It's Monday night, and the team hasn't arrived. Worse yet, it's nearly half past nine, and the bar is beginning to fill up.
"I don't know where they are," the bouncer says, widening his eyes. "Still not here."
And then, suddenly, they are. Sofa Kingdom is in the house. The four teammates -- more will trickle in later -- are wedged near the back of the bar at a sticky brown table just below the crackling speakers, but now they're here, and the game, as the crowd at New Deck Tavern has come to know it, can begin.
The game, of course, is Quizo --a four-round, 10 questions per round trivia game, with a "joker" option to double the score of a round about which you feel confident, all for a possible total of 50 points. And Sofa Kingdom is its current hero. Since the summer of 2003, the team has been consistently proving it knows more trivia than the rest, and that it has no problem recalling tidbits such as what airline was the first to fly a commercial Boeing 747 from New York to London, every Monday and Wednesday night, from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m.
"We're all from the Penn band, that's how it started," says College "03 and second-year veterinary student Jamie Rosenthal, referring to Sofa Kingdom's motley crew of band kids and "Nerd Bowl" whizzes.
Sofa Kingdom consists of a rotating core of about a dozen members, six of whom are present this particular Monday, and each of whom brings their own expertise to the trivia table.
"We all come from different backgrounds," says Engineering senior Aaron Haddad who, at 21, is the only undergrad and youngest of the group. "They're good at general knowledge, he's good at trivia, and I'm good at games," he continues, gesturing around the table.
Sofa Kingdom is also good at reasoning through questions, trivia-laden or otherwise. How much money have they won off of New Deck? Well, with top-three placements about 90 percent of the time, and a first place prize of $65 off the bar tab...
"Let's estimate," College "01 James Krocyzynksi says in the same matter-of-fact tone he uses for Quizo questions, and then begins a series of simple calculations: If they play eight times a month, and even if they estimate down and say they win $35 about seven times a month -- and they don't, they tell you, it's much higher than that -- the number still would be awfully high. It's certainly high enough to cover the 3+ pitchers of lager and half-priced bar food that sustains them between questions.
"We decided between $2,000 and $2,500," Rosenthal reports back.
It's this cerebral approach that dominates their Quizo style, leading Sofa Kingdom from banter to discussion then back to banter again -- they're surprisingly funny, and not without irony -- all before they reach their final answer. Just take Question Six from Round One: "Which two letters come next in the following sequence? A, E, F, H, I, K, L, M..."
"We're thinking it's the Hawaiian alphabet."
"Is there an F in the Hawaiian alphabet?"
"I'd bet it's pretty similar to the Latin alphabet."
"What about Cyrillic?"
"Cyrillic has a C." (So no, not Cyrillic).
And then finally: "I know! It's all the letters without a curve in them."
This outburst comes from the corner of the table, from College "03 Eric Swanson, from the unanimously acknowledged "heart and soul of Sofa Kingdom," from the lanky kid who overlaps in both band and "Nerd Bowl," and from the medical school bound 23-year-old who is the admitted star of the team that is the admitted star of the New Deck Quizo.
Meet the man who brought Quizo to Philadelphia.
He smiles easily, he reddens easily, and with his eyes that flash blue, he almost looks like an overeager kid trapped in the more seasoned body of man comfortable in bars. But he is the Quizmaster extraordinaire, still hosting a Quizo at Fergie's and New Wave Cafe three nights a week, and still writing the questions for New Deck.
His name is Pat Hines.
Hines says he became addicted to the game when living abroad in Ireland -- there, every pub has its own trivia or "quiz" -- and when he returned to the states, he started hosting a game at O'Flynn's down in Wildwood, NJ for some "walking around money."
"We were in O'Flynn's one night and we were at this big long table, and all the people were sitting there and they all have these pieces of paper in front of them," Hines says. "Some woman came in and said, "Is this Bingo?' And we said, "No, this is Quizo.' That's where it came from."
And so Quizo was born. After a year down at the shore, Hines brought his idea to New Deck, back in 1992.
"Pat started Quizo in Philadelphia, and we were his trial," New Deck Manager Kathleen Doyle says from her perch on a stool in the bar her parents opened. "I remember when we started. [Hines] was in college to be a teacher and looking for a way to support himself. My sister said, "This isn't going to work, it isn't going to bring people in,' and now ... I think last week we had 194 people."
That's not to say the beginning wasn't shaky. Hines recalls that only English and Irish students, all of whom had experience with pub quizzes, came out to play -- "It was more of an immigrant thing, or expatriate thing, I guess," he says -- and even then, Quizo wasn't a natural hit.
