Head to the Old Pequliar in Ballard if you want in on a raucous evening of pub trivia.

Sign up starts at 7:45, the quiz starts at 8, but tables often get scarce by 7.

It’s just $5 per team to play, with a max of 5 people per team. The pub doubles the pot, so first place gets a decent pile of cash.

A few of the snap decisions I had to make on last Tuesday’s quiz:

Question: According to legend, Laocoon and Cassandra both warned against accepting what large gift?
Correct answer: the Trojan Horse
Team asked: Can we have credit for “horse”? They didn’t call it the Trojan Horse.
Verdict: No. Too general. I would’ve given credit for “big wooden horse” or something, but not just horse.
In the cold light of day: I probably should’ve given them the point. In Quiz Bowl or on Jeopardy!, no, but for pub quiz, probably OK.

Question: In Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty, what present does Carabosse give Princess Aurora on her sixteenth birthday?
Correct answer: spindle
Team asked: What about “spinning wheel”?
Verdict: OK.
In the cold light of day: I’m still OK with it, though a friend of mine noted that they aren’t the same thing.

Question: In the O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi,” Jim sells his watch so he can buy what present for his wife Della?
Correct answer: combs
Team asked: Will you take “brush”?
Verdict: No, because they’re not the kind of combs you use to comb your hair, so a brush is a different kind of thing altogether.
In the cold light of day: Good call.

Question: Bob Dylan tells Mr. Jones — rather than Mr. or Mrs. Charles — that “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is” in what song?
Correct answer: “Ballad of a Thin Man”
Team asked: What about just “Thin Man”?
Verdict: No, because a) that just capitalizes on my hint, and b) it’s not the complete title.
In the cold light of day: Good call.

A friend of mine who’s hosting at the Old Pequilar next week corralled me before last week’s quiz. “What do you think of Person X for the movie round?” she asked.

Brief explanation: the movie round at the OP always involves nine questions with movie titles as the answer. Question 10 is always “Who appeared in all of these movies?” So constructing a round involves picking out an actor or actress and working backwards from there.

I won’t share Person X’s name, in case my friend uses them next week. But her question made me consider what my movie round rules of thumb are.

“Hmm,” I said. “I think it’s a good idea, but I don’t know if people will know the name.” And that’s the key: to be fair, the movie round’s common denominator needs to be someone who players not only recognize, but can name.

I call it the David Warner rule. Another friend of mine wanted to write the quiz one week. He wrote a movie round using David Warner for question 10. I probably would’ve let it go, but the two people I shared the host slot with vetoed it. “I’ve subscribed to Entertainment Weekly for five years and I’ve never head of David Warner,” said one of them. He knew all the movies in question, and (when prompted) recognized Warner’s face, but had no idea what the guy’s name was.

My friend rewrote the round using Luis Guzman, who probably pushed the envelope a little bit, but enough teams got the question that it proved OK.

These days, when I want to make the movie round tricky but still playable, I look for people who are pretty famous but not necessarily for their film roles. Three examples: August 7, January 29, and April 10. That last one probably pushed the envelope again; if I used that person again, I might make the other nine questions even easier.

Of course, the challenge is part of the fun of the movie round. The David Warners of the world may be too obscure — and the Amrish Puris of the world are right out, at least in an average US bar — but I don’t think it’s much fun to have the answer be Brad Pitt or George Clooney, either. When you can guess the answer within two movies, even if you don’t regularly see 100+ movies a year, you could use a little more challenge.

Here’s what I do: When I’ve got an actor in mind, I ask my wife if she’s heard of them. If so, yay. If not, I usually scrap the idea.

Random closing thought: I really wanted to do a round with John Waters in the Q10 slot, but he hasn’t appeared in enough movies to make it work well. Take more acting gigs in other people’s films, John!

If you’re in Seattle, think that my questions are reasonably easy, and want to see ‘em live and in person, stop by the Old Pequliar tonight before 8:00.
I’m hosting the quiz.

Quick rules rundown, if you haven’t been there before: 5 people max per team. Eight rounds of ten questions each, including two picture rounds. Round 1 is always Geography, Round 7 is always Movies. $5 per team to play. No cell phones, no laptops, no cheating. No shouting out answers. Pretty straightforward.

If you stop by, say hi.

I’ve been hosting quiz nights for just about a year. And just when I think I’ve got a handle on what I’m doing, along comes last Tuesday night.

In short: the quiz was too hard, which means people weren’t having as much fun as I’d have liked. I know there are quiz hosts who delight in making really hard quizzes, but after a few early quizzes, I came to realize that people have more fun playing the quiz when they get a decent number of answers right. The penny dropped for me when I read it on the Trivia Hall of Fame’s Question Writing Clinic: “Mystifying people is bad. I find that people like to get between two thirds and three quarters of the questions. However, trivia writers have a bad habit of writing questions that entertain or challenge them, instead of their audiences.”

Twenty teams played the Old Pequilar’s quiz on Tuesday night. Scores ranged from 16 to 57 — which means even the winning team didn’t quite get 75% of the questions right. Second place was a point behind them — then third place got 48 points. Only half the teams got 40 or more questions right, or 50%.

My dream spread is more like a low of 20 and a high of 65, with most of the teams scoring over 40 points. Frustration isn’t fun.

We always start with Geography, which is always one of the harder rounds. This week, though, the average score was 3.3. Ouch. It was after Round 2, A Fine Romance, that I knew things weren’t going well. Average score that round was 3.8. Those ended up being the two hardest rounds, but none of the verbal question rounds had an average above 5 points, and usually I’d consider a 5-point average round acceptable but low.

I was tempted to call Tuesday a fiasco, but really, it wasn’t a complete failure. For one thing, I didn’t gloat. I apologized, starting with round 3, and was sincere about it. And when I read the first question of Round 5, Voices, I got a lucky setup. The question: From 1944 to 2001, Smokey Bear said “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Since April, 2001, Smokey says “only you can prevent” what?

Someone yelled out “Syphilis!” And I responded, without much thinking about it, “No, that’s Smokey Beaver. I’m asking about Smokey Bear.” The entire bar cracked up in a tension-relieving mass laugh. From there, people had more fun. I kept apologizing (while keeping it light), and the rounds got somewhat easier, which helped.

What happened? I misjudged the difficulty of a lot of my questions, getting wrapped up in presenting interesting info without doing enough to make the questions answerable to someone who wasn’t surfing Wikipedia. And, because the bar is really worried about finishing by 10:00 whenever they have the porch open, I included two quick-to-read rounds (A Fine Romance and The Loyal Opposition). They work great for keeping things moving, but there’s no real context to the clues, so it turns into a round of “you know it or you don’t.” And a lot of people didn’t.

Fortunately, this was an aberration — for the last several months, at least, my average scores were closer to my ideal, with high scores approaching 70. I find that there’s a couple of teams every week doomed to score 20 or fewer points, no matter what I ask, but that it’s definitely possible to raise the scores of most teams with solid question construction.

Next time — August 14, mark your calendars — it’ll be easier. Cross my fingers.

It’s one of my weeks to host Seattlest trivia. If you’re in town and want to check it out, rustle up a team and get to the Old Pequliar by 8:00. (Much earlier if you want a table.)
David wrote the team-requested beer round, since that was going to be used last week. One round ended up insipiring me to create a category on Wikipedia — I’ll link to it tomorrow, once the quiz is done.