Located at 341 South Elm Street in downtown Greensboro, The Green Bean offers coffee, tea, beer, baked goods and live music. Trivia night is held every Monday at 7:30 p.m. The cost to participate is $3 per person and half of all money raised goes to charity.
Metaphorically speaking, trivia is a pickup game of basketball for smart people. You see someone taking jump shots and practicing their spin moves and you wonder if maybe you can do better. Sometimes, you’ll find out that you can. Other times, you’ll end up flat on your ass.
Hosted regularly by Alex Howell, trivia at The Green Bean covers a lot of epistemological ground. Questions will test your knowledge of history, science, literature, pop culture and more. The question format is equally varied: you may go from listing seven of the top ten largest cities to unscrambling a word jumble trying to spot a flaw with an image on a projector screen.
The breadth of knowledge required to succeed in trivia makes team selection crucial. You can play with up to four other people and you’d better hope at least one of them knows something you don’t. Getting along with your teammates helps too, as internal squabbling and an inability to reach consensus can doom a team to failure.
The biggest enemy, however, is time (though finding a place to sit can sometimes rate a close second). While there isn’t a time limit per question, teams who don’t write down their answers before the next question is called will have a lot of guesswork to do at the end. The game is divided into two rounds of 15 questions each and roughly a third of those questions rely on visual prompts which won’t stay up on the screen for very long.
Trivia, Green Bean-style, can sometimes be a maddening experience. Howell has a tendency to get ambitious with his questions and that ambition has occasionally resulted in no teams picking up a point (identifying out-of-context imagery is notoriously challenging). Further, the difficulty of the questions can vary wildly between the first and the second round. It’s easy to have a decent showing after 15 questions and knock yourself out of contention with a bad second half.
On the other hand, it’s equally easy to walk away with cash in your pocket some weeks. Prize money usually goes to the top two teams and though winning streaks are common, no one is a lock for first. Since you have no way of knowing where other teams stand until the end, your own point totals are of minimal value.
How much enjoyment you get out of trivia night will ultimately depend on your level of patience. If you accept the possibility that you will miss questions you know (or should know) the answer to and walk away empty-handed, you can kill a few hours with friends and feel good knowing your money is going to a worthwhile cause. But if you come to win – as many do – you may leave with a lot of frustration.
6.5/10
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