Nothing Trivial

I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m a dork. No, not your average, run-of-the-mill dork. I’m your atypical überdork. The kind of dork who doesn’t write “überdork” without the two dots over the ‘u’. The type of dork that also knows those dots are called ümlauts, from the German word meaning ‘two dots’. The kind of dork who knows that the word dork originally referred to a whale’s penis. As a self-professed überdork, I admit freely that I like no bar game better than trivia. I’m a lousy shot at beer pong, darts, and beer darts– it’s the coolest new game that’s sweeping all the fictitious bars I frequent! I know obscure facts and I like to drink, so trivia is my sport of choice.

Needless to say I take it seriously. Well, I guess it was needful to say. Every wrong answer is an excruciating blemish on my quizzical record. That’s one of the reasons I have issues with certain trivia practices. I get my trivia fix at Charley O’s on Tuesdays. Hell, I even went through the effort of ensuring I am scheduled off on Tuesdays so I can hit O’ Corley’s for trivia and karaoke, the dynamic duo of drinking. Jamie has been the host of trivia for a while now. His cohost shifts often but for now it’s Antonio and they are a great team. Any gripe I have with trivia is not host related, let me say that from the start.

One of my biggest peeves, coming from a man with peeves visible from space, is a certain team that plays at O’Corley’s. See, some of you don’t realize how seriously competitive trivia can get. I’ve seen people loose their thumbs for cheating. Actually, that was an old Charles Bronson movie, but trivia is competitive, and many teams come back week after week. The truly hardcore teams have matching shirts. In particular, the Chopstick Mafia is a team that, like me, takes bar trivia very seriously. So seriously that sometimes they may occasionally use a piece of technology to acquire the answer to a question that is stumping them. They use their phones to cheat. Hey, Mafia, don’t get all riled up. Everyone knows you cheat! We’re at the bar playing trivia so don’t assume we’re ignorant. But in your defense, Chopstick Mafia, you are not the only team that cheats. The only reason I don’t is because I don’t have an internet phone. I could take the moral high ground and say even if I had an IPhone I wouldn’t use it to cheat, but I would. I take it that seriously, too.

The problem comes when a team of twenty with IPhones answer questions that no other team got because they are cheating, errr, I mean, using advanced data access techniques. So to level the playing field I have devised a few suggested rule changes and additions. I hope every bar that hosts trivia will read this and reconsider their practices.

Rule 1: Team size may be no more than ten to fifteen people, or a tenth of the total bar crowd that night. So if your team has twenty members and there are only fifty people in the joint, you should maybe split into two teams. Why? You tell me– is it really fair for a school of dolphins to swarm three or four tiny mackerel? I’m tired of being the mackerel! I’m nobody’s fish!

Rule 2: Each question has a one minute time limit. If you know the question, that’s plenty of time. If you don’t, it gives your team ample time to compare ideas and brainstorm. It’s also a short enough time limit to kill the ‘google effect.’ That’s what I’m trademarking as the use of internet technology in trivia cheating. Look for the term in Wikipedia any day now.

Rule 3: The Equalizer. Just to make it more sporting, why not give the last place team a chance to catch up? Before the final question, let any team in last place chug against the first place team or teams. If a team in last place beats a first place team in the chug-off, the last place team gets moved up to first place. No one loses any points. This helps teams that are completely out-gunned have a chance, all be it a slim one, to win. The leading team still has an advantage– they’ve proved they know a lot, so they should have no problem answering the last question. Okay, maybe this rule is trivia communism, but I stand behind it, just like I stood behind Marx. Groucho, not Karl. Besides being a great comedian, he’s one hell of a trivia host. He used to host What’s My Line back in the golden years of television.

Rule 4: The Tie Breaker. This method ends the chug-off approach for deciding who wins in a tie. Instead, a question with multiple parts may be used, like asking the teams to name all the signs of the zodiac. Or all the Golden Girls. Still, a few teams may be able to name off Blanche (Rue McClanahan), Dorothy (Bea Arthur), Rose (Betty White) and Sophia (Estelle Getty, RIP). So a tie breaker question doesn’t preclude a final chug off, but it definitively decides which teams watch Lifetime: Television For Women.

I don’t really expect all (or any) of these rules to be adopted. I know that as a group people are resistant to change. So maybe trivia is fine the way it is. Or maybe I’m just a bitter überdork with no IPhone.