Trivia Night Is Free to Play and Not Free to Run

Most American trivia nights are free of charge to the players. That is a fact about the players. It says nothing about the bar, which pays for the night one way or another, and the way it pays, we will argue, is the reason your favorite room does trivia on a Tuesday and not on a Saturday.

This piece is about who pays for the quiz, with what, and what you should do about it. The numbers come from the companies' own pages and from a reported piece on the economics. The conclusions are our own, and we say where.

Free for you, and said so

One large national operator, Geeks Who Drink, tells players the game is free to play. It runs a 2-hour game. Teams top out at six players. The company lists 900-plus weekly events. A 2014 report counted 469 weekly bar nights for the same company, so by its own numbers it has about doubled.

Read the page for bar owners, though, and the pitch changes. The page promises that you pour the drinks and they handle the rest. It sells formats as ways to put butts in seats. The bar's job is the drinks. The quiz company's job is the crowd. The page lists formats and no prices, so we cannot tell you what a Boston room pays.

What a bar pays

A reported piece gives the only numbers we found in the open. In August 2014, Priceonomics wrote that Geeks Who Drink and a rival based mostly in New York City charge bars about $150 to $200 a night, according to the five bars it spoke to. The same piece says hosts make about $50 per night, plus a bar tab.

Treat all of that as dated and not about Boston: the piece was published August 5, 2014, and prices move. It is still the only look at a quiz night's books that we could source, and the mechanism it describes is the one the bar-owner page above still sells: the bar rents a host and a set of questions.

One bar's ledger

The best paragraph in that piece is a ledger from Coogan's Restaurant in New York. Its manager told Priceonomics in 2014 that the bar takes in an additional $800 on trivia nights. Of that, $200 goes to food and drink costs, $175 to the trivia company and $85 to gift card prizes. That leaves just $340 in profit.

Run that as arithmetic and the bar kept a bit under half of the extra money. The manager also said it is hard to calculate how many of those people would have come anyway. Our reading: a quiz night is a modest bet, not a windfall, and the bar needs the room to fill.

The pitch and the books

Companies advertise big numbers. The piece reports that Geeks Who Drink claims clients see three to 10 times the revenue. The bars did not say that. They confirmed higher sales, and the piece puts the range at 30 percent to 65 percent, well short of the ads. One bar employee added that some tables just hang out and buy Cokes.

That last quote is the useful one for you. A table that plays for two hours on one soda is a table the bar paid a host to seat. There is nothing wrong with it, and no one should drink more than they would have to make a bar's math work.

Why Tuesday

The 2014 piece found that Tuesdays and Wednesdays are far more common for the company's events than other nights. Boston looks the same. Boston.com's reader guide to trivia nights has 57 listings across Greater Boston, and in our count of that page, taken November 14, 39 sit under Tuesday or Wednesday. Friday and Saturday have one apiece.

Here is the opinion. A trivia schedule is a list of a bar's slow nights. A room that fills itself on a weekend does not rent a quiz for it. In our own venue list, Lucky's Lounge in Fort Point advertises Triple Trivia Tuesdays on its home page.

The city treats it as a small line item. Boston's fee schedule lists a flat fee for trivia of $50 for the entertainment license. That is less than one night's rate in the older piece, which is our comparison, not the city's. Our piece on what Boston's entertainment licenses cost has the rest of that list.

The prize is a credit

The 2014 piece says players at most American trivia nights are playing for gift cards or money off the tab. In Salem, a listing for East Regiment Beer Company describes a pub trivia night where the winners take home a gift card plus bragging rights.

A gift card is a promise to come back. That is the best thing the format sells: a repeat customer. The Coogan's manager also said karaoke did far better at his bar. Our karaoke guide says where Boston keeps it.

What to do with this

Go to trivia for the people and the questions, and pay the bar back the way the format intends: order food, order what you would order anyway, and tip the host if you had a good time. If a room is packed, one reader on Boston.com says that at Remnant Brewing you have to get a table early even though play starts later, so arrive ahead of the start.

A two-hour game means you can plan the night backward from the end. Decide how you are getting home before the first round, not at the last question. Last Train at /last-train/ shows your line, and Eat Late has food that stays open after the host reads the final scores. If you want a room with more than a quiz, the guide to bars with games is the next stop.