Should phones be used at trivia nights? A D.C. cheating scandal begs the question
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Once again, a scandal has rocked Washington, D.C.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
And no, it's not the political kind that we're all used to in this town.
MARTÍNEZ: No. This one has to do with another sacred trust - trivia, a major pastime in overly competitive D.C., and, of course, a popular way for bars and pubs across the nation to bring in loads of business.
FADEL: So here's what happened. A popular trivia spot caught a team cheating...
MARTÍNEZ: (Gasps).
FADEL: ...During the game's music round.
SIMON BEE: Essentially, one of our floor managers caught somebody looking at Shazam on their Apple wristwatch.
FADEL: That's Simon Bee, owner of the Red Bear Brewing Company. The brewery hosts two weekly trivia nights, and they're pretty big events. About 40 teams show up every week. The bars rake in thousands of dollars each time.
MARTÍNEZ: I've been there many times. Fun place. All right, so after being caught cheating, the team was banned from playing trivia at Red Bear, but that offending team had just won four weeks in a row. Logan Stone and DJ Allen (ph) are two of the trivia night hosts.
DJ ALLEN: It's happened maybe once or twice, but, like, people apologized, we moved on. This just blew up.
FADEL: It's revived the debate over using phones versus pen and paper at trivia night, although he used his watch, but anyways, let's move on.
MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter).
FADEL: Howard Gelinas (ph) runs Trivia Kings, a D.C. trivia league that uses pen-and-paper ballots. He's found that phones make people suspicious.
HOWARD GELINAS: It gives the appearance that people are cheating. I mean, in general, if people see phones out, people think, oh, their phones are out, they're cheating.
MARTÍNEZ: Still, Gelinas says that if you really want to cheat at trivia, you'll find a way.
GELINAS: It happens, it's going to happen and there's really nothing anyone can really do if they want to stop it.
FADEL: So it's really up to the players, he says, to call out cheating when they see it. At Red Bear Brewing, they've embraced last week's scandal.
LOGAN STONE: The overall theme for tonight is scandalous.
(APPLAUSE)
STONE: We're looking into it, because why not?
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. Why not? Host Logan Stone thinks people are willing to cheat at such low stakes because people are competitive.
STONE: I think there's a lot of reasons why people do it. Sometimes they just want the free booze, sometimes they want the gift card. I think people like the rush of winning and maybe don't want to feel like they don't know something.
FADEL: Which is something that host DJ Allen thinks people shouldn't care about. I mean, it's pretty trivial.
ALLEN: What I love about trivia is you should be comfortable at not knowing a damn thing and still having fun.
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