by Lisa Haglund
Contributing Writer
When you’re sitting in class listening to a lecture, do you ever wonder what your teachers do on their off time?
If you find yourself in the University District any Thursday night, go to the World Cup and you may find out. Every Thursday at 8 p.m. Chip Dodd, instructor of Geography Shoreline, puts on the trivia quiz at the World Cup Wine & Coffee Club. Frequented by instructors from Shoreline Community College and the University of Washington, as well as students and former students from both, it’s a popular night with around 30 to 40 people regularly playing.
As soon as you open the door at 5200 Roosevelt, you’re enveloped by the sounds of excited chatter and laughter with a tinge of braggadocio, all of it colored by nerves. It’s 7:50 at the World Cup; the quiz starts in just 10 minutes. People are collecting their generously poured glasses of wine and steaming-hot cups of coffee and tea.
About 40 contestants who are gearing up for tonight’s quiz fill the comfortable room. If the games played over the last couple of weeks are any indication of what’s about to happen, there’s some serious competition ahead. Most of the large wooden tables in this small wine bar are already taken. Dodd is tearing apart tickets for the game and passing them out to the players, while teams count and hand over their dollars.
If you think playing a trivia game against a team of your teachers is a lost cause, think again. Last October, a team of former Shoreline students, and a team of current Shoreline teachers known as the Shoreline Liberation Army (or SLA), found themselves locked in a tie-breaker for two weeks.
The teachers ended up winning the first week, but a week later the former Shoreline students toppled the SLA and claimed the prize for first place: 70 percent of the entry fees at $2 per person. Second place gets 30 percent of the pot, and each night the World Cup raffles off bottles of wine or other gifts.
Just two weeks ago there was another tie-breaker between another former student team called "Only In It For the Money" and the SLA. It came down to a climate question. While recounting the story with Dodd, one of the Only In It For the Money team members grinned.
“We triumphed,” he said with a smug satisfaction.
The trivia quiz, also known as a pub quiz, is extremely popular in the U.K. as well as certain cities in the United States, particularly in pubs and bars. Dodd, the Quizmaster at the World Cup, has also heard reports of the trivia quiz phenomenon invading Australia.
The trivia quiz reached its peak in Britain in the 1990’s, though at the time Seattle was just catching on. Now there are between 20 and 30 trivia quizzes going on at different venues in the city. They are usually held on week nights, and in Seattle trivia quizzes may be found at bars, pubs, taverns, clubs and wine bars; they are no longer the trappings of just our city’s British style pubs.
Dodd began playing trivia nights over a decade ago at the English style George & Dragon pub in Fremont, and at Murphy’s Irish Pub in Wallingford. He played with friends and colleagues from the UW and neighborhood locals. Just last year one of his friends encouraged him to start his own trivia quiz, and he’s been the Quizmaster at the World Cup since.
Every Quizmaster is in charge of selecting the topics for each quiz every week, often with several questions asked in each category. There is no universal set of rules and procedures for these contests (see box). Some Quizmasters incorporate visual and audio clues for certain questions, adding to the entertainment factor. At the World Cup a large flat-screen TV is mounted above Dodd, where visual clues or short movie clips are shown. The monitor also displays the written questions to the teams after Dodd has read them aloud. A few minutes pass to let teammates deliberate until an answer is agreed upon.
Trivia subjects vary from week to week. A recent quiz night featured categories ranging from Brought to You By the Number 5, (where the answers to each question had the number 5 in them, i.e. “Hawaii 5 0”, or “The Jackson 5”), to Google King County (players were shown a topographic map taken from Google Earth of a certain area in King County and had to identify the site, i.e. Gasworks Park, or Factoria Mall).
The difficulty of the questions changes from place to place. The Thursday night trivia quiz at the World Cup in the U-district is run by a Geography instructor, but it’s certainly not a science quiz. The World Cup Trivia night may be more challenging than some, but the teachers are beatable.
Former students of Dodd’s from the UW are also giving the teacher’s team a run for the money. The first place prize may not be enough to pay for your text books next quarter, but you could have a good time winning it. Playing the Trivia Quiz at the World Cup may also provide an opportunity to see what some of your instructors at Shoreline do for fun when they’re not in class.
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