The Geeks also keep a blog detailing the goings-on of every trivia night — as written by the room's quizmaster — replete with photos and good-natured trash-talking. To keep things personal, the Geeks also skip the television screens, opting instead to just read questions and repeat any that players didn't hear. "It's all about the community aspect of it," says Dicker. "At quiz you debate questions, you can yell at the quizmaster and they can yell back at you, you can flirt with people on the other team, talk shit on the blog the next day. You get known by who your team is, and it's about those relationships. Why would I put the questions on a TV screen? You don't form a relationship with the quizmaster that way. Why don't we all just bring laptops if we're going to do that?"
Dicker understands the importance of the social interaction, because that's what drew him to quiz nights. While a freelance writer living in New York, he picked up a copy of the Roddy Doyle play War, about a bunch of unemployed Dubliners who become obsessed with pub quiz. Intrigued, Dicker sought out a quiz in the city and wound up at Rocky Sullivan's.
Jim J. Narcy
The geeks behind the Geeks: John Dicker and Joel Peach.
Jim J. Narcy
The godfather of Denver trivia: Alec Warner.
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"It stems from social insecurity," he says. "I used to like to go to bars that had a Pac-Man machine, and if I was feeling insecure or something, I could go play and still be around other people. That's what I liked about the quiz: I could see the same people every week. And we weren't the best of friends or anything, but there was just this inherent community there of the most hilarious characters."
The host of the Rocky Sullivan's pub quiz allowed Dicker to sit in as a guest host every now and again, and he fell in love with the game.
When he moved to Colorado in 2002, Dicker sought out the quiz community, but he didn't particularly enjoy what he found. He thought about opening his own room and ran the idea by Peach, a snowboarding buddy who'd sold the IT firm he'd started back in Ohio. "On the lift at Breckenridge one day, he told me how he wanted to try it," Peach remembers. "I wasn't working, and I had started a company before, so I figured why not?"
The two christened their night Geeks Who Drink and kicked off the pub quiz in LoDo, at Nallen's, in June 2005. For the first two weeks, the players were mostly friends the duo dragged to the bar, but pretty soon the night began taking on a life of its own, with regulars turning up every week.
"As soon as we built that first crowd there, I thought, if we can do this in one location, then we can do it in forty," Peach says. Bar owners agreed. Once word got around about the loyal, rabid Geek players — and their liquor tabs — bars came calling.
The Geeks have made trivia hip. They inject humor into nearly every element of their pub quiz: Past games have included a music round titled "Jew or Not a Jew," a round identifying X-rayed items people have placed inside themselves called "Shove It Up Your Ass," and pornographic adult story problems. The Geeks also offer twists on the norm, such as nights when they compete against other cities (Denver recently did battle online against Seattle, Philadelphia and Toronto in the same evening), guest "celebrity" quizmasters (Mike Jones), and rooms where the rules are completely chucked out the window, such as at the Trail Head Tavern in Fort Collins, where analog cheating is allowed and attendees regularly tote encyclopedias and reference books to the bar. Another difference is that the Geeks ask an entire round of trivia, then call for the answer sheets, rather than rely on the standard question-song, question-song format.
"I don't think we're afraid to be a little edgier, a little different," Peach comments. "We're at a bar, we're all adults, so we're not really concerned with offending people. I remember we had Ben Kronberg the comedian come in as a celebrity quizmaster, and he did an entire round on poop. The owner of the bar wasn't thrilled that he walked two tables, but the reality is that we pack the place every week, so they're willing to let us take chances. Plus, most people loved it. They like to see us doing new and different things."
Dicker and Peach are reluctant to talk exact numbers, but they will say that in the past few months they've been able to collect regular paychecks as opposed to sinking every cent back into the company. Dicker, who published The United States of Wal-Mart two years ago, has even been able to cut way back on his writing. "I love the hustle of it," Dicker says. "Even with freelancing, it was like that. I loved writing, but I realized that my favorite part was hoodwinking editors into giving me assignments, and once they accepted the pitch, it was like mission accomplished. Then it was like, oh, shit, I actually have to write this thing. And even though I've written dozens of stories, I always found it bang-my-head-against-the-wall frustrating. Writing a quiz, editing quiz material, giving my blog writers feedback, pitching bars, closing sales, logging on to the website in the morning to see how we did last night here, last night there, what we can do to tweak this so that it works better — I love that there is always something different for me to focus on. Maybe I have ADD or something."
