AT 7:51PM ON A COLD TUESDAY NIGHT, customers make a steady stream in through the door at London Bridge Pub in Monterey. Tony Malokas greets many by name as they hand over a dollar bill, grab an answer sheet and retreat to their area of the sprawling bar. There’s no time to waste – trivia starts at 8pm sharp.
An older man who has been sitting at the bar wanders up to Malokas. “I’ve never been to one of your trivia nights before,” he says. “Can you tell me about it?”
Malokas runs through the basics – $1 to play, 51 questions, winner takes all.
“Can you give me a sample question?” the man asks.
“Sure,” Malokas says, reaching – apparently effortlessly – into his vast mental vault. “What are the four state capitals named after presidents?”
“Hmmm,” the man intones. “That’s a good question! You got me thinking.”
And with that, he ambles away.
Soon 8pm comes and the trivia begins.
Q: With roughly 25 years of experience, who is probably the longest-running trivia night host on the Monterey Peninsula?
Tony Malokas wasn’t necessarily an obvious trivia host, but he does really love trivia. His knowledge of superlatives and lists and stats is wide. Did you know that despite being a beloved American rock icon, Bruce Springsteen has never had a Billboard Hot 100 number-one hit? Or that Wyoming, a 97,914-square-mile state, is home to just two escalators?
It all began years ago when Malokas was playing trivia regularly at the now-defunct Mucky Duck. One week the bar needed a backup host and Malokas offered to fill in. “It was a little intimidating because I was 26 and I was a shy kid,” Malokas says. He must have pulled it off, though, because the gig stuck: Malokas has been hosting trivia for about 25 years now, starting at the Mucky Duck (which later became the Bull and Bear, before closing permanently) and then moving to London Bridge. There was a hiatus when London Bridge changed ownership, but Malokas estimates he’s been back in action for about 15 years since bar owner John Eales “coaxed [him] out of retirement.”
“I really enjoy it,” says Malokas, who in his day job works as a caddie at Pebble Beach. “Of course when you’re a player you’re like, they should ask this! And, they should ask that! Now I can.”
Trivia at London Bridge happens on Tuesdays, but it begins on Sundays with the weekly writing of the questions. Malokas gets ideas from trivia books (he’s got stacks and stacks of them), and also from the internet. Wikipedia’s sortable list pages are an especially good resource, he says.
Still, like any writing, quiz questions are about more than just the content. “It’s very easy to make ambiguous trivia questions,” Malokas says. That won’t do – contestants have been known to argue for more points if they’re marked as getting a question wrong but feel confusing wording contributed to that.
A good trivia question, according to Malokas, is one that some people know and some people don’t. That might sound a bit tautological, but it also gets to the heart of something important about the genre – trivia is by definition random, but it shouldn’t be so out there that no one has a chance at answering. That can be a trickier line to walk than one might expect.
To make things simple, Malokas conceives of his questions in categories and writes them according to a loose formula. There’s geography (“very age – and gender-neutral”), history, sports (divisive), pop culture/current events (pop culture is very balkanized these days, Malokas reflects, so this category especially rewards a diverse team) and science. Science questions are difficult to write, but always popular, Malokas says – sometimes, when enough time has passed, he’ll will dip back into his own archives. Reduce, reuse, recycle: Brass is an alloy of what two chemical elements? Phobos and Deimos are moons of what planet?
The quiz tends to frontload easier questions (so as not to scare away any newcomers right off the bat) and balance the difficulty level. But Malokas’ perspective is that “it’s OK to have really hard questions, as long as there are only a couple of them.”
Overall, the London Bridge quiz isn’t exactly easy – nor should it be. It caters to a longtime crowd of regulars, with 75 to 80 percent of the 70 to 90 people who fill this bar coming back week after week, Malokas says. It’s trivia by and for trivia lovers.
“There’s a subset of people in the world who are curious about everything – and they love to show off what they know,” Malokas says. Here, they can. And anyway, “what else are you going to do on a Tuesday night in Monterey?”
Q: In the 1950s, a bunch of popular TV game shows were taken off the air after it was revealed that they were rigged. Who is credited as the primary whistleblower in this debacle?
Trivia’s history is full of good trivia questions. The word “trivia” is derived from the Latin “trivialis” (found everywhere, commonplace) and “trivium” (crossroads). In medieval times, Trivium referred to a tri-fold educational pursuit – grammar, logic and rhetoric – that preceded Quadrivium, where students learned arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. In these roots, one can see the beginnings of what “trivia” has come to mean today – it involves facts and knowledge, yes, but pretty random facts and knowledge.
