The Bottleneck Trivia Night

Where: The Bottleneck, 870 Granville Street, right beneath the Commodore

When: 8pm, Wednesdays. You probably don't need a reservation.

Web Presence: This facebook event will keep you up to date.  Confusingly enough, they just keep changing the date for the event instead of setting up a facebook group or page or whatever.

Team Info: The team limit is 8, but they are kind of lax on enforcing it.

Format: 2 Rounds, 15 questions each. No dedicated picture or music round, but those questions do pop up.

Prizes: Top prize is an almost unfathomably good 4 tickets to a show of your choice at The Commodore - apparently including shows that are sold out at the box office. Some quick math: 4 tickets to see Montreal's own Chromeo will set you back $199, including the ridiculous 50 dollars in extra fees. Right of the bat, this puts The Bottleneck's top prize into some pretty rarefied air. Second place is 2 tickets, and third is 0 show tickets. I think it was "merely" a free pitcher of beer.

Food and Drink: $3 beer special (I think it was 1516 or similar). One of our party got some food, and it looked pretty tasty.


The Bottleneck is one of those places that sprung up in the last year while I was away - except that it has been there for more than 2 years. I guess I've never really paid much attention to what happens on that stretch of Granville. Contrary to my expectations, the bar itself as quite pleasant, appropriately hip without seeming like it was putting on airs. Talking Heads posters? Check. Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, screening in the background? Check. A somewhat idiosyncratic collection of Granville bar stars, groups of college kids, and British Columbia Supreme Court Justices (really!)? Check. The Justices did not stick around for the quiz, alas.

The quiz is a short one, and goes by fairly quickly. The night is ably hosted by Matthew Orr, self-proclaimed trivia wizard, who also writes the questions himself. I prefer it when the host crafts their own questions. Not that larger companies don't write good quizzes, but the personal touches are nice. Of course, you get the bad alongside the good there, but it does make it easier to give them shit if there's anything you don't like. Not that you should, it's uncouth.

The questions were solid, although a large number verged on the "You're probably guessing this one" side. While I won't dispute that the current age of Charlize Theron is indeed a trivial fact, it isn't much fun to try and come up with it at a quiz night. There were quite a few 'Name the Year' questions, which were a little bit more fun to tackle. There was also quite a bit of Vancouver/BC/Canadiana. I had a blast trying to remember my Steve Francis facts (The Franchise!) as well as who was Premier in February, 2011, but people from out of town will find this tough. If you're a local, you'll probably have a lot of fun with these questions. Visiting from the United States/Kingdom? You might find a respectable percentage of the questions functionally impossible.


At the end of the night, top honours went to a team with 21 out of 30, a good 7 points clear of your correspondents. Difficult and cleverly crafted questions second guessed us, crossed us over, and left us with broken ankles. There is room for the quiz to grow, so come on down and take a shot at winning the best prizes a Vancouver Pub Quiz has to offer.

If you just want the short version, it was a good quiz with even better prizes.

Trivia Night At Malone's

Looks like the Malone's quiz is no more. Requiescat in pace, The quiz at Malone's.

Where: Malone's, 608 West Pender Street 

When: 8pm, Tuesdays. Reservations neither required nor needed. 

Web Presence: The events section of their website confirms the dates of the quiz, if you're confused. 

Team Info: The team limit is 8, and some of the tables seem large enough to support such. 

Format: 8 Rounds and a bonus round, just like that at The Manchester. You can also pull up to 5 bonus points for drawing a picture, so bring someone who can draw, I guess. 

Prizes: $25 gift certificate to Malone's, which can't be used until the next week. While a good plan to get people coming back, it might not do much for someone who's just dropping in for a week. 

Food and Drink: Meh. It won't kill you, but neither will it thrill you. They do have drink specials for trivia night - A Steamworks Pilsner for $4.13. You could do a lot worse than that. 

Freshly arrived from vacation, and having no duties relating to employment at all, we decided to spend our Tuesday night catching up with friends, all the while checking out a new pub quiz. I've known about Malone's for awhile, but due to a decent schedule, I never really got around to checking it out. 

The crowd was thin compared to most other quiz nights, with only about 5 tables competing. I think the quizzers were outnumbered by non-quizzers, which was a first for me to see at a quiz in Vancouver. This could be a result of a slow night, a quiz that hasn't quite gained enough traction yet or maybe since Malone's is attached to The Cambie Hostel, and as such functions as a impromptu meeting place/pre-game/common room for travellers, most of whom aren't hanging out at a hostel for pub quiz. The sound system only seemed to work on one side of the bar, and even then it was pretty fuzzy and tough to hear over the ambient music (no, not like Brian Eno). It appears to be a quiz tolerated but perhaps not encouraged by the management, based on the atmosphere. 