"It was hard getting it started each night, because not only did you announce Quizo and no one knew what you were talking about, but we used to go around to every single table... to explain it," Hines says.
But explain it he did, and Hines and fellow-trivia buffs embarked on a Quizo learning curve together.
"In the beginning when I first started doing it, we messed up all the time," Hines says. "Questions were phrased improperly, we had wrong answers."
Now, however, Hines spends about two hours per quiz scouring the internet and encyclopedias for potential Quizo questions, and says his quizzes are near-perfect.
"I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but I'm rarely wrong, let's put it that way," say Hines, who has learned to avoid the Quizo pitfalls of ambiguity, and would never ask a seemingly harmless question like "What's the world's largest lake?"
"Well, is that in terms of area or volume?" he asks. "That's two different answers."
That's not to say the crowd never disagrees. Hines remembers one time at New Deck when the question was "What river flows through Shanghai?" The answer Hines had was the Yellow River, but someone disagreed -- a native of China, of all people. The man was on his feet, just two tables away, screaming and screaming.
"I lived in China! I know this answer!"
Everyone was looking, murmuring, but Hines held his ground.
"Meanwhile, inside I'm thinking, "I gotta be wrong. I mean, this guy lived there and is Chinese,'" Hines says.
The next week, the guy came back and apologized; it seems the Yellow River does, in fact, flow through Shanghai.
"I thought, "Well if I was right then, I'm never gonna go back on anything,'" Hines says.
And so he doesn't. He's not cocky; he's just not wrong.
Say hello to Newman.
It's only appropriate that Quizo's first infamous team chose an equally infamous name -- Hello, Newman -- reflecting all the Seinfeldian neuroses and quirks that might make someone a Quizo natural.
"Hello, Newman was there from the very beginning, the first of the purely American teams that started coming," Hines says. "They were Drexel studs... They were good when they started. You'd read out their name and the whole place would boo."
Bar Manager Aidan Travers says he remembers "people making up names about Hello, Newman, like Goodbye, Newman. People got pretty clever with their names."
Indeed, teams' names have become another Hines' Quizo tradition, and any team who has ever won Best Team Name should say thank you to Newman.
"Funny names came up as a response to Newman," Hines says. "New Deck only had two prize then, and Newman would win every time, so we had to have something for [the others]."
Enter Best Team Name, complete with a free pitcher of beer for the winners.
"Say we changed our french fries," Doyle says. "We'll have names like, "We don't like the new fries,' or "Change it back to the old fries.'"
Celebrities, current events, pop culture and Philly sports teams -- not to mention fellow Quizo teams themselves -- also provide fodder for Quizo names. Just a few weeks ago, one team named themselves, "Only Girly Men Shop at Sofa Kingdom."
They've been called other things too: "Autistic band kids' and "One autistic guy and three fat chicks,' both names courtesy of previous 34th Street write-ups. "I was autistic guy," 2000 College grad Jason Garbo says, grinning. "And the women I was with were overweight."
That Sofa Kingdom has become the target of other teams isn't terribly surprising -- "Sofa Kingdom is the new Hello, Newman," Doyle says.
"That's why we started Sofa Kingdom," Swanson says. "Hello, Newman was here every week. We wanted a name that everyone would know."
The name Sofa Kingdom is a spoof on the Ottoman Empire -- the historical dynasty, not the nifty piece of furniture -- and it's also... well, say it slowly.
So-fa-king-dom. So-fuk-ing-dum. So-fucking-dumb. Sofa Kingdom.
But really, they're anything but. The kids who hail from "Nerd Bowl" -- officially the Penn Academic Demolition Team (PADT) -- boast a laundry list of accolades. "Those guys are usually pretty sharp," Hines says, referring to the PADT-turned-Sofa Kingdom contingent that once beat Mormon and Jeopardy sensation Ken Jennings in a Stanford tournament. And though Sofa Kingdom has yet to earn a game-perfect 50 points -- their average score is 42 -- they've come damn close.
They've had a 49 twice, a couple of 48s, and what should have been a 50, once, if only Rosenthal hadn't stayed home that night.
"If I'd have been there, we would have gotten it!" she says.
The question was "What part of the body is the palpebra?" and, as a vet student, Rosenthal knew that palpebra is just another word for eyelid.
"I never really matter," she says. "Usually, anything I know someone else knows."
But that one time, the time Sofa Kingdom almost cemented their legacy with a perfect 50, she knew. She knew, and she wasn't there. The team went with tongue.
But even without that elusive flawless game, Sofa Kingdom is good. And so, just like with Hello, Newman, teams boo or tease Sofa Kingdom in the name category.
