Becoming an Established Trivia Host

In the Summer of 2006, I unexpectedly landed a gig as the “quizmaster” at The Gael Pub, a new Irish pub on the UES that had recently begun a weekly trivia night. After committing to this challenge, it took me a couple of weeks to get the hang of the format, as well as to feel comfortable working behind a bar (not a place little Jewish guys like me often find themselves). Based on my extremely limited knowledge of pub quiz nights learned in the months prior by playing trivia at The Gael, I know that my role as “quizmaster” meant that I had to focus primarily on two things:

1. Fun – If the event wasn’t fun, people wouldn’t come. And wasn’t that the point?

2. Speed – Nobody wants to wait around forever in between rounds, so I’d need to learn to score answer sheets quickly- not an easy task in a loud, dimly-lit bar armed with a pen and scratch paper)

Luckily I didn’t need to worry about the trivia questions themselves, as Paul, the Irish bartender who’s idea it was to start a trivia night in the first place, was writing them every week.

I spent those first few weeks working extremely hard at developing my “quizmastering” skills (who’d ever heard of such a thing??), and even though I wasn’t getting paid, I knew that this was a good opportunity for me to not only develop my public speaking skills, but to meet new people and have a lot of fun in the process. I also love to make people laugh whenever I can; people have long told me I have a good sense of humor and should try stand-up (which I have never had the guts to do), so this was a nice way to challenge myself, and see if I could “cut the mustard” by making strangers laugh.

It worked.

After those first few weeks, Paul and I noticed that the same people were returning, in the same groups. And they had brought friends.

Lots of friends.

In fact, after the first month of trivia the bar had twice as many people in it on Tuesday nights as it had when I started. Not a full house, but certainly more than the 20 or so who were there during my summer trivia night adventures with friends, and WAY more than were to be expected out at 9pm on a Tuesday night.

In my next post, I will talk about bumping my new “quiz night” to the next level.