20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY march 2-8, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com “The appeal of the programs, with the rising challenge of Soviet brain power as a backdrop, was ultimately patriotic; the contestants were selected to be a cross-section of our nation just as deliberately as the G.I.s in a war movie are,” he wrote. “There we bravely sat in our living rooms, sweating it out with this or that Shakespeare-reading poultry farmer or chemistry-minded chorus girl, and there they were on the other side of the blurred little screen, patting (not wiping) their brows with handkerchiefs, biting their tongues as instructed, stammering out rehearsed answers, gasping with relief at the expected cry of congratulation. And we sat there, a nation of suckers, for years.” The shows were pulled from the air, and in 1960 Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit this kind of behavior in the future. Pub trivia or bar trivia, finally, is an in-person version of the game that emerged in England in the 1970s. It was developed as a way to get people to patronize bars during the slower days of the midweek. It proved successful and spread—today trivia nights abound in cities across America and there are at least 10 active, regular trivia nights in Monterey County, from Fernwood in Big Sur to The Links Club in Carmel to Nacho Bizness in Monterey and XL Public House in Salinas. And trivia nights seem to pay off for the bars that host them. Pre-pandemic, trivia Tuesday at London Bridge Pub could pull a crowd of over 100 each week with a record, owner John Eales says, of 220 (“In the winter!”). These days, it’s usually closer to 90—but that’s a decent-sized crowd for the waterfront bar, especially in the winter months when tourists are fewer. At Other Brother Beer Co. in Seaside, where trivia has been on the menu for a little over a year, co-founder and Operations Manager Michael Nevares says Tuesdays have become one of the bar’s busier days of the week—comparable to a Friday. “We have a lot of regulars—it’s become a pretty crucial thing for the community and for our business,” he says. “Our staff is definitely making more money in tips on those nights.” Each trivia night has its own style of gameplay, its own rules and rewards, and each seems to attract a slightly different crowd. Not all trivia nights rely on a host—there are myriad online companies and services these days that will provide trivia questions for a subscription fee. Some bars keep it simple and opt for this. But for others, the host is an integral part of the experience—part instructor, part performer and all-time keeper of the keys to the questions. Q: Which local trivia host once used a mole to decipher whether a team was cheating? In the modern bar trivia setting, it’s so easy to cheat. We all carry a phone, and thus access to the world’s knowledge, with us at all times. At trivia night at Hacienda in Carmel Valley, players are required to stash their phones in a communal basket for the duration of the game. But not all bars have this kind of policy—so what’s to stop a gift card or cash-reward-hungry team from trying to rig the game in their favor? Long-time host Malokas recalls one team that he suspected was cheating—they were just doing too well, too consistently, week after week. So he conscripted a friend and instructed her to join the team. The week she did, their score tanked. (Teams score each other’s quizzes at London Bridge, so group accountability is always part of the game.) Armed with this evidence, Malokas confronted the team and told them they had to stop cheating in order to be welcomed back. “Most people who cheat don’t think it through,” he says. Still, Malokas adds, cheating is “surprisingly rare.” In 25 years of hosting, it’s only come up only a few times for him—perhaps it’s just not in the spirit of trivia night. Q: Who began her trivia hosting career using the popular video chat software Zoom? Noah Doss and Lindsay Hutchings were really missing trivia. Wednesday night trivia at Bull and Bear had been a habit for them since they began dating in 2019. But then the pandemic happened and trivia nights were put on pause. So Hutchings decided to take matters into her own hands. “I really missed trivia, so I decided to start hosting it on Zoom for friends,” she says. That didn’t last forever, but it did give Hutchings an inkling that she might enjoy being on the other side of the mic. She started the Instagram account Monterey Bay Trivia (@ mb.trivia) and began posting “Trivia Tuesday” questions. In the fall, The Whisky Club in Monterey reached out to ask if the duo might want to host an IRL trivia night—they began in November, and currently host twice a month on Thursdays. The quiz tends to involve 30-40 questions, at least a couple of which are about whisky. Hutchings, an aesthetician by day, writes the questions and hosts the evening. Doss, a math professor at CSU Monterey Bay, serves as editor and adviser. Compared to other hosts, Hutchings seems to have a more evolutionary way of writing her quiz—rather than setting out to write questions, she finds questions as things come up in various places in her life. “I never know how to answer this question [about how I write trivia],” Hutchings says. “Because I feel like my answer is very unsatisfactory. But in all honesty, it’s just whatever feels good.” She does rely on ongoing news and local events for possible question areas or ideas—she did a lot of research into the history of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am when it was happening, for example. “I love watching documentaries,” she adds. “And sometimes when I watch something I’m like, this is a great question! And I pause it and I just write something down.” Doss serves as her sounding board. “I’ve been going to trivia since undergrad,” Doss says. “So a lot of what I bring to the table is I’ll look at a ques- “There’s a subset of people in the world who are curious about everything—and they love to show off what they know.” Each trivia night has its own format and style of gameplay. At Other Brother, each round is just 10 questions, but it adds a twist—teams must choose to wager a number of points (1-10) on each answer depending on their level of confidence. This adds a fun dimension, host JD Bates says, because “almost nobody is totally out of it at the end.” Different trivia hosts have slightly different definitions of what makes a good trivia question. Other Brother host JD Bates says, “The best questions are when there’s heavy debate.” Here, a team at Other Brother’s trivia night discusses an answer.
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