin / washingtonpost.com)

Trivial pursuits are a national obsession. Between 13 and 16 million viewers tune in to "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" each week, and close to 7 million watch "Jeopardy," according to the Nielsen ratings. So far, more than 18 million users have tried ABC's "enhanced TV" option, which lets viewers play along with "Millionaire" on their computer. But sitting at home shouting answers at your television is boring; it doesn't prove that you're smarter than anyone else.

In England, most neighborhoods have a pub that runs a quiz night, or weekly trivia contest. Washington has been bereft of a quiz night for a while -- the Hard Rock Cafe's music trivia night folded in April 2001. So when three new nights debuted, I decided to check them out, taking a few friends along for the ride -- including two who competed (but didn't win) on Jeopardy.

Thankfully, none of the quizzes is the standard first-person-with-a-hand-in-the-air or whoever-can-get-the-quizmaster's-attention format, so popular at radio station giveaways and in elementary school classes. Instead, they all resemble (to varying degrees) a high school pop quiz. At Fado, the Penn Ave. Pourhouse and Stetson's, the quizmaster reads questions into a microphone, repeating each one a few times so everyone can hear him. Players, grouped into teams of two to eight members, write answers as legibly as possible into the appropriate blanks on an answer sheet. At the end of the round, each team hands one set of answers to the host, where answers are checked and scores are tallied. Jimmy's Old Town Tavern works its preliminary round in a similar fashion, although the JOTTeopardy game is played like "Jeopardy."

All of these events are free, all offer some food or drink specials for at least part of the game, and they're great for after-work happy hours, dates or just hanging out with your know-it-all friends.

Fado (Monday, 8 p.m.)
Fado's weekly Brainstormer quiz night is the largest in the area, with seven rounds of 10 questions; and, for a quiz night, it has a professional setup. Pick your own team and choose a good name -- the best one is rewarded at the end of the night by the host, a convivial Irishman who swears with impunity. There have been between 50 and 80 players in the room when we've visited, usually grouped into teams of two to eight members. After each of the seven rounds, an assistant retires to the back of the room to check the answers. When he's finished, he updates scores and leaders on a large whiteboard near the host's table, so it's easy to see how well you're doing.

Four of the seven rounds are termed "general knowledge" -- you know, questions about the location of the White Sea, the name of the ship that haunts the Cape of Good Hope, the common name of prussic acid, presidential quotes. The other rounds are "themed": in one called "A for effort," all the answers had at least four "A"s and no other vowels. Some questions were easy -- the actor who starred in a TV drama set in Korea -- but others, like "A town and river in northeastern Canada" weren't. In another, you fill in the blanks from a pool of answers -- last time we were there, ours was about Brazil. Finally, you're given a sheet with 10 "famous faces" on it, and you have to identify who they are. These can range from Don Shula to Winona Ryder to a very young Steven Spielberg.

It's a fun night, judging by the laughter from the crowd after each round, but that could be the $4 imperial pints of Bass Ale on offer. I'd recommend this as an after-work activity or an evening out with a group of friends, because, unless you join a random team, you're not going to be meeting very many people while the game is on. Some participants take this very seriously, although they're in the minority. Brainstomer is not a quick evening, either -- the game started at 8:30 (instead of the advertised 8) and finished well after 10. There's no cover charge, but you must be 21 to enter the bar and play.

By the way, my partner in trivia and I came in third, and are now the proud owners of Fado gift certificates and a Fado baseball cap -- just one. The winners got T-shirts, Guinness memorabilia and much larger gift certificates.

Penn Ave. Pourhouse (Tuesday, 7 p.m.)
Quizzo, played Tuesdays at the Penn. Ave Pourhouse, is very similar to Fado's in format. There are only three 10-question rounds, and the questions are oriented toward pop culture. What really sets this game apart is its lightning pace -- every Tuesday, there are two full games in less than 90 minutes. This is surprising, because Quizzo really is a one-man show. Neal Racioppo hosts the event, reads the questions, checks each team's answer sheet and tallies scores after every round. He also writes the questions, with help from a friend in Philadelphia who hosts a similar event.

The questions are fun but challenging. Queries include, "Two Academy Award-winning actresses appeared in Tom Petty videos. Name one, and get a bonus if you can name both." How about, "Canned food was developed for whose armies?" And, "What was Indiana Jones's first name?" Not many questions about the White Sea or British politicians here, although they crop up on occasion. Two rounds consist of these "general knowledge" questions, bookending a themed fill-in-the-blank round.

