Sandy Jack’s – Greenwood – Thursdays @ 8 pm

The Trivia: Five themed rounds of eight questions each with one bonus round. Zac is a solid host, moving efficiently through the questions, repeating them when necessary, enunciating the right words, and effectively calming down the rowdy crowd. My favorite part of Lit Up Trivia is that the host invites the two last place teams to come up and choose among a few options for the categories for round 3. Involving the last place teams is a great way to make trivia night feel more inclusive, and it’s impressive that there are several rounds just ready to go depending on the players’ choices. The questions themselves are hit and miss. Some are interesting (loved the questions about Leinenkugel’s and George W. Bush wanting to be commissioner of baseball), but many are too ambiguous to be anything but guessed at, or just frustrating. I’ll nitpick a few in particular.

What “R” Beatles song is track 13 on the White Album? Answer: Rocky Raccoon. There’s a couple reasons this is not my favorite question:
1) There’s nothing especially interesting about a song being track 13 on an album, so there’s no hidden trivia or even a path that could lead to the correct answer unless you specifically know the exact track order of the White Album. There are so many more interesting approaches to asking a question about Rocky Raccoon (like that it inspired the name of a Marvel character, or it was adapted from a poem called “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”, or that Donovan made contributions to the lyrics, but no… it’s track 13!)
2) If you wanted to guess the answer to this question, why wouldn’t you guess “Revolution 1”? It’s a far more popular Beatles song that is ALSO on the White album (track 25 if memorizing Beatles album track listings is your kind of thing). Or you could go with that song’s weird partner “Revolution 9” (obviously well known as track 29), which has plenty of interesting trivia around it (did you know it’s actually the longest Beatles track at over 8 minutes in length?).
So this leads you to the awkward moment of just trying to read the trivia writer’s mind, and flipping the proverbial coin. Maybe some people like that, but I prefer trivia to be more about skill of recall and making connections, and I don’t think it’s a worthwhile endeavor to memorize the track listing of every Beatles album just to answer this particular question.

What animal recently broke into a house in Tennessee and snuggled in the owners’ bed? Answer: A Dog.
This isn’t really trivia. It just relies on having heard of this particular story which was a month old at the time of the trivia. Sounds like the host was listening to “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me…” while writing these questions.

What is “liquid pred”: an alcohol, a medicine, or an oil-based fuel? Answer: medicine.
I don’t like this question at all. Firstly, it sounds like “liquid bread”, and the host didn’t spell it out for us, so anybody who wasn’t listening for the p-pop on the microphone would assume that he was talking about the slang term for a full-bodied beer and move on with their lives. It’s actually Liquid Prednisone, an oral medicine used to treat arthritis among other things. Stupid; frustrating. Thirdly, it’s multiple choice. If you have to make your question multiple choice, just write a different question. Nobody wants to feel like they’re back at school. On top of that, this question is worth three times as much as any question from prior rounds that were far better written.

Fill in the blank: I’ll be home for Christmas, you can _______ on me. I actually really enjoyed the Christmas blanks round (even though it doesn’t make much sense to do this round in June). The selection of which words to bleep really led to some hilarious moments. I’m singling this one out because, depending on the version of the song, the lyric is either “plan” or “count”. The host played the Bublé version, which I was confident was “count on me”. He said the lyric was “plan on me”. It wasn’t. It’s count. Nothing bugs me more than a trivia writer getting their own question wrong. It’s sloppy and leads to frustration, especially for the poor host, who now has to sit there and argue with angry inebriated people.

Okay, you get the point. I think Craig has potential as a question writer, but the quality is below the level of Jeopardy, and those writers write over 300 questions a week, so I expect the more boutique scene of bar trivia to have higher quality than that.

The prize is a round of drinks & shots for first place. A decent value if you have a big team, but most bars give out a bar tab, so this prize is pretty disappointing. Nothing for second place. Even more disappointing.

The Venue: Sandy Jack’s is quite dive-y. There is a pool table… which means there are people playing pool… and they probably aren’t playing trivia… and they don’t really care that trivia is happening. I actually love playing pool at bars, but it was a bit distracting during the question reading, and the bar was quite rowdy overall. At one point, there was a dog running back and forth. For you, maybe that’s a plus, maybe that’s a minus, but I figured I’d mention it. There’s also a couple pinball machines at the front (fun). The bar has some food (pizza and chips) and a decent variety of beers on tap. Plenty of shot specials and sports on the televisions, but you can only see them if you’re sitting at the bar.