The questions themselves were pretty good. A decent mix of pop culture and more eggheaded stuff. They had a pretty fun photo round were you provided silhouettes of fictional characters and you had to identify them. Art, the quizmaster, erred on the side of sanity and accepted "Tom Hanks and Wilson," based (on can infer) on the assumption that the name Chuck Noland never stuck in anyone's head. Everything followed a similar flow to that of the Manchester (I think they are both run by Nice Guys Trivia, who specialize in Donnolly pubs, but I'm not exactly sure), but the music round was orders of magnitude harder. Instead of getting a point for knowing that a song was either done by Guns N Roses, OR that it was titled "Sweet Child 'O Mine", the quiz was instead fastidiously awarding half points for knowing that the song was "Manic Monday," and that the band was Reliant K. While I'm not a fan of arbitrarily difficult questions - I agree with Mike re: The Cove's facebook only questions - I do like deep knowledge questions like that where you have to earn your points. If I was a Reliant K fan, I'd have been very happy to get that. 

Another plus for this quiz is that it goes fast, and that there are a lot of questions. I approve of a "No fucking around" approach to a quiz. It will save us all time in the long run, and we've got a finite supply of that. There's a lot of questions, and you don't manage to feel rushed, or bored due to extensive downtime. The balance is deftly struck. 

The food is borderline average bar stuff, but the drink specials are decent. One suspects they don't have your proper 20oz pints per CAMRA standards, but that's a rare bird indeed.

In conclusion, this felt like a good quiz run in a decent locale that was more or less indifferent to its existence. The amiable and speedy quizmaster runs a tight ship, and I was happily surprised to have as good a time as I did. In a head to head with Relish, I don't think it has quite the atmosphere yet, but the questions were solid, in one reviewer's opinion. We were also told that they will be running the equivalent of a "Quiz of Champions" sometime in the future. I don't have the information on that yet, but one can assume the prizes will be larger, and the competition fiercer. We'll make sure to keep you posted.

Returnal

Another quick administrative post. As previously discussed, I was out travelling, but now I am returned. The quizzes seemed to have multiplied while I was away, so it looks like there will be super new reviews coming up. First in line are a pair of quizzes downtown - Malone's and The Bottleneck.

My co-blogger Mike, who has been doing a fantastic job in my stead, and will continue to update the blog as well. Rumour has it he's trying to start up a few quizzes of his own. Stay tuned!

The Cove, Redux

Where: The Cove, 3681 West 4th

When: 8pm every Monday

Web Presence:  The facebook group has quiz info and flat out gives away three answers each week, which you'll want to take note of because the corresponding questions are unbelievably difficult.

Registration Fee: Nobody really does these anymore, so from here on assume a quiz is free unless we tell you otherwise

Team Info: No de jure team limit, but the compactness of the venue and corresponding smallness of the furniture will make it tough to get more than six around a single table

Format: Three rounds of 15 questions each

Prizes: Free shots given out for funny answers or creative team names, as adjudged by the host.

No, Hassan, it's poker chips now

The new hosting regime also carries on the "magic keys" prize format, with numbered poker chips substituted for the previous macguffins. After each round, the first, second, and third place teams receive three, two, or one chips, respectively, and the total points winner after all three rounds gets a free pitcher and eight chips. The host then draws a random number, and whichever team holds the chip with that number wins their choice of grand prize: a $50 Cove gift certificate, or the contents of a mystery box.



Food and Drink: Won't thrill you. I also tried a Blood Alley beer which I didn't care for in the least.

This blog reviewed The Cove back in 2012; since then, however, the old Kits watering hole has gone through two changes of hosting duties, so we thought it prudent to give it another go -- especially since Cascade's What the #!*@?'s recent retirement has left a great void on the Monday night quiz calendar.

Reading back over that review, it seems things under the new stewardship are substantially the same as they were then, but there seem to have been a few changes, mostly for the better.

I never tried the Cove quiz under the previous host, but the new emcee tends the helm well. Chris writes the questions himself and his tastes incline somewhat to the geeky; last night we got a point last night for knowing that Peppy's famous exhortation in Star Fox 64 was "Do a barrel roll!" and I'm sure future weeks will have similar such content in store.

As opposed to the previous two freelancers, Chris is an in-house host, doubling as Cove's marketing manager, one especially pleasant consequence of which is that he can give out free drinks essentially whenever he pleases, which is quite often. Come up with a witty joke answer and you've got a very good chance of winning your table a round of shots. And on the subject of complimentary spirits, the night I was there, the quiz was apparently sponsored by Canadian Club who had brought in a pair of Cactus-Club-waitress-types to dole out Dixie-cup-sized samples of their whisky.

