Rules for January 25th “Why We Love NYC” Trivia Night with Pat Kiernan

In just a few short days, on January 25th, we will be producing a very special trivia night at The Bell House in Brooklyn: “Why We Love NYC: A Pop Culture Trivia Night Celebrating the World’s Greatest City” hosted by Pat Kiernan!

We’ve been fortunate to have received quite a bit of press for this event (a special thank-you to our friends Time Out New York and Brooklyn Based for interviewing Pat, and to Brooklyn Exposed for running a ticket contest for their readership, as well as a great feature article about our NYC trivia entertainment and team building vendor). With the increased attention, however, have also received a great number of inquiries regarding how the event will be administered. Although this trivia night deviates from our core business of corporate entertainment and employee team building, the core rules for running a professional trivia event remain the same.

We will of course announce in detail before the game starts, but for people planning to attend, here’s a brief overview of the rules for Wednesday’s event:

1.         Limit 8 players per team – Here’s the deal: the more people you have your team, the greater knowledge pool you’ll be drawing from. We realize that people want to play with their friends, and they should – however, in order to keep things as fair as possible, we are limiting team sizes to 8 players.

2.         Small teams discouraged – That said, as with any live trivia event, score sheets must be graded manually, which takes time. TrivWorks has run many large-scale trivia events before, but even with our crack squad of graders working at full-steam, the simple fact is that more teams means more grading, which takes more time. In order to keep things moving smoothly, we will need to limit the number of teams – which means we will be encouraging smaller groups to join together, and form a “trivia powerhouse” as Pat likes to say.

3.         No cheating – This should go without saying, but of course we have to say it. Don’t cheat. It’s unfair, it’s lame and it totally defeats the point. Keep your SmartPhones in your pocket, and don’t Google the answer or text a friend. Just play your best, and have fun – besides, if you are cheating at trivia night, we know how to spot you.

4.         Funny team names required – In order to submit your team’s answer sheet, you will need to first come up with an hysterical team name to identify yourselves by. This will be your team name for the entire event, so make sure it’s a good one!

5.         Please, no challenging the answers – The trivia questions being asked have been thoroughly fact checked: since keeping things moving is so important, we ask you to respect the rule that whichever answer Pat announces to be the correct answer, that’s the correct answer (if you absolutely must contest an answer, please come see me – I’ll be floating around the scoring table).

6.         Only 1 raffle ticket per person – Over the course of the evening, Pat will be drawing raffle tickets to invite contestants up onstage to participate in 1-on-1 trivia. You will receive a raffle ticket upon arrival, but only 1 ticket – so don’t lose it!

7.         Submission time limits – Again, since attendance will be extremely high, we will need teams to hand in answer sheets promptly; we also want to discourage anyone from having enough time to cheat (although nobody will cheat, since that was rule #3). Pat will announce the time limit for submissions: any answer sheets submitted after the deadline will not be counted, so be punctual!

There are a few other rules, but I don’t want to get too bogged down in them – after all, the event’s supposed to be fun! However, take some time to review these rules in advance, so that you may be best prepared to compete on Wednesday – and hopefully, win!

If you are planning to attend this event and have any questions, would like additional information or even want to share a great NYC pop culture trivia question of your own, please write in the comments section below, or send me an email at david@trivworks.com – better yet, send us a message on Twitter @TrivWorks, using the #WeLoveNYC hashtag!