"They're still paying full price for their food," Haddad says.
So why does Sofa Kingdom keep on coming back to New Deck week after week? Sure, there's the fact that, as Hines says, "I think New Deck is known across the city for having the best prizes," -- $65 off your tab for first place, $35 off for second, a case of Guinness bottles for third, and a free pitcher for Best Team Name, to be exact -- but it's more than that, too.
"It's the only acceptable Quizo, really," Rosenthal says.
From Swanson: "It's really well done."
"Pat [Hines] does a good job of getting generalized kinds of questions," Garbo says.
And from Swanson again: "It has the highest first prize that we've seen. New Deck will pay for us to eat."
So New Deck may be Sofa Kingdom's preferred Quizo, and Philadelphia's first Quizo, but it's certainly not the only Quizo.
Quizo? he laughs. We stole it.
"Just like everyone stole Sink or Swim from us, we stole it from them."
Though the bartender at Smokey Joe's doesn't necessarily know that the "them" he's referring to is New Deck, just six blocks down the street, it is true that New Deck was the first Philadelphia bar to introduce a pub trivia game -- and Quizo into the drinkers' lexicon -- and that every other bar that offers a quiz night has, in some way or another, copied New Deck.
"It kinda bugs me," Hines says, although he has admittedly mixed feelings on Quizo's success in the Philadelphia scene.
"Obviously it's not my idea, I took it from someone else, I basically stole the idea from Ireland," he says. "I thought it was a great idea and I used it, so I don't mind that, but sometimes when people use the name Quizo, it bugs me."
Quizo, however, has become a generic name of sorts, almost like Saran Wrap or Xerox, and Hines recognizes that Quizo has taken on a life all its own.
"I think it's cool that it took off," he says. "I like the fact that people like it. I'm not getting ready to sue anybody."
Not that he could, anyway. Hines estimates that 40 or 50 bars in Philadelphia offer some sort of quiz night -- on Penn's campus alone, Blarney Stone, Cavanaugh's, and Smoke's all offer the game -- and each with its own twist.
Take Smoke's, for example. They spell their Thursday night trivia game with two Zs -- Quizzo -- and play to a different crowd, a crowd that appreciates Simpsons or Saved by the Bell theme nights.
"Everybody's got their own format," says Phil Castagna, the Philadelphia attorney who brought Quizo to Smoke's back in Fall of 2000 when he was a law student at Villanova. " I used to have themes to the round, like the answers would start with some letter or have a certain color in them. I thought that made us different from the New Deck -- we had themes and that takes a little more time to come up with."
"I think it's more of a stress relief here than it is at the New Deck," he adds.
Maybe, but that isn't the case a fortnight ago when the Smoke's speaker system blows, and with 11 p.m fast approaching., current host Wesley Barrow has yet to begin round one.
As Smoke's owner Paul Ryan fumbles with wires behind the DJ booth, he says, "I should've just given up, but these people, they're into it."
Indeed they are. Microphone-less, Barrow abandons his usual perch in the DJ corner and moves to the middle of the bar where he belts out his questions to the seven or so surrounding teams. The teams lean forward to catch the phrases of Barrow's increasingly hoarse voice, and he is an obliging, if not downright eager host, hopping from table to table to repeat his question.
"I deliberately make my questions easier and more focused around pop culture," Barrow says. "I've only been to New Deck once, and I think the [questions] are too tough for our crowd."
Eventually, Ryan fixes the sound system, and Barrow adapts, speeding through the questions and eliminating one round entirely. The crowd could care less, still thoroughly enjoying themselves, but Barrow has seen better nights.
"I'm going to get so wasted after this," he says.
It's everywhere now.
"You see them all over, in Florida, in Washington, D.C.," Hines says. "So you know that someone was in Philadelphia, either at one of my quiz's or another."
Still, Hines has no intention of patenting his Quizo.
"Everyone tells you, "Oh yeah, franchise it, you can go national,' but I've just never had any plans for it," he says. "I enjoy trivia and to this day I still enjoy going out and doing it, actually being in the bar and asking the questions. That's all it ever was. It's still that -- something fun to do. I don't know if I could make it a career."
It's Tuesday night, and Hines is seated at his high table in Fergie's, a pint glass full of pencils and his personally typed Quizo questions spread in front of him. Clutching the microphone in his left hand, he reads a question, adds a joke and then drags on his cigarette as the teams scribble down their answer.
Quizo may not be a career, but damn, it sure is a great hobby.
The waitress smiles and brings him another beer.