An interesting aspect of Quizzo is the "Joker" gambit -- if you've had a good round, circle the Joker logo on your card and your score will be doubled. You can only do this once per game, so be careful. My partners and I thought we knew at least 7 or 8 out of 10 in the first round and Jokered -- earning 14 points. Then we got a perfect score in the third. If we'd waited and Jokered then, we probably would have won the game instead of coming in second. Ah, well.

Racioppo, a Philadelphia native, was a regular at Quizzo trivia nights in his home town. But when he moved to Washington in June to take a job with the Shakespeare Theatre, he couldn't find a single quiz night in town. So he took matters into his own hands. "I was sitting at the bar [at the Penn Ave. Pourhouse], drinking a Yuengling, and I thought, 'I miss Yuengling, and I miss Quizzo," he said. "They have Yuengling here, so maybe they could have Quizzo.'"

Now they do, and it's a great reason to head for Capitol Hill. The beauty of the night, of course, is that your chances of winning are doubled. If you don't do well in the first game, just wait 15 minutes and play again. First-place winners split a $20 bar tab. The runners-up get a $10 tab.

Stetson's (Tuesday, "Between 7 and 7:30 p.m.")
There is only one prize at the weekly pub quiz at Stetson's: First prize. And what a prize it is - they'll pick up your team's entire bar tab for the night. (You can have up to eight people.) Some other quizes offer a greater number of prizes - a pitcher of beer for the cleverest team name or a funny consolation gift to the team that finishes last - but not one matches the potential cash value at Stetson's.

Prizes aside, we also really like the questions at Stetson's -- themed rounds about U.S. history ("Which city and state had the first traffic lights?"), alcohol ("What's in a tequila sunrise?" "What's the oldest bar in Washington?") and literature ("Name the captain and the ship in '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.'"), among others. There are bonus points galore, given for extra information on seemingly random questions. Sometimes the quiz includes a fill-in-the-blank handout rounds, sometimes it doesn't. Either way, there are are always eight rounds of at least 10 questions each.

But - and this is a major caveat - the quiz's organization can border on the shambolic. We've never seen a quiz that had to change its leaderboard so often because of bad addition or bad scoring. We've watched as organziers awarded points to different teams because of two "correct" answers. (For example, Big Ben is NOT the name of the clock in the tower of the Houses of Parliament. It's the bell in said tower.) These incidents can make the evening slightly frustrating. The quiz is new, though, so we'll give it time, and hopefully, the kinks will be worked out soon.

Jimmy's Old Town Tavern (Tuesday, 7 p.m.)
JOTTeopardy, played every Tuesday at Jimmy's Old Town Tavern, is for masochists, or those who were going to go out and spend a few hours at a bar with their friends, whether playing trivia or not. See, only three contestants can actually play JOTTeopardy, and in order to do so, you have to win one of the three preliminary rounds. These are fill-in-the-blank forms with 18 questions on various themes, such as actors and roles ("Who played Josef Mengele in 'The Boys From Brazil?'") or state landmarks ("What state boasts Chaco Canyon and the Painted Desert?"). The papers are passed out by servers and turned in at the bar. You get 30 minutes to answer the questions. About 15 minutes after the deadline, they tell you the name of the winner and how many questions the winner answered correctly. The quizmasters don't tell you the answers to the questions, who the runner-up was or how many you got right.

My friends and I were getting seriously annoyed by the delays, and almost left after the third round (no, none of us qualified for the main event). Good thing we didn't, because the final round of JOTTeopardy is impressive. The bar brings in a six-foot-high board that mimics the familiar "Jeopardy" set up, but with five categories instead of six. The three contestants have electric buzzers, which light up when they ring in. But, as host (and owner) Jimmy Cirrito told one contestant after learning he appeared on the television show, "You can drink, smoke and swear here. I bet Alex Trebek wouldn't let you do any of that."

It's hard to say what was more amusing -- Cirrito, dressed in a sequined Uncle Sam jacket (think Apollo Creed in "Rocky IV") and cracking bad jokes at every turn, or the game itself. Categories included "Spelling Bee," in which contestants had to spell words like "sacrilegious" and "chlorophyll" without starting over; "Halls of Fame," with questions about various sports' Halls of Fame; and "Music," where the DJ played snippets of songs by groups like the Dave Matthews Band and Earth, Wind and Fire for the contestants to identify. There's only one round of questions, plus the one-question final JOTTeopardy. The winner and runner-up receive bar tabs.