Wokeness ended my backroom Jeopardy! habit

In May I got a Facebook message from a guy named Mikey Walsh, who I’d met once at a trivia night at Mister Tramps, one of the diviest dive bars in Austin, Texas. He told me he’d been running a quiz called “Buzz In Buzzed,” which was exactly like Jeopardy!. Several of the regular players had been on Jeopardy! like me, and he was looking for more contestants to play.

“This is not a business,” he said. “It’s free to play, and there’s no prizes. It’s just nerds playing trivia for fun.” This wasn’t the kind of offer I turn down. The opportunity to play fake Jeopardy! in the back of the bar for no money? Sign me up, I said.

A couple of weeks later, I went to Buzz In Buzzed. It had been several years since I’d been at Mister Tramps, but it was the black-walled grime-pit I remembered. Walsh set up a Jeopardy! rig in the back room, where Tramps usually throws its sparsely attended standup nights and drag queen bingo. I sat in an uncomfortable chair, buzzer in hand, at a fold-up plastic card table.

Walsh, who works at a local sandwich shop, found himself with some extra cash. A lifelong Jeopardy! fan, he decided to use the money to buy an electronic quizzing rig, and a USB recording module so he could approximate the sounds from the game show. He rested it in a plastic crayon box.

A $20 lifetime subscription from a service called JeopardyLabs allowed Walsh to create Jeopardy!-style games that have the same general topics and rhythms of the original. But he includes stuff you’d never see on the actual show – for example, forcing contestants to identify GIFs from Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid and answer questions about rock that’s so indie you would have had to attend the specific live show to know the answers. He throws in some old – slightly altered for copyright reasons – Final Jeopardy questions in a category he calls “Actual Hard Jeopardy! Fuck You.”

At first, Walsh’s games were just him and regulars from Mister Tramps, mostly local mechanics having a beer after a long shift. Though Walsh was pretty good, regular scores of negative 6,000 were common. Then he posted the game on the Jeopardy! Reddit forum. Other Jeopardy! fans showed up and started playing. Suddenly the games were hard, as though NBA-quality players had started shooting hoops at the local playground. A young computer programmer appeared, lost, and decided she didn’t want to lose anymore. So she started studying, improved – and then she was doing the trouncing. Earlier this year she appeared on the TV show and easily won a game.

I made my first appearance at back-room Jeopardy! after Memorial Day and played a game against another former contestant and also a guy who will probably be a Jeopardy! contestant one day. I absolutely dominated the proceedings until I shanked a Daily Double in the second round, putting me a little behind. And then the power went out in a massive hailstorm.

Walsh conducted Final Jeopardy by flashlight. The answer to the question was Peep Show, the Mitchell and Webb sitcom created by Succession’s Jesse Armstrong. Somehow I missed it, even though I’ve seen every episode of Peep Show, and I lost the game. I also lost the following week. Then came my third game, where the Final Jeopardyquestion was: “In early 1976 this band from Salford, England, took its name from the sexual slavery wing mentioned in the 1953 House of Dolls.” I knew that this was Joy Division, won the game and got to pose for a smug photo.

“I almost dumped this Final because someone told me they were triggered, but I thought, fuck it, it’s a fact,” Walsh wrote on Facebook. Fuck it indeed. I was hooked.

Buzz In Buzzed has a distinct Austin, indie vibe about it, but it’s not an anomaly. A vast world of trivia competitions bubbles underneath the surface of ordinary life. Online leagues in a variety of formats run every day, featuring the best quizzing minds in the world. It’s a fiercely competitive world. My team, Crash Test Smarties, in the exceedingly tough and competitive Online Quiz League, includes a winner of the Jeopardy! teacher’s tournament, two three-time Jeopardy! champions (including me), an Only Connect quarterfinalist, and the 2021 winner of the UK Brain of Brains competition. Last season, we finished sixth.

Buzz in Buzzed was fun all summer, but then, as often happens in subcultures, there was petty drama. I’ve made some of the dearest friends of my life playing trivia, but many players can be performatively woke. When answers come up at BiB that people don’t like, it’s tradition to boo loudly. Over the weeks, I’ve heard the great brains boo “Christopher Columbus,” “Pete Hegseth” and, in one egregious instance, “capitalism.” When one answer was “Houthis” I decided to boo, but no one else did.

I went to play BiB on the day of Charlie Kirk’s murder, which was probably a mistake. One of the players said they “didn’t give a fuck.” I decided to give a little lecture, which made everyone uncomfortable. Then, later, they all loudly booed “J.K. Rowling.” I left the room with my cider in hand, thinking that these weren’t really my people after all, even though I love answering quiz questions just like they do. The next day I removed myself from the BiB Discord server and haven’t been back.

Walsh, who prefers to keep things apolitical (though he did once hilariously refer to Dean Cain as a “piece of shit Superman actor” in a question), says there’s not a path for me returning. I miss it. It’s fun and competitive and the drinks at Tramps are cheap. Those are surely good enough reasons to overcome trivial political differences.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.