For those who frequent the local bars, bar trivia is common event. The goal is to discover how much seemingly useless information you and your friends have retained since high school. And it helps that you’re doing this while drinking pitchers of beer. As the new semester rears its ugly head, it’s time for you to make new, smarter friends to be on your trivia team and start training to claim yourself a bar trivia victory. After finishing your bowl of Wheaties, shooting a few raw eggs for protein and doing 15 push-ups, use this Bar Trivia training program to become a true champion.
Read Perez Hilton’s Blog We all have to make sacrifices on the road to success and this one, my friend, might be yours. That is unless you have a regular pop culture gossip guru on your team who is not only ready to fire off trivia facts about Lindsay Lohan’s current rehab status, but also has an opinion ready. Bar trivia is famous for questions based on what has happened in the news during the previous week. And what makes news more frequently than Ryan Gosling with his shirt off? Read Perez Hilton’s celebrity gossip blog the week before bar trivia to keep up with important things such as the Kardashian’s marital statuses or sexual orientations.
Watch ESPN’s SportsCenter Sports trivia is always a significant portion of any bar trivia challenge, with questions deriving from games played in the recent weeks or historical facts about long-standing rivalries, record setting players or some Super Bowl that ESPN Classic is still running repeats of. The best way to arm yourself with sports trivia is to watch sports talk shows such as ESPN’s SportsCenter. The show recaps recent highlights while interjecting random facts such as the records of New England Patriots’ defense from the 1970s. The key is to pay enough attention so that the witty banter sounds less like a foreign language and more like trivia facts that can be regurgitated.
Stare at the Periodic Table of Elements Your misguided decision to take Chemistry 100 as your physical science GenEd requirement might actually benefit you in the bar trivia arena. Knowing the abbreviations for most of the elements on the Periodic Table will help you in your quest to dominate trivia night and keep you from having to bring along your awkward science geek old roommate who will probably work at NASA someday. On the other hand, maybe you should stay in touch with him just in case he does become a billionaire.
Use Sporcle to Actually Study for Something Ever spent a couple of hours perfecting your ability to list the Presidents of the United States in reverse chronological order in under two minutes on Sporcle.com when you should have been studying for a final? Just think about the possibilities of arbitrary historical information you could cram into your skull at lightning speed with the help of the online quiz database. Some useful quizzes include “Top Baby Boy Names in the Past 100 Years” or “Worldwide Homicide Statistics.”
Familiarize Yourself with Drink Recipes Since you are at a bar, it is a good idea to arm yourself with some information about drinks recipes. It seems like a simple, obvious pairing but many teams have bitten the dust by not knowing the ingredients to a “Woo Woo.” Investigate the components that make up some of the most popular cocktails to earn your team extra points in trivia and with that special someone at the end of the bar you could order a subtle “Sex on the Beach” for.
Allie Connell can be reached at [email protected].
