Quiz Trek - The Black Cat Bar, Edinburgh

The Black Cat Bar, Edinburgh

Tuesday Nights

7pm

My trip to Edinburgh last week was made all the more enjoyable by the fact that my extremely tolerant other half agreed to attend a couple of pub quizzes with me. There were a couple of options for the Tuesday Night but given my football team of choice, The Black Cat Bar, sounded like a good one. This is a very small bar on Rose Street. It serves a great selection of Ale, has a nice friendly atmosphere and was packed for the quiz which started at 7pm. (An ideal start time for a quiz if you ask me....a large amount of friends won't play local quizzes with me as they start at 9pm).

This was a very short quiz and clearly a popular one. 8 teams of 5-6 players, and then us two sitting sheepishly in the corner, meant this small bar was packed to capacity. It begins with a picture round for 10 points which involved this week celebrities when they were younger. I don't like picture rounds at the best of times and especially not one's such as this. Not really a test of knowledge of all put pleased with 9 we managed between us.

The second round was 5 simple general questions (although the old "Chestnuts I don't know" caught me out again...What was the first man made object to break the sound barrier?"). An 8 question connection round follows which was quite straight forward followed by an odd music round. From what I gather the quizmaster does "mash-ups" every week so this week we had small clips of several songs playing in a random order, some repeating and re-occurring and to make it harder they were B-Sides to the biggest selling singles of certain years. Confused? I was....So getting 5/8 was not half bad!

The quiz ends with the top scoring team getting a one question chance to win the money. One member goes up to the Microphone to try out what this week was a tough question! Fail and there is no prize. Win and I think £30 was up for grabs.

Either way, despite this not being a quiz I would usually enjoy we did have a good time in the Black Cat Bar. 18 points being available for pictures and music in a quiz out of 32 is very off putting though as these are the two rounds were bigger teams benefit more. Also the fact both rounds were very gimmicky made them rather dull. The connection round was very straight forward and I was caught out only by the Chestnut above and a question on Scottish Football. 

Certainly this is a popular quiz night, so it must be doing something right!, although I probably would not return given the option. Very much a "social" quiz where everyone seemed to know everyone and not much real use in having good quizzing knowledge heading into it. As I said though, the quiz is making money for the bar and getting people out quizzing so all credit to the quizmaster.