The quiz masters: Being a geek is cool again,…
The quiz masters: Being a geek is cool again, thanks to Boulder's growing trivia scene
By Jennie Dorris |
August 14, 2009 at 2:36 a.m.
Geeks Who Drink has a non-traditional approach to its eight rounds of trivia, which include a multiple-choice visual round where — on one recent night — teams are asked to match animals to their waste products, and audio rounds where teams identify butchered covers of Beatles songs.
"I played trivia in Denver one night and it was so lame," says John Dicker, one of Geeks Who Drink's co-founders. "They'd just ask the question, play a song, then ask another question and play another song. The host didn't interact with the audience; it was kind of the equivalent of a dartboard — it had no soul."
The Republic of Boulder picked up the Geeks Who Drink trivia content last fall, its owners believing in the Geeks' draw to that point that they opened on Tuesdays — a night the bar and restaurant traditionally had been closed.
"It's really different than other trivia nights — a lot of them have easy questions. These are kinda out of left field here," says Brian Bond, a bartender at the Republic who plays the game as a one-man team, Team Republic.
Bond says the gamble has proven successful for the bar.
"We love the people coming in," Bond says. "Sometimes we get so busy that I'm not able to play."
Free beer
Geeks Who Drink officially started just over a year ago, and has spread rapidly to new venues due to word-of-mouth and other more nontraditional marketing campaigns.
"I saw an ad for it on Craigslist — it said something about free beer, and I thought, 'I'll do any sport that involves free beer,'" says Jessica Dale at a recent trivia night at the Republic. "It's something fun to do at a bar."
Dale's teammate, graduate student John Stadler, agrees that the game's success comes from its diversity. The two had just completed a round with detailed questions about MTV.
"It's more well-rounded than other trivia. I'm the lit kid, since that's my major," Stadler says.
Dicker writes different questions for the Geeks' 14 metro-area venues, so that a person could play Geeks Who Drinks on different nights and have a different set of questions each time. It's a task that has turned into a full-time job, Dicker admits — but it's a job that's pretty fun.
"We're doing a multiple choice round on sexually transmitted diseases," Dicker says. "We're going to do a round of pop songs in German. It's definitely not like we cribbed this off of Jeopardy! or Trivial Pursuit."
Boulder transplants Staci and Ted Lupberger tried out Geeks Who Drink recently because they were looking for a way to meet other Boulderites. They were surprised by the variety of the questions and the audience the event drew, noting that it wasn't all college-aged participants.
"It's more different than I thought," Staci Lupberger says. "I thought it would be younger, though we're probably still the oldest ones here."
Dicker agrees that the nights tend to draw a mid-20s to late-30s "competitive nerd" crowd.
"We draw people that are just geeky. If you have lots of knowledge that doesn't serve a purpose, like if you're a hunting geek or a kickboxing geek, you'll be perfect," he says.
Dicker and co-founder Joel Peach have a few more secrets to their successful pub quiz night. First of all, they hire comedian hosts to read the questions and interact with the crowd, including Denver comic Andrew Orvedahl and Boulder funnyman and Daily Camera columnist Dave Burdick.
"We just scouted out folks that could show up on time and deal with hecklers," Dicker says. "You know, anyone that won't embarrass us too much and has basic computer skills."
At the end of each round, there also is a bonus question read; the first team to write the answer on the back of its paper and run it up to the host receives a free pint of beer. Conversely, the team that loses overall for the night receives a consolatory half-pint of beer.
Dicker and Peach also have created an online community with their Web site — www.geekswhodrink.com — where they blog after each night's quiz. This allows team members to follow their scores and see who else is winning around town. Dickers says the community on the Web site is what spawned the idea for the Geek Bowl.
"Even before I announced the Geek Bowl, I was hearing from teams (saying), 'I want to play that team in Fort Collins, you should have a tournament,'" Dicker says.
Dicker's full-time dedication to the project has turned out some revenue, he says, though he's still working to build the business. Geeks Who Drink is paid directly by the bars, which benefit from the crowds that the pub quizzes generate.
"We're making money, but we're not exactly where we want to be yet," he says.
In the end, though, it's the constant imagination of the two founding Geeks that keep this quiz night unique and successful. Recently, they've convinced a local theater troupe to act out the questions during a movie round, and they also enlisted a gay men's choir to sing one of the musical rounds.
"We try to make it as entertaining as possible," Dicker says. "You'll never know what you're going to get each week."
Contact Camera Nightlife Writer Jennie Dorris at nitefile@gmail.com.
Jennie Dorris
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