Q: Where can I find the best local bar trivia? A: One man has made it his full-time job

It’s 7 p.m. on a Wednesday at Mirror Twin Brewing on National Avenue and 20-plus trivia teams have picked their clever names – often inspired by the week’s events and many unprintable in a family publication.

Host Matt Crump has recited the ground rules (don’t shout out answers and no cheating). For the next two hours he’ll read questions, tabulate scores and declare rankings.

This particular night the last puzzler — teams can wager up to 15 points on it — is: At 4,000 miles, what are farthest-apart capitals of bordering countries?

When, after two songs and a lot of anticipation, Crump gives the answer and announces the winner, shouts and high fives erupt from the team that got it right, wagered the max and captured first place.

“Wednesday nights at Mirror Twin are great, it’s a great group of people,” said Bar Supervisor Chris Grissom, himself a trivia fanatic who in his younger years played as often as four or five times a week. “Matt is a great host … he’s excited to be there.”

Grissom thinks craft beer and trivia are “a perfect partnership of two similar interests.” Craft beer has “become so much of a culture, trivia is as well.” Proving his point, each Wednesday a core of 10 to 15 of the same teams of four to six people descend on Mirror Twin to buy and drink craft beer and play trivia.

Every day of every week somewhere in Lexington friends and family, neighbors and co-workers join to pit their knowledge and wits against other trivia fanatics.

Often they are playing a game written and produced by Don Willoughby, who fell into the trivia business by chance 21 years ago and has come to love it for the sense of community it creates and the bonds it strengthens.

“Some of the sharpest teams are when three generations of a family are represented,” he said. He recalled a woman, the “matriarch” of a trivia team that included her grown children and their friends. She valued the camaraderie so much that when she needed chemo she scheduled her treatments around trivia matches. “Eventually she succumbed to cancer,” Willoughby said, “and I was an honorary pallbearer.”

There are other trivia operators but Willoughby’s Local Trivia Action is easily the largest in Kentucky, with 42 regular weekly gigs in Central Kentucky and 11 in Louisville. That doesn’t count the specialty trivia contests like (like Rick and Morty, The Office, Friends) or the special community events benefitting everything from the Kentucky Book Festival to Developing Nepal to the Explorium and the Lexington Philharmonic.

Willoughby, who grew up in the Boston area, was in Lexington working as a chef at the Malabu Pub in 1998 when he went to a trivia night at a bar in Atlanta while visiting family. When he returned he visited with some of the regulars at Malabu and tested them on some of the trivia he’d learned. Then he figured “I can do this and get paid for it,” so he started writing the questions himself for Tuesday trivia nights at Malabu.

In the days before widespread internet access, writing the questions meant haunting the library, combing through reference books and, occasionally, “stealing some from Jeopardy, if I could get away with it.” By 2001 he had given up cooking to devote himself full time to trivia.

These days, Willoughby continues to host shows although he has a employees like Crump as well, and writes all the material, spending four to five hours a day developing shows.

There are national trivia companies, including Denver-based Geeks who Drink that provides the material for the Wednesday night competitions at Hopcat in Lexington, but Willoughby prides himself on throwing in some Kentucky-centric puzzlers, whether about Laura Bell Bundy’s career or bourbon and tailoring questions for the specific crowds. Late afternoon shows are “more PG” while the 10 p.m. bar show will have “a little more R-rated feel.”

It works and they keep coming back. Willoughby still hosts the Malabu Pub trivia game that gave him his start 21 years ago, and has one team, appropriately called the Know-It-Alls, who’ve been there every week but one for over two decades.

He’s seen couples get together and marry over trivia – even performing one ceremony himself – and even proposed to his own wife through questions he wrote for one special game.

“It’s absolutely bonding.”

And if you’re still wondering ... the farthest-apart capitals of bordering countries? That would be Moscow and Pyongang.

This story was originally published December 24, 2019 at 9:24 AM with the headline "Q: Where can I find the best local bar trivia? A: One man has made it his full-time job."