BRAIN STORMS

 

Who wrote the song “Georgia On My Mind”? What famous Native American leader was known to his people as Goyathlay? Who holds the Syracuse Chiefs’ career home run record? Where can you go in Central New York to cavort with friends and win prizes for knowing essentially useless information? 

To answer that last question, you can get fired up for some brainy competition every week in a lively environment at your neighborhood pub, thanks to local entrepreneurs who host barroom trivia. Deejay and quizmaster Chris Baker (also a Syracuse New Times contributor) and his English teacher partner Kris Denton pack ’em in at Quaker Steak and Lube in Geddes every Thursday while personable funnyman Steve Patrick holds court before a loyal group downtown at the Wise Guys comedy club on Tuesdays. 

And if the question is which trivia crew stages the most games in the area, the answer has to be the Syracuse Trivia Company. The 3-year-old business, owned by hard-working Brian Cocca, puts on eight games weekly, including a hotly contested Tuesday league at Coleman’s on Tipperary Hill and a popular Thursday game at Liverpool’s Meghan MacMurphy’s. 

Although the competition is sometimes furious, playing with a team of friends while hoisting a few drinks and munching some snacks promotes the same camaraderie as a weekly bowling or softball league. “I’ve got a couple groups of younger people who are early 20s,” Baker says. “They never win, but they come every week, play, have a few drinks and have a good time. It’s mostly guys in their 40s and 50s who come and play. And there’s always a couple of guys who just happen to be in the bar and they’ll hear there’s trivia and they’ll stick around and play.”

Patrick, who calls his game “Smart Ass Trivia,” plays his role like a performance artist, putting an unconventional twist on the competition at Wise Guys. “We do a lot more silly, fun stuff with a lot less structure,” he shrugs. “We might say something a little more uncouth, you know. It’s not a library in here, it’s a comedy club and we take advantage of it. We might drink a little more, get a little more obnoxious, but it’s where all the cool nerds go.”

Cocca, from Manlius, took a circuitous route to his enterprise, having worked in the wind energy industry in Pennsylvania after receiving a degree from Ithaca College in cinema and photography. “When I moved back to Syracuse,” he recalls, “I just wanted to play trivia. I went around to a few places, but it just wasn’t what I wanted. My brother said, ‘Why don’t you just start your own up?’ I went over to Coleman’s because I live just around the corner and I said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in having a trivia night that I could host?’ The timing worked out great. That was about three years ago and it became really popular. In the summertime we have more than 200 people playing.” 

While trivia has been played in local taverns for decades and the basic concept hasn’t changed, ready access to information over Internet-connected devices like cell phones has made researching answers much easier. “There’s a huge problem I’ve seen with everyone having Smartphones now, especially in big rooms,” Baker concedes. “You’ll get couple of teams that try to cheat and look up the answers. It’s hard to police when you’ve got a big place. I’ve been to some places that if they even saw you with a cell phone out, they would nullify or void whatever points you have.” 

For most players, the fun is in the game and the prizes are low priority, but hosts watch for cyber-cheats anyway. “Basically, I’m the policeman,” Cocca explains. “I do walk around and I’m vigilant about it. I’ve had to disqualify teams, I take points away. When I do take points off, I make an announcement that whatever team had their cell phone out and they lost five points and everyone cheers. So there’s the honor system, there’s me policing and there’s crowd enforcement.” 

To some extent the emcees encourage vigilance among players. “We do keep an eye out for it,” Patrick says. “We encourage the teams to squeal on each other if they see someone using a phone. I will take your points away if I catch you. {Bartender} Ryan {Van Wormer} is also on the prowl, but the thing is, it’s in an enclosed room. We can all see each other. It’s not like {a place} where there’s three or four rooms and people can hide around a corner and use their phones.” 

At the same time, the trivia hosts find ways to use technology to enhance the game. Syracuse Trivia Company posts themes on its website to tease players prior to a scheduled night of questions. “I put a free answer up on the website, too,” Cocca says. “You don’t know what the question is, but you know at least one answer that night.” 

Players who “like” Smart Ass Trivia on Facebook can use it to pick up an edge. “I send them little clues during the week,” Patrick explains. “Sometimes I’ll tell them to wear a specific thing or bring a specific thing to get points. I give them the categories every Sunday.”

Although each quizmaster has his own system for running a game, they all have to put in long hours to bank a supply of questions that will tease rather than torture. “What I find I like best are the ones where you ask the question and then when you give the answer, everyone goes, ‘Oh, I knew that,’” Baker says. “A good trivia question is one where the answer is always on the tip of your tongue and you know it or you don’t. A good trivia question is something where it’s not just a black-and-white answer like who was the fifth president of the United States or whatever. It’s something along the lines of how, many U.S. presidents have had four-letter last names? You can count, but you might forget one. After the answer it clicks, ‘Oh, I forgot Taft or I forgot Polk or whatever.’” 

A team of cousins playing at Quaker Steak has its own standards for the perfect trivia query. “It should be good common sense,” theorizes Gerry Messmer, “but something that’s not thought of every day.” 

Nodding in agreement, Mike Dendis adds, “A little arcane.”

IN IT TO WIN IT

Although for many buffs, trivia is more about fun than prizes, make no mistake: They want to win. “We get out with friends, use our brains,” Dendis says. “Prizes aren’t as important as the bragging rights. “We’ve won quite a few, we know a lot of useless stuff. I’m good at movies and TV, they’re good at other categories.”