As for my nitpicky critique, I'll say this: if you want to hint an answer on facebook, that's OK; give the answer outright, if you must; but something's wrong when the question is so impossible that you could only get it right from being given the answer. For example, who played "Stock Boy" in Home Alone? His subsequent appearance in 1997's Picture Perfect notwithstanding, I'd place Jim Ryan well outside the canon of suitable quiz answers. This goes a bit beyond the pale of rewarding those who follow your social media to additionally punish those who don't. (I also challenge the figure of two-hundred-something total deaths in the Game of Thrones series so far. The Battle on the Blackwater alone claimed several thousand casualties! Did we mean named characters? Please specify next time!)

The more I think about it, the more I like the magic keys prize format. While elite teams are still rewarded for their knowledge, lesser contenders can still compete and have a good chance of taking home the big prize. No more juggernauts running wild week after week. Call it enforced egalitarianism, but this seems like an idea too good to stay confined to one venue -- don't be surprised if every quiz in town is giving out poker chips, keys, ping pong balls, or buttons before long.

Our last reviewer had it about right the last time. This is a strong quiz with a good host, a fun mechanic for giving away the big prize (it was a full-size metal toboggan this week!), and the steady flow of free shots and pitchers are a pleasing addition.

Why you don't ask about city populations

Oops

Back on October 16, the fourth and final round at Moose's Down Under consisted of a single question which provided players a list of 10 of the world's great megacities and asked each team to rank them in descending order of population.

I suspect that the question writer believed that the question, which could score anything from 0 to 10 points, would result in a point distribution resembling a normal bell curve. What it produced instead was a mushroom cloud. The approximately 13 teams playing combined for a collective two points.

Fortunately, even an accidental nuclear blast can be a teaching moment, and there are two lessons to be learned in this case: (1) don't ask questions about relative city populations; and (2) don't ask players to compare numbers that are really close to each other.

There are a host of reasons why, which I'll explain below, and demonstrate how Moose's question managed to trip just about all of them, a fact which virtually guaranteed disaster.

1. There are multiple ways to measure the population of a city, and none of them are authoritative or universally accepted

The predominant issue with relative city population ranking is one of definitions. When one talks about the population of a city, does one mean the population that lives only within the municipal city limits? Or should one ignore the imaginary line on Boundary Road and instead regard the city as an organic phenomenon, consisting of anyone who lives within a single socioeconomic aura? An even broader view defines a city as any blob or smear of contiguous urban area, even if it includes separate, non-overlapping auras.

Consider an everyday example that illustrates the problem: if your apartment is in Coquitlam, would you when abroad introduce yourself as a Vancouverite?

Unfortunately, which metric you choose makes a huge difference. According to the metropolitan agglomeration definition, Vancouver boasts over 3 million inhabitants and rounds out the great triumvirate of Canada's big three cities with Toronto and Montreal. If, however, you insist on formal city boundaries, our hometown scarcely clears 600,000 and finishes a mortifying eighth behind an ignoble crop of welterweight contenders including Calgary, Ottawa, and even Winnipeg.

This is by no means an unusual situation. Take a look at this handy table and notice that Tokyo may be the world's biggest city, or, perhaps, only 14th; Istanbul likewise is about 20th by metropolitan standards, but vaults to 2nd biggest by municipal boundaries.

Wolfmother

Hence much of the difficulty in Moose's puzzle. Tokyo and Istanbul were both among the cities teams were supposed to consider. Though players had no way to know this at the time, the question writer was operating from the municipal definition, which put the Japanese capital way down near the bottom of the list and old Constantinople near the top.

The lesson here, question writers, is that definition matters. You might attempt to get around this by specifying the metric in play, but this runs the risk of a) confusing players and b) coming off as excessively arbitrary (that is, if a player asks you why only this-or-that definition, what else can you say but "that's the one I chose so the question works," which is not much of an answer).

Therefore I think the better move is to use cities that are so far apart in population that their relative size remains the same in any system or combination of systems. As an easy example, Victoria-Boston-Sao Paulo leaves no room for error. Crafting a less obvious list will be a challenge for the writer, but can probably be done.

2. The margins for error were stupefyingly small

A quantitative look at the cities Moose's included in their question reveals that the differences between the population figures were so razor-thin that even if everyone had known exactly which population measurement was in play, there would not have been much improvement in scores.

