Character Studies is an INDY series about familiar faces around the Triangle—and the stories you may not know about them.
Walk down Durham’s Main Street on a Wednesday night, and you’ll probably hear Arturo Sanchez’s warm but commanding voice spilling out of the huge speakers at Bull McCabe’s.
“We have 23 teams playing tonight,” the trivia host announces from his seat behind the bar on a recent summer evening as he juggles a microphone, a tequila with cranberry, and a laptop (with three rounds of questions typed out and ready to read).
By the end of round one, the team formally known as “Baja blast your back out at Taco Bell” is dragging just one point behind “Fact me harder, daddy” which is sitting in first place. “Taking away the Department of Education can’t stop me because I can’t read” is stuck in the middle of the pack, but still wins a pitcher of beer for best team name (as determined by Sanchez himself).
“This was a very creative one,” Sanchez says. Turns out this group also won best name previously for “I hope our score is higher than the Eno River” after the historic flooding at the state park.
Sanchez, who moved to Durham to go to Duke and then never left, was a regular trivia-goer at the now-defunct Charlie’s on Ninth Street and James Joyce on Main Street. Once, when a host went out of town for the week, she asked if he would cover for her. He picked up the Bull McCabe’s gig weekly in 2018 when the previous host left, and added a Thursday night at Fullsteam (now at The Can Opener while Fullsteam moves to American Tobacco Campus).
Sanchez says the weekly trivia competition really gained more momentum during the doom and gloom of the COVID era when he switched to hosting online.
“[Trivia] kept me from going crazy,” he says. “I would write the trivia in my house and then host from my living room.”
A lot has changed since people started venturing back out into the world, and Durham business owners are still trying to figure out how to adjust to the population’s new work from home and food delivery habits. Even now, a few online trivia teams will join in the weekly fun (although, don’t worry, they are barred from winning prizes). And as those team names about floods and federal cuts reference, there’s still a lot to be worried about in the world.
Maybe that’s why Sanchez’s pub trivia—a casual social gathering where the lines between right and wrong are clear and inarguable—is so much fun.
“People are more engaged and wanting to go out and do stuff in person,” Sanchez says of the post-COVID era.
The two-hour midweek nerd fest has all the intimacy of a house party and all the inclusivity of a concert in the park. A group of coworkers in polos sits next to a raucous bunch of graduate students in their Duke blues sitting next to a grandma-grandson duo having a casual bite to eat.
Many of the teams, like the winners of the pitcher for best team name, are regulars. That’s partly because Sanchez just hosts a damn good trivia. The questions, which he spends about four hours a week working on, are difficult (“This is a fucking smart city, you know?” he says), but logical—even if you don’t know the answer, you might be able to reason through it. And Sanchez, while he loves his regular attendees, doesn’t want any newcomers to feel alienated by obscure or highly specialized questions.
And if you’ve ever found yourself arguing with a teammate about an answer, then you’ve fallen right into Sanchez’s trap.
“I want to ask you questions that make people argue,” he says with an impish smile. “That’s my favorite thing, is to make people argue.”
He likes his other gig bartending at Pizzeria Toro, but has hopes for expanding his trivia domain in the future.
“My two favorite days of the week are the days I do trivia,” he says. And in a dream world? “I would want to do five trivias a week.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].