Histories seem to agree that it was the 1902 book Trivialities: Bits of Information of Little Consequence, written by British aphorist Logan Pearsall Smith, that firmly established the modern understanding and definition of the word trivia.
Trivia as a game first rose to prominence in the 1950s with a rush of TV game shows like The $64,000 Question, Twenty-One and Dotto. These shows enjoyed high ratings until it was revealed – thanks in part to disgruntled former Twenty-One contestant Herb Stempel – that producers were coaching contestants to fix the outcomes.
In an October 1959 story for The New Yorker, John Updike wrote about the cultural impact of the deception: “The appeal of the programs, with the rising challenge of Soviet brain power as a backdrop, was ultimately patriotic; the contestants were selected to be a cross-section of our nation just as deliberately as the G.I.s in a war movie are,” he wrote. “There we bravely sat in our living rooms, sweating it out with this or that Shakespeare-reading poultry farmer or chemistry-minded chorus girl, and there they were on the other side of the blurred little screen, patting (not wiping) their brows with handkerchiefs, biting their tongues as instructed, stammering out rehearsed answers, gasping with relief at the expected cry of congratulation. And we sat there, a nation of suckers, for years.”
The shows were pulled from the air, and in 1960 Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit this kind of behavior in the future.
Pub trivia or bar trivia, finally, is an in-person version of the game that emerged in England in the 1970s. It was developed as a way to get people to patronize bars during the slower days of the midweek. It proved successful and spread – today trivia nights abound in cities across America and there are at least 10 active, regular trivia nights in Monterey County, from Fernwood in Big Sur to The Links Club in Carmel to Nacho Bizness in Monterey and XL Public House in Salinas.
And trivia nights seem to pay off for the bars that host them. Pre-pandemic, trivia Tuesday at London Bridge Pub could pull a crowd of over 100 each week with a record, owner John Eales says, of 220 (“In the winter!”). These days, it’s usually closer to 90 – but that’s a decent-sized crowd for the waterfront bar, especially in the winter months when tourists are fewer. At Other Brother Beer Co. in Seaside, where trivia has been on the menu for a little over a year, co-founder and Operations Manager Michael Nevares says Tuesdays have become one of the bar’s busier days of the week – comparable to a Friday. “We have a lot of regulars – it’s become a pretty crucial thing for the community and for our business,” he says. “Our staff is definitely making more money in tips on those nights.”
Each trivia night has its own style of gameplay, its own rules and rewards, and each seems to attract a slightly different crowd. Not all trivia nights rely on a host – there are myriad online companies and services these days that will provide trivia questions for a subscription fee. Some bars keep it simple and opt for this. But for others, the host is an integral part of the experience – part instructor, part performer and all-time keeper of the keys to the questions.
Q: Which local trivia host once used a mole to decipher whether a team was cheating?
In the modern bar trivia setting, it’s so easy to cheat. We all carry a phone, and thus access to the world’s knowledge, with us at all times. At trivia night at Hacienda in Carmel Valley, players are required to stash their phones in a communal basket for the duration of the game. But not all bars have this kind of policy – so what’s to stop a gift card or cash-reward-hungry team from trying to rig the game in their favor?
Long-time host Malokas recalls one team that he suspected was cheating – they were just doing too well, too consistently, week after week. So he conscripted a friend and instructed her to join the team. The week she did, their score tanked. (Teams score each other’s quizzes at London Bridge, so group accountability is always part of the game.) Armed with this evidence, Malokas confronted the team and told them they had to stop cheating in order to be welcomed back. “Most people who cheat don’t think it through,” he says.
Still, Malokas adds, cheating is “surprisingly rare.” In 25 years of hosting, it’s only come up only a few times for him – perhaps it’s just not in the spirit of trivia night.
Q: Who began her trivia hosting career using the popular video chat software Zoom?
Noah Doss and Lindsay Hutchings were really missing trivia. Wednesday night trivia at Bull and Bear had been a habit for them since they began dating in 2019. But then the pandemic happened and trivia nights were put on pause. So Hutchings decided to take matters into her own hands.
“I really missed trivia, so I decided to start hosting it on Zoom for friends,” she says.
That didn’t last forever, but it did give Hutchings an inkling that she might enjoy being on the other side of the mic. She started the Instagram account Monterey Bay Trivia (@mb.trivia) and began posting “Trivia Tuesday” questions. In the fall, The Whisky Club in Monterey reached out to ask if the duo might want to host an IRL trivia night – they began in November, and currently host twice a month on Thursdays.
