Bar Trivia Nights

I really like trivia nights at local bars. There’s something about drinking beer and answering questions that gives you a perfect combination of drunk invincibility, brashness and an excuse for why you missed ten questions in a row that you probably should know. It also makes you feel smart, maybe, and usually you can win some stuff. Plus, your faith in humanity is restored because there’s a whole legion of people who would rather answer esoteric questions about defunct NBA teams, rather than putting on beer goggles and trying out lame pick-up lines.

I’ve gone to trivia at several different bars, and there are distinct types of people who attend. There are the smart, nerdy people—probably law or PhD students at local universities—who arrive with packs and in button-downs, thinking that their knowledge of obscure governmental amendments will be useful sometime in the night. There are the table of two quiet guys who communicate only with the pencil on the answer sheet who end up winning the whole thing.

Then, there’s the group of co-workers, who I’ve decided typically work in IT, who ask the moderator to repeat the question and/or the answer choices several time during the contest. There’s the parents there double-dating with their son or daughter and his or her spouse. There are the people who really just came for a couple of drinks, but decided to get into the game because they ordered more gin and tonics than they’d planned and want to get their bar tab taken care of. There's the single guy who's lost.

You go. You’ll see what I mean.

I don’t write this list to make fun of trivia nerds. I’m not poking fun at them; they are my people. They are the kind of people who recognize that a good reward for a day’s work is a beer. They are the people who probably want to have a serious conversation when they’re seriously sloshed, rather than watch inane YouTube videos until they pass out on the coach (if they haven’t mastered the art of doing both). They like knowing random facts, and they don’t think stuff is only worth knowing if they can apply it to a current or future career.

Overall, there’s something nice about being around a bunch of people who like to answer—sometimes really hard!—questions while getting drunk. It gives me faith that alcohol doesn’t always equal losing.

Do you like trivia? Why do you do it?