Mayflower Trivia Night

Every Thursday night Howard Rachelson hosts a trivia quiz at the Mayflower Inn in San Rafael, CA. The Mayflower is a British pub. They have all the stuff you would expect from a pub: Newcastle, Guiness, Bangers & Mash, and Scottish waitresses. Normally it's a pretty quiet place, with the exception the nights that English Premiere League games are on Fox Sports Net and trivia night.

Thursday night every know-it-all in Marin county comes crawling into the Mayflower to put their brains on the line. The rules are simple. You can have as many people as you want on your team. Each person pays in three dollars. No cell phones and no yelling out the answers. One person writes down the answers on an answer sheet and at the end 6-9 teams get a slice of the pie. The night is broken down into 20 general trivia questions, some can be multi-part, then a visual question, 4 music questions, and then the 'bonus' question which is just like any other question except that it is worth more points. When everyone is done, he collects the sheets then hands them out to a select group of graders, who grade them as he takes the whole bar through the questions again and everyone shouts out the answers.

I would say that 2/3 or the teams that play show up every week. That may sound a bit much, but it isn't when you consider that Howard has been doing this for 15 years now. He even runs a little side business of selling question sets off his website: http://www.triviacafe.com. The teams range from about 4-12 people and go by names like Tequila Mockingbird, The Standard Deviants, The Rocket Scientists, and Dewey, Screwem, and Howe. We play as Team Gonzo. It's my homage to Hunter S. Thompson.

We don't go for the money. We go to kick people's asses. That being said, we usually place in or near the money. We have only come in first once in our illustrious career. It just happened to be one of those nights where the questions were perfectly geared towards the people we had at the table.

Now, we aren't just a bunch of young punks who know everything. In fact 80% of our answers probably come from just one of our players, Champ. Yup, his name is Champ. He is a semi-retired SAP DBA. Whatever the hell that is. Whatever it is, he knows a lot. He is good at history, literature, and sports. So, he basically carries the team until the math question when Py and Adam get the dueling equations going on the back on napkins.

Most weeks it's just the four of us. On occasion we have 8 or 9 people, which can get a little out of hand. Six is probably the optimal number of players. If you get too many, you end up out guessing yourself and changing right answers to wrong answers. Then you spend the rest of the night kicking yourself and banging your head against the wall.

Overall, it's a great way to spend a Thursday night drinking beer with friends, eating pub food, and pretending to be smart.

© Copyright 2002 Patrick Berry. Last update: 3/24/02; 9:25:40 AM.