The quiz tends to involve 30-40 questions, at least a couple of which are about whisky. Hutchings, an aesthetician by day, writes the questions and hosts the evening. Doss, a math professor at CSU Monterey Bay, serves as editor and adviser.
Compared to other hosts, Hutchings seems to have a more evolutionary way of writing her quiz – rather than setting out to write questions, she finds questions as things come up in various places in her life. “I never know how to answer this question [about how I write trivia],” Hutchings says. “Because I feel like my answer is very unsatisfactory. But in all honesty, it’s just whatever feels good.”
She does rely on ongoing news and local events for possible question areas or ideas – she did a lot of research into the history of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am when it was happening, for example. “I love watching documentaries,” she adds. “And sometimes when I watch something I’m like, this is a great question! And I pause it and I just write something down.”
Doss serves as her sounding board. “I’ve been going to trivia since undergrad,” Doss says. “So a lot of what I bring to the table is I’ll look at a question and go, Ooohhhh, that’s a good one!’”
A good one, per Doss, is a question with multiple points of entry – one that gives different people, from different walks of life, a chance at a correct answer. “The tiny intersection of two interests – that’s where trivia is at its most fun,” he says.
Doss and Hutchings might be new to hosting, but they’ve already got regulars. “And one of our regular groups, they go to every trivia,” Hutchings says. “It’s incredible. Basically every day they play trivia.”
Q: Whose family history with trivia includes solving a medical mystery with the help of the game show Jeopardy!?
For all its fun and frivolity, trivia can be quite serious, too. And despite its reputation as a game full of small pieces of useless information, it might prove incredibly useful. Noah Doss has seen it happen firsthand.
“My dad actually self-diagnosed a medicine side effect because of Jeopardy!” the Whisky Club co-host/quiz editor says. “He was taking a heart medicine for a period of time, and he was watching Jeopardy! every night… and he realized, ‘I keep knowing an answer and I can’t call it forth. I know I knew that answer and I know I knew the one before it and the one before that. But I wasn’t able to produce the answer.’
“And we were kind of like, well, you know, you’re nearing 60. And he goes, ‘No no no, this is something different.’ So he went and looked into it, and found that this is an extremely rare side effect of the heart medicine. He knew – ‘I should be doing better at Jeopardy! than I am today’ – and that is how he figured it out!”
The elder Doss is now off that medication, keeping healthy with regular walks and a good diet. He still watches Jeopardy! regularly – often after walking the dog in the morning.
Q: Which Monterey County trivia host plays songs between questions that may (or may not) hint at an answer?
It’s a Tuesday night in Seaside and Other Brother Beer Co. is packed. Teams of people spill from picnic tables and crowd around high tops. Host JD Bates comes over the loudspeaker to announce that the competition, at 25 teams, is full.
“If you haven’t got in yet – make eyes with someone and see if you can join a team,” he suggests.
Bates got into hosting for the performance of it. He calls these appearances “shows” and says that, even with all the work that goes into creating question sets, it is worth it – “I like being part of the party,” he says. (That extends through his work life – through his company U Sing Karaoke, Bates hosts karaoke on Wednesday nights at the Bulldog and Thursday nights at Other Brother. He spends the rest of his week working as a server.)
One round of Other Brother trivia is just 10 questions (there are two rounds per night), but it comes with a twist – for each question, teams must wager a point number (1-10) depending on how confident they are in the answer. Questions are asked one at a time, after which teams have two minutes to write down an answer and a wager and turn it in to Bates. While Bates intentionally includes questions he considers both easy and hard, he’s OK with the idea that some might be beyond his audience. “When nobody knows the answer we all learn something,” he says.
After all the answers are in, Bates reads the correct answer to the question and the room fills with a mixture of groans and cheers. Teams note whether they got it right or not, and it’s on to the next.
To contribute to the party atmosphere, Bates plays music during the two-minute answer periods. And not just any music – his playlist is carefully curated to complement a question or suggest (or perhaps misdirect!) an answer. A question one recent night about alcohol, for example (“What amendment repealed prohibition?”), is followed by the LMFAO hit “Shots.” (The answer is the 21st Amendment.) Bates says he spends three to five hours each week coming up with the questions, and at least another hour crafting the playlist.
“It’s a lot of unseen work,” he says. But Bates holds himself to a high standard of entertainment – trivia night at Other Brother is, above all, a good time.
“I try to look at it like being an entertainer is about the person being entertained,” he says. “I try to bring value to their experience. I want to do something the best I possibly can, because that’s kind of how I take everything… people say they’re having more fun at mine and I’m like that’s right, all right, cool. That’s my goal.”