Bars hosting quiz nights find it to be
anything but a trivial pursuit
By Tracey Stark
(a shorter version appeared in Seoul magazine September 2006)
At 7 p.m. on Thursday two couples walk into 3 Alley Pub in Itaewon and ask for a table. The waitress tells them there are no tables available. They look incredulous, as half the tables appear empty.
“They’re reserved,” the waitress says without being asked. “It’s trivia night.” (In fact, some of the tables have been reserved by the same people every week for months.)
They nod in understanding and wander toward the back in hopes of finding a few stools near the pool table or dart board. In a few minutes the reserved tables are filled and a man walks around the bar passing out score sheets to those wishing to compete.
Trivia night at Rocky Mountain Tavern in Itaewon. (ts '06)
As more and more new bars, restaurants and clubs open in Seoul and just as many fail, the main goal for owners of existing businesses is to keep the seats full seven nights a week. Friday and Saturday take care of themselves. But what about the other five days?
In Itaewon there are three ways that have proven successful: dart league on Tuesdays, pool league on Wednesdays and Trivia night on one of the other remaining “dead” nights.
“What I do every day is try to fill my bar. I went to a pub in Australia that had trivia night and I liked it. It’s something that a group can do,” says Gunter Kamp, the Australian owner of 3 Alley Pub, which has the longest-running quiz in town.
There are now four bars in the Itaewon-Haebonchong area hosting quizzes on four different nights: 8:30 p.m. on Sunday at Jesters, 9 p.m. on Monday at Rocky Mountain Tavern, 9 p.m. on Wednesday at New Phillies in Haebonchong and 7:30 p.m. on Thursday at 3 Alley Pub.
Todd Jenkins, from New Zealand, owns New Phillies and says he didn’t take the other bars into consideration when he chose Wednesday for his quiz night.
“Wednesdays weren’t busy. It’s made a bit of an impact,” he says, scanning the small, but packed bar after the conclusion of a recent quiz.
It also offers those not interested in pool an alternative.
The attraction seems to be the idea that you can think when you drink in a calmer setting than you’ll find on a Friday or Saturday night in any of these venues. There is also that sense of community and mateship when a bar is stuffed to the gills with people engaged in a game together.
Another reason people go are the prizes. Every bar rewards the winning teams, whether per round or at the end, with free beer or wine. 3 Alley Pub, which has been hosting trivia night for five years now, offers other prizes in addition to booze.
“I have two World Cup t-shirts for a person wearing underwear of the opposite sex,” the host begins as a way to warm up the crowd at 3 Alley Pub. He offer prizes throughout the night to give more people a chance to walk away with something.
He gets no takers and changes the requirement for winning the t-shirts “the first person to prove they aren’t wearing any underwear.” A woman climbs out of a booth and exposes the top half of her buttocks. The host, satisfied she isn’t wearing any underwear, gives her the shirts and she climbs, red faced, back into the booth to the cheers of her female teammates.
“Three Alley gives away more than just booze, and that’s great,” says Carolyn Papworth, an Australian and a regular at both Rocky Mountain Tavern and 3 Alley Pub. “But,” she adds, “I just wish they didn’t ask us to show our bosoms for them.” (She insists that she has never shown her breasts for any prize, anywhere, ever.)
Although getting a person to expose a part of their body in exchange for a prize is often the case, it isn’t the rule at 3 Alley. At the same quiz a shot of liquor was awarded to the first person to show the host a nail clipper and a soccer ball was given to someone with a Korean flag in their possession.
One bar asked each team to ante up a small amount of money before the quiz to go to the first and second place teams in the form of a food and drink tab.
Robert Curr, an American, organizes trivia night for Rocky Mountain Tavern, or RMT as regulars call it. Most weeks he hosts, but as often as he can he passes the responsibility to one of the regulars interested in hosting so he can sit down and play.
“I wanted to host a quiz at 3 Alley after our team won,” Curr says. “They said no, so I went to Rocky Mountain and asked them. If they (3 Alley) had let me host just one, I probably never would have started it here.”
Corry Day, a Canadian and co-owner of RMT says, “It didn’t take much convincing. Robert had the will and the know-how,” he says with a nod across the room to Curr. “Trivia night turned out to be more popular than hockey games.”
Death by Vegemite, a team which frequently wins one or more rounds at RMT and often has the best overall score, consists of two or more Americans (sometimes Curr is one of them), Papworth, who is Australian, one or two Canadians, a Scot, and sometimes a Brit. This, Papworth says, is part of their strength.
“We all come from such diverse backgrounds that it can’t help but make us better,” she says, then adds, “plus we love not paying for beer.”
But diversity isn’t a guarantee of success at some trivia nights.
One recent quiz at RMT featured a myriad of questions about video games and comic books, topics obviously of interest to the quiz’s host. Scores were low that night for Death by Vegemite.
“I had no bloody clue what he was talking about and neither did most of my team,” Papworth says of that night.
But despite an occasional bad quiz, she keeps going back. Everyone does.
Though some hosts make it seem like writing a good quiz is easy, it’s not, they say. Curr says that it often takes four to six hours to put together a themed quiz.
Papworth, who has hosted in Curr’s place several times, says she spends more time than that scouring the internet for interesting and, hopefully, a variety of questions that aren’t too difficult.
Ron, an American who declined to give his last name, and one of the hosts at 3 Alley Pub, says the key is to find a balance when making a quiz.
“Even though the majority of these people are from North America, we have to remember our European friends and our friends from Down Under,” he says. “I like it when people miss a question and say ‘Oh man, I knew that!’”
Matt Clement, a Canadian and one of the quiz hosts at Jesters, says that once you start seeing the same team win over and over again you have to mix it up. On the night of his recent quiz one of his categories was devoted to the TV show Sex and the City. There were moans from what appeared to be the most confident teams from earlier rounds and smiles from those who had previously looked frustrated.
The host at New Phillies, Mario Abrams, an American, said the quizzes started out too difficult and too Eurocentric. “The one thing we tried to do was put together a potpourri of categories. The challenge is to make sure the bottom team is still in the competition.”
Keeping things moving also proves to be important. As all of these quizzes take place on week nights, they have to end at a reasonable hour. This is where choices have to be made about scoring.
At 3 Alley Pub and New Phillies the quizzes are collected and then redistributed to other teams to check each other’s sheets while the host reads out the answers. At Jesters and RMT the answer sheets are collected at the end of each round and checked by a scorekeeper while the answers are read aloud.
Each system has its merits, but all of the pubs have found a way to finish well before the buses or subways shut down.
After the scores are tallied, the winner is announced and the beer is awarded accordingly. The losers most often end up staying for another round or two and talk about the questions they “should have known.”
When RMT started the quiz in July 2005 Curr told a few friends to come and support him. For a few weeks it was small. But friends of friends of Curr’s and others began to come and in time the bar was standing room only.
None of the bars advertise their quiz nights extensively in any traditional media outlets, although 3 Alley Pub has a small line listing in the K-Scene classifieds.
“Word of mouth is the most important kind of advertising,” says Wayne Gold, a Canadian and owner of Jesters, who has been hosting trivia for only two months.
In time, it seems, most would aspire to be as successful in their trivial endeavors as 3 Alley Pub, who have a full house every week and reservations weeks in advance.
“For me, the main thing is fun, and that’s the real bottom line,” Kamp says from behind his crowded bar.
Gunter Kamp, owner of 3 Alley Pub.
“Word of mouth is the most important kind of advertising,” says Wayne Gold, a Canadian and owner of Jesters, who has been hosting trivia for only two months.
