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Geeks who Drink announcer Kent Wilhelmi conducts the event at O’Neill’s Pub and Restaurant on May 27. Geeks who Drink is a pub quiz show played at bars in Albuquerque and beyond, and has expanded into 21 states.

Pub’s quiz game garners a geeky following

nicole11@unm.edu

Twenty-first century nerds crawl out of their Dungeons and Dragons games and hit the town at Geeks Who Drink.

“Geeky stuff is better with a drink in your hand,” said Albuquerque Quizmaster Eric Kohen. “Star Wars and a glass of scotch, and I’m set.”

Geeks Who Drink is a pub quiz game in which participants answer questions on everything from string theory to Britney Spears to U.S. history — do you know what Veterans Day used to be called?
Kohen said it offers something different from Albuquerque’s club scene.

“I did that, I was 20 and got wasted with frat guys Downtown,” Kohen said. “Trust me, I’ve thrown up all over Downtown Albuquerque, but I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to go have a drink, I want to have a relaxing evening where I’m not surrounded by a bunch of crazy drunkards or clubbers, and I think that’s what a lot of our crowd is.”

Kohen said Geeks Who Drink appeals mainly to the “young urban professional,” but that all types of people participate. Some are in suits and ties, one man wears a shirt that says “party with sluts” and a 16-year-old drinks water as he plays with his parents. Participants can form teams of up to six people, and the game has eight rounds of questions including a visual round and a music round.

“We definitely have the group of socially awkward nerds who bumble and can’t look you in the eye,” he said. “And then we have people who are drunk frat partiers and everything in between.”

Tammy DiDio said she and her friends play Geeks Who Drink every Sunday night at O’Neill’s Irish Pub in Nob Hill. She said they specifically design their team to be as effective as possible.

Their team consisted of a dessert entrepreneur, a UNM adjunct physics professor, a journalist, a screenwriter, a woman with a master’s degree in psychology and a 16-year-old boy.

“We’re here just for the occasional trivia question from the ‘60s, but otherwise we’re not helpful,” said Tony Delaflora, DiDio’s teammate. “We decided we had to have younger people. That’s our big hole.”

Kohen said the questions are carefully written for maximum entertainment as well as level of difficulty — they can’t be too hard or too easy.

“It’s no fun asking trivial pursuit type questions,” he said. “They’re boring, dry and make people feel bad. If we had 64 questions that nobody knows the answers to, all it does is inflate our ego.”

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Kohen said one of the questions Geeks Who Drink creators asked when they hired him was ‘Are you more geek or drink?’ He said at the time he was torn between the two, but he thinks alcohol makes it more fun.

“I think you always have to have at least one semisober person on your team before you’re just like, ‘Rawr, I don’t care anymore,’” he said.

Kohen said participants rarely get rowdy, but when they do, he knows how to handle it. The most common type of disruption is when people yell the answers out loud.

“I usually call them things that you can’t print in the Daily Lobo,” he said. “If they keep doing it, the nice thing to say is ‘Someone get my dad a drink’ or ‘Sorry your craigslist date didn’t work out.’”

Kohen said he met his wife while she was a quiz player, and they even played Geeks Who Drink at their wedding dinner. He said he loves to make people laugh, and a group of graduate students once told him that he gave them a reason to hang out and become friends.

“During the day, I help run business,” he said. “It’s boring, and it’s entering things into spreadsheets, and I’m like ‘God I hate this job.’ By the end of the night, I’m like ‘This is why I do it.’ I mean, even the hecklers are kind of fun.”

In case you hadn’t already lost all faith in the Daily Lobo, a team of staffers came in second to last in a pool of about 25 teams.

Geeks Who Drink

Monday: Dublin’s Street Pub 8 p.m., O’Neill’s Pub (Heights) 9 p.m.
Tuesday: Blackbird Buvette 7 p.m.
Wednesday: Broken Bottle
Brewery 7 p.m., O’Neill’s Pub (Nob Hill) 9 p.m.
Thursday: Coaches Bar and Grill 9 p.m
Sunday: O’Neill’s Pub (Nob Hill) 8 p.m.

Free to play

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