I crunched some numbers using this list of municipal populations and discovered that, among the ten cities Moose's players were asked to rank, the average difference between each city and the next largest was only 7 percent, and only exceeded a 10 percent margin in two instances. Mumbai and Moscow, which ranked 4 and 5 on the list, have a difference of only 4 percent; Moscow and Beijing, 5 and 6, are only 2 percent different. The difference between 8th and 9th place was smallest of all: only 1 percent--less than 100,000 people in a total of 9 million--separates Tokyo from Mexico City. This is a small relative difference indeed, and seems even less significant when one considers the error factor built into the measurement, as well as the fact that city populations are changing all the time and at different rates.


Probably no one will disagree that distinguishing two figures with only a four-parts-in-one-hundred difference between them is, in general, too much to ask of players. I'd instead suggest 10 percent as an absolute minimum difference between figures if players are expected to compare them. This is based partly on my intuition and my experience in trivia, but the main reason being (and my apologies to the non-mathematically inclined) that my 10-percent rule means that players need never consider more than two significant figures.

In conclusion, the which-city-is-bigger-than-which question is a risky venture. Players generally don't know which population definition is in effect, which can introduce a kind of unintentional and artificial difficulty to the question.

Furthermore when players are expected to compare two or more numbers, those numbers can be close, but in my view should be different by no less than 10 percent. 

Moose's quiz is a superb one, but their cities question was a definite misfire. Still, it might have been fixed. In the first place, instead of selecting the 10 cities from the top 14, use the top 30 instead. This would both space out the margins between them and lessen the impact of using the wrong definition of city size.

Darby's now running monthly league competition

Darby's pub has introduced a new competition that adds an extra level of excitement to their already excellent product.

Throughout November, the results of each weekly quiz will also count towards a monthly leader board; total points scored carry over from week to week, and the team who tally the most at the end of the month win a spectacular prize pack including Steamworks beer and branded glassware, a Darby's gift certificate, custom printed winners' t-shirts with the team name screened on it, and a grand prize yet to be determined. (The prize has been awarded once already, and it was Whitecaps tickets, so expect something equally big).

Quizmaster Katie plans to repeat the Monthly Cup at least through the winter, and perhaps on indefinitely thereafter. As if you needed another reason to go.

This columnist's only complaint is that I keep declaring this or that pub to have the best prizes in the city, and then another goes one better and makes a liar of me. Truly are we living in a golden age of Vancouver bar trivia!

Darby’s runs every Thursday at the corner of 4th Avenue and Macdonald.

Cascade's What the #!*@? Quiz -- a mainstay of the Vancouver quizzing scene -- coming to an end

Sad tidings indeed from Main Street. Karen, the longtime quizmeister of the Cascade Room, has announced that effective next month, that establishment's venerable quiz will be no more--at least as a regularly-scheduled event. From their official facebook page:

Now for those of you who were not with us last night, an announcement! After more than 5 1/2 years, 165 quizzes and close to $30,000 raised for more than 70 charities, our What the #!*@? Quiz night is coming to an end. Our last quiz will be Monday, November 25th…please come and join us for a fond farewell…I've enjoyed almost every single second of it

I will continue with some special event Quiz Nights as well as Quiz Nights on request so keep in touch! This is not "goodbye"…it's "most likely see you soon". So I'll expect to see lots of familiar faces on the 25th xo k

For those who don't know, Cascade is one of Vancouver's longest-running and greatest pub quizzes. Many Vancouverites first caught the pub trivia bug there, including, I am sure, at least a few individuals who now run quizzes of their own. Yet none of them have ever duplicated the sheer quizzing pleasure of Cascade, which was probably best encapsulated in their famous "what's-in-the-shot" rounds, the likes of which we may never see again.

The continued success of Cascade owes everything to Karen's extraordinary commitment to her craft. Each week (and later, fortnightly, and eventually monthly) she would hammer out a full set of questions, the freshness of which was attested by the habitual inquisitions on the news of the day and other happenings of only a few days' vintage. Her annual Quiz of Champions, an invitational grand prix featuring only winning teams of the past year was yet another (hugely successful) expression of the same--for participants it was nothing less than the Wimbledon of Vancouver quizzery.

True to the progressive ethos of Mount Pleasant, 100 percent of proceeds from the quiz went to a local charity of the players' choosing, a fact which makes abundantly clear that the undertaking was, at bottom, a labour of love and not a mercenary ploy to pump up Tuesday night patronage (though that it certainly did).

After more than a half-decade of unflagging quality, the departure of What the #!*@? is to be sorely lamented. As mentioned above, Cascade's final regular quiz takes place November 25 and is sure to be a night to remember.