Blending researcher and showman, the question men have to strike a tricky balance. “I try to write questions that at least most of the audience has a fighting chance,” Cocca explains. “I hate to hear someone hear the question and say, ‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’ I try to avoid that. Ideally, I’d like 75 percent of the teams to get questions right. I try to make sure I have a good mix: questions that 21-year-olds would get and ones that 61-year-olds would get and everyone in between. Then I try to also cater to male and female interests.”

Patrick hosts a fairly even mix of men and women of varied ages for what he terms “a big, drunk game show,” and tries to play to that diversity with categories that on one recent night ranged from pizza to zombies. “You might not know Led Zeppelin, but you might know Britney Spears,” he explains. “You might not know Lord of the Rings, you might know Gone With the Wind. I don’t lean toward any crowd.” 

When three women sitting at the Wise Guys bar who call their team Drunk Force win a round of shots with a correct answer, they let out a loud cheer. “Up to now, we got them all right, so we’ve got a false sense of security,” confesses Barbara Karazuba of Syracuse. “Everything could turn around on the next question.” 

Nearby, their rivals, teams with such wacky names such as There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand and Instant Trivia, Just Add Alcohol, await the next question. “I came the second week that Steve started it here and I’ve come every week,” says Kaleigh Pfohl of Liverpool. “I love winning for the winning. I’m really competitive. It’s a good place to come, be a nerd and be competitive.” 

Winners generally score a gift card to the host establishment or memorabilia provided by a sponsor company, while season champs can win more significant prizes. Even better, they win bragging rights. “Whichever team wins the most games over the course of the year we have a special prize and we have a plaque that they put on the wall,” Baker says. “Their name goes on the plaque as 2012 trivia champions.”

While Syracuse-area games are run by local managers, large companies that franchise trivia nights around the nation have popped up. Syracuse Trivia runs eight games using three hosts, but Cocca is the sole owner and he keeps his focus local. “We do a food drive at Coleman’s,” he says. “I give players a bonus point for each non-perishable food item they bring in—up to five points—and donate them to the St. Patrick’s Church food pantry. We’ve been doing that every week for two years. We donated more than 6,000 pounds over the last two years.”  

 

Baker and Denton’s CK Entertainment has branched out beyond tavern contests, combining trivia with their 7-year-old disc jockey business in an unusual way. “We started about a year ago to work trivia into weddings,” Baker explains. “We talk to the brides beforehand and they send us a bunch of specific questions about the bride and groom: where did they meet, how did they meet, how long did they date, what color was their first house? Every half-hour or so {at the reception} we ask a question and whatever team gets the most questions right, they have a gift basket for them. We’ve done that at a few weddings now and it’s always a lot of fun.” Sounds like more fun than the chicken dance, that’s for sure.

But for most players, the rowdy atmosphere of a pub and the lure of going head-to-head weekly with like-minded geeks bring out their memory mojo. The game masters can throw in added enticements, but it’s the competitors’ love of showing off their massive store of obscure facts and pointless knowledge that drives them to get out with their teams. 

“Right now we’re in second place, one point back,” notes team secretary Nick Petitti, sitting beneath a tricked-out chopper suspended from the Quaker Steak ceiling. Although his team—named Wow, That’s Really Good—consists of five young couples, mostly grad students, they correctly answer a Neil Diamond question that dates to the 1970s.

“We all have our specialty,” explains Kaitlin Hendricks. “If there’s no consensus, we take a vote.”

Even if you don’t know the answers to our original questions—Hoagy Carmichael, Geronimo and Dutch Mele—you can still have a great night out playing trivia if you join the right teammates at a venue that fits your style. Maybe you’d be good at rock star Shakespeare at Wise Guys, wherein Patrick recites lyrics from a rock song the way the Bard would have done it and you have to name the song. 

“It’s a comedy club,” he reminds. “We can get away with more than the other guys might be able to. That’s what makes it fun.”                                           

There is no shortage of venues that cater to those of us pursuing all things trivial, and here they are, arranged chronologically. Always be sure to call ahead in case of vacation schedules or unplanned cancellations.

Trapper’s Pizza

5950 Butternut Drive, 

East Syracuse; 438-4444.

Mondays at 7 p.m. 

Awful Al’s Wine & Whiskey Lounge 

321 S. Clinton St.; 703-4773. 

Mondays at 8:30 p.m.

Bull and Bear Pub 

125 E. Water St.; 701-3064. 

Tuesdays at 7 p.m.

Henneberg Tavern 

64 Albany St., Cazenovia; 

655-8281. Tuesdays at 7 p.m.

Wise Guys Comedy Club 

201 S. Salina St.; 214-4596. 

Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m.

Coleman’s Irish Pub 

100 S. Lowell Ave.; 760-8312. 

Tuesdays at 8 p.m.

Stingers Pub 

4500 Pewter Lane, Manlius; 692-8100.

Wednesdays at 7 p.m.

Metro Lounge 

505 Westcott St.; 428-0810.

Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m.

Sitrus at University Sheraton Hotel 

801 University Ave.; 

380-6206. Thursdays at 7 p.m.

Meghan MacMurphy’s 

7990 Oswego Road, Liverpool; 760-8312.

Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.

Quaker Steak and Lube 

3535 Walters Road; 451-9464. 

Thursdays at 8 p.m.

Lamont Tavern 

108 Lamont Ave., Solvay; 487-9890.

Fridays at 7 p.m.

Applebee’s

5241 W. Genesee St., Camillus; 488-3715.

Fridays at 9 p.m.