Weeknights Heat Up With Trivia Nights on Cape Cod

By: Johnny Gwynn, January 31, 2012

On a cold Wednesday night in January, I find myself heading towards the bars on Main Street. It's become a regular routine that borders on addiction. I base my social life around these midweek nights, looking forward to them all week long. Why? Because, from the Sandwich BBC to Tommy Doyle’s in Hyannis to the Fishmonger Café in Woods Hole, Wednesday is trivia night.

I’ve become a regular at the Liam Maguire’s trivia night. It’s become at weekly tradition to meet up with friends at this venerable Main Street, Falmouth pub, grab a drink and flex the useless fact portion of our brains. As soon as I walk in, I see that the place is packed with the familiar faces. Each team is huddled over a round of drinks, discussing game plans and sizing up the competition. You might say hello to people across the room or appreciate the atmosphere of a crowded bar, but one the game begins, the other tables are your adversaries.

Trivia is a team sport. While I might be a walking, talking encyclopedia of music and movies, I can’t name you the Celtic’s starting line up or one general who served in the Civil War. It helps to have a well-rounded bunch.

The best teams vary in expertise and also in age. As I look around at my teammates, we are four 20-somethings and two 50-somethings. While I’d normally shudder to think of going to a bar together with my parents and friends, trivia nights have been a fun way to bond and just share a beer.

It's all in the name

If you ask me, the team name is the most important part of trivia, bar none. Victory all but hinges on a great name. Great team names can be topical (“Bend it like Cundiff”) clever (“Sotally Tober”) or just cheeky (“He Twittered all over her Facebook”). Whatever your flavor, this is your chance to really get creative and have some fun with the whole room. Tonight, we are “Caution: Slow Children.”

Part of the fun of bar trivia is that there is no way for you to prepare yourself for what will be asked. Some nights you’re the brainiac, and on others you will have your head in your hands, wondering why you didn’t pay attention to who was in that Pepsi commercial in 1990. I constantly surprise myself on the amount of useless knowledge I’ve acquired that has no good purpose other than to answer trivia questions.

I won’t lie to you: trivia can be cutthroat. One night, I jumped the gun on a question about presidential quotes. For the rest of the night, I don’t hear the end of my mistake. If we lost, it would've been because of my fumble.

Luckily, I did not pull a Kyle Williams. We ended up taking the first place trophy, a $25 gift card to Liam’s. While this only covered half our bill, it truly is all about the bragging rights and notoriety when it comes to bar trivia.

Watch out world, Caution: Slow Children are your trivia champions… until next week.