I needed my first taste of bar quiz

I needed my first taste of bar quiz questions in Dubai 23 years ago. There is some debate as to whenever Holiday dog collars pub quizzes started, in the UK however. I've seen one source which will claims there was no such thing before 1970, and another article reckons they will didn't really take off until Insignificant Pursuit came along in 1982. My own enjoy is that Trivial Pursuit is the dad of the pub quiz.

Some trivia about that original quiz game:

Wikipedia says it was invented in Nerja, a small Spanish seaside town, for the south coast about 40 kilometers from Mlaga, in 1979. The New York Times says it happened in Montreal, but does acknowledge that one with the co-inventors, Chris Haney, a Canadian photo editor, used to go to Spain every winter, and that year put in 16 hours a day writing inquiries for his new game. It absolutely was launched in 1982, and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Anyway, back to Lebanon. At the time there were only a dozen possibly even pubs where you could legally drink, and all of those were in hotels, hence the pub quiz had obviously been imported from the UK by a number of the thousands of British Expats who were employed in the oil business and related industries.

The quiz we accustomed to go to was in the Ramada Hotel room, close to our office, in a club called The Old Vic. Our team appeared to be called A + 2 (Our company was Asset Analysis, this business partner and I plus 2 others made up the team).

The Quiz Master was a teacher on Dubai International School, so I would say the level of questions was moderately advanced. There was no world wide web during those times for online access to (mostly) cost-free pub quiz questions, so it actually was a labour of love to put together them.

In Dubai at the time the significant week began on Saturday through to Thurs lunchtime, with Friday a full day's holiday. The Old Vic Quiz Night was on a Monday, obviously a quiet night for trade, therefore the quiz to bring people in. First prize was a meal designed for 4 in the hotel's restaurant, and am can honestly say that we triumphed in many times, always choosing Thursday lunch for our prize meal, the start of our own weekend!

As for the pub quiz concerns, it's a long time ago, but I actually do remember one, because 3 of this 4 of us in the team failed to have a clue, and as we acquired by 1 point that night it turned out to be a crucial answer for us. The question? "In equestrianism, what is a martingale? inch

Since those pub quizzes within Dubai I've been a big fan, and already ironically live about 20 mins away from the bar where many of the initial Trivial Pusuit questions were created all those years ago.

Sadly, Chris Haney passed away in 2010 at the age of 59. I must say i do believe that he and his co-inventor Scott Abbott were the fathers of pub quizzes; their legacy - the sometimes exasperating, but always entertaining, pub quiz issues which thousands of people try to answer every week.