Paddy’s of Park Slope – South Slope – Thursdays @ 7 pm

The Trivia: Four themed rounds of seven questions each. Each week, there is a themed image round, a themed audio round, a themed regular round, then a “throwback” round that consists of random trivia questions from previous weeks (definitely an advantage for the regular teams). Teams can double the points of one of the rounds if they feel they did well. It’s a relatively small amount of questions and host Tommy Eyebrows energetically keeps the pace moving quickly, so the night ends up being over by 8:30. It’s over so quickly, you could almost do a “bang bang” and hit up another trivia night nearby right after. Why not?

Trivia night at Paddy’s feels very old-fashioned (which is a plus for an old-head like me, even though the host called me young lol). There’s a lot of banter with the bartenders and the “regular” teams (you know, THOSE TEAMS that win every week), and an intimate environment that makes it feel like this trivia has been running for years rather than only the few months that it has. At some other places, the host can demonstrate favoritism with certain teams, but Tommy was very friendly, having conversations with each team of newcomers, making all feel welcome and included. He offers raffle tickets to win a mystery prize (but really it’s to get some extra tips lol don’t hate the playa…).

The questions ranged from easy to hard throughout the rounds and assessed a wide variety of knowledge bases. Bring a team with breadth, but keep in mind that there is a 4 person limit, which is a bit of a bummer. I don’t fully agree with the necessity of putting an upper limit on team size. I think there are inherent qualities of pub trivia that encourage people to keep their team sizes reasonable: 1) splitting the prize too many ways makes it essentially worthless, 2) there are serious diminishing returns on adding more members, and 3) a team of 8 or more people probably only has 4 of them actually taking it seriously anyway. Also, if you’re going to put a limit, 4 is definitely too low. I think SIX is a fine upper limit if that’s something you really care about, but in the end, don’t you want to encourage teams to bring more people? If a team of four is dominating weekly, what can another group really do to compete if they can’t invite more people? If it seriously becomes a problem where a SUPERLARGE team is dominating each week, a better solution is to just talk to that team and ask if they would like to split up, rather than making a rule to force them. If I have a team of five, I guess I’ll just have to go to a different bar.

The Venue: Paddy’s is pretty small. It’s cute, I’d even say. Plenty of beers on tap and sports on the TVs. They don’t have any food, which is a shame because I’m normally pretty hungry at 7 pm, but you can order food at a nearby food truck or restaurant and eat it in the bar (although the wait time at the taco truck around the corner was fully 30 minu- aaaaand I JUST realized it was Cinco de Mayo, so YMMV).