In 1976, Sharon Burns and Tom Porter decided to formalize the popular pub quizzes of Northern England as a way for bar and tavern owners to increase their business. Starting in the south, the pair traveled from one end of Great Britain to the other, organizing teams and leagues throughout the country. Their efforts ultimately paid off – a 2009 study estimated there were 22,445 regular weekly pub quizzes within the United Kingdom.
On the other side of the pond, that same study placed the number of pub quiz events in the United States at only 2,000, a fact that John Dicker and Joel Peach attempted to change in 2006 with the introduction of Geeks Who Drink.
“The whole impetus for the founding of Geeks Who Drink was that bar trivia, especially at that time, was just really, really bad,” explains Geeks Who Drink marketing director Ken Brill. “It wasn’t terribly imaginative, it wasn’t terribly interesting, and to be honest, most of the folks who hosted, their format was ‘ask a question, play a song, give you the answer to the question.’ Do that for an hour and a half and call it a night. John and Joel both looked at that and thought, ‘We can do better than this.’ And from there they came up with a format they thought was more engaging.”
John Dicker and Joel Peach organized their first bar trivia night in Denver, Colorado, in 2005 before officially launching Geeks Who Drink in February of the following year. By 2007, Albuquerque had joined the proceedings, with San Antonio and Austin coming on board in 2008 and Seattle in 2009.
“It ended up being more of an organic sort of growth,” Brill explains. “Albuquerque is not that far from Denver. It’s about six hours. We had some folks check it out in Denver and when they went back to Albuquerque, they sort of brought it with them. And we just started to grow organically at that point. Even after things took off, Albuquerque remains – as far as weekly attendance goes and as far as special events and themed quizzes – one of our biggest markets. After that point we started to get more aggressive as far as pursuing opportunities in new markets. Especially moving into Austin and Seattle, which are now, along with Albuquerque, two of our largest markets.”
Although the number is constantly changing, by January 2015 a total of 34 states across the country were holding Geeks Who Drink events. “I would say aside from the southeast – Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida – you don’t have to go more than one state to find a quiz,” Ken Brill adds. “We’re not in those states and we’re not in the swath of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana. Those are really the only extended portions of the country that we don’t currently have an event in.”
The number of cities is a little harder to pin down as many locales hold multiple events in suburbs and nearby communities. In the state of Washington, for instance, Geeks Who Drink is held in twenty different cities, but many of them are within a short distance of Seattle.
In terms of format, Geeks Who Drink is divided into eight rounds of eight questions, with each round having its own individual theme. “We have a team of writers who produce content for our quizzes,” Brill explains. “Our team of writers is led by Christopher Short, who’s a six-time Jeopardy champion and our chief editor. He sort of guides our editorial process but a number of our hosts around the nation, probably thirty to forty, contribute to our writer’s team on a weekly basis. It’s Christopher who gives them a once-over. We send them off to fact-checkers to make sure that our quizzes are well researched and we’re not asking questions that are easily refuted by a simple web search. And then he compiles those questions into a daily event that has a good balance of different topics and themes.”
Although each edition of Geeks Who Drink is unique in its own right, the popularity of certain themes has made them semi-regular occurrences nonetheless. This includes a segment entitled “Fake Chewbacca Sings the Hits,” where the vocals of a song are replaced with the growls of the famous Star Wars Wookie.
“We’ve also done a number of rounds where one of our writers has asked their grandparents to describe pop culture things, and we’ll transcribe how they described them and you have to name that thing,” Ken Brill adds. “We look for themes like that, that we can repeat on various different levels because they have sort of an appeal to them. People really like them. We do look for that but we try not to be so predictable as to have a Star Wars question shoe-horned in every week. It doesn’t really work for the scope of what we’re trying to do.”
In addition to the regular Geeks Who Drink weekly pub quizzes, the organization also sponsors Quiz for a Cause charity events that benefit local non-profits in the various communities where Geeks Who Drink is held.
“We will partner a non-profit with one of our existing venues,” Ken Brill explains of the process. “We’ll collect donations from our players at that event and then the vast majority of those donations go to the non-profit organization at the end of the night. Obviously we promote those events heavily and they get that extra exposure, they get sort of an ‘in’ with some people who maybe don’t know of their organization or may be difficult to reach as far as donations go. And one of the biggest things is that they often can get volunteers out of these events. The demographics that comes out to our quizzes is typically in their mid-twenties, early-thirties. Some of them don’t have a ton of money to donate but a lot of them have time. There’s a lot of value in it for our non-profits and we really like to utilize our marketing reach to benefit good causes.”
While Geeks Who Drink is a weekly event, Geek Bowl is an annual tradition that features the best quiz teams from around the country competing against one another on a grander scale and is unquestionably the largest live trivia event in the United States.
“Last year we had more than a hundred teams competing,” Brill says of the 2014 edition of Geek Bowl. “We gave away more than $10,000 in prizes for our players. We sort of pull out all the stops when it comes to the content we produce and how we put on the event. For our music round, we booked eight different performing acts to perform the songs. So we might have a harpist followed by a men’s choir followed by a marching band performing each of those songs. We also compile a video celebrity round, so we reach out to some of the folks we have connections with and have them ask questions. I like to describe it as the pub quiz to end all pub quizzes. If you have fun at your weekly trivia night, this is it on massive, Arnold-size steroids.”
As for the success of Geeks Who Drink, as well as the popularity of pub quizzes and trivia nights in general, Ken Brill points to a number of factors. “I like to think that twenty years ago people knew the names of everyone at the bar they went to,” he says. “That was their social outlet, where they went and they talked. Nowadays people want something to do while at the bar, something to do while they’re out and about.”
Pub quizzes are one way to fill that need, while offering intellectual stimulation in the process as well. “I think another reason it’s taken off is as people get smarter – which believe it or not I believe people actually are – a pop quiz is the perfect way to be social with people you like and to use some of that intelligence that you feel like you have,” Brill continues. “And it’s also simply social. We have teams of up to six players, so you can bring your friends out. It’s a good way to get people out of the house on a weekly basis.”
Bars, trivia, friends and fun – the perfect equation for both Geeks and non-Geeks alike.
Anthony Letizia