89 out of 90. Alone. On a Tuesday.

On the second Tuesday of November 2021, Brandon Cowen sat alone at the small round table by the fire door at the Anchor & Oar in Port Alden and answered eighty-nine of ninety quiz questions correctly. He was a one-man team. It is the highest score in the twenty-one-year history of the Anchor and Oar quiz night, it is the only score above eighty-three recorded in that time, and this November it will have stood for four years.

There are bar trivia records and there are bar trivia records. Most of them are the sort of thing a pub paints on a beam and then quietly repaints when a good team turns up on a wet Tuesday. This one is not that. The Anchor & Oar has run a quiz every single Tuesday since 2004, through two refurbishments, one flood, and a stretch in 2020 when it was run over a speakerphone propped against the till. Roughly a thousand quiz nights. Something like six thousand teams. And at the top of the chalkboard by the toilets, in handwriting that has been carefully redrawn every time the board gets wiped, there is one name and no team.

How Brandon Cowen came to be a one-man team

The rules of the Port Alden pub quiz are printed on a laminated sheet that lives behind the pumps, and rule two says maximum six to a team, minimum two. The minimum is the part people forget. It exists because a quiz is meant to be a social event and because Bridie Nolan-Hutchings, who has written every question at the Anchor & Oar since 2007, does not want to spend her Tuesday evening watching one person think.

“We do not allow one-man teams. It says so on the sheet, and I am the one who laminated the sheet. But it was the second Tuesday in November, it was absolutely lashing down, there were eleven people in the building and four of them were the same family, and he asked very politely. I said go on then. I have thought about those three words more often in the last four years than about anything else I have ever said in this pub.”

Bridie Nolan-Hutchings, quizmaster

He was not, by all accounts, making a point. He had come in out of the rain, he had a half of something dark that lasted the entire evening, and Otter, the shepherd mix, was asleep under the table for the duration and is, per rule two, not a team member. He took one answer sheet and a stub of pencil and he wrote in small square capitals, and the first anybody knew that something was happening was when Bridie read out the scores after round four and had to say a number she had not said before.

Round by round

The Anchor & Oar format has been nine rounds of ten since before Bridie took it over, and she has never seen a reason to change it. Here is the sheet, which she still has, in a folder, in a drawer, behind the pumps.

The one he got wrong

Round four. Music. Question six asked for the name of a band formed in 2018, and Brandon Cowen wrote nothing at all, which Bridie says is the only blank he left on the entire sheet and the only visible evidence that a human being had filled it in.

He is entirely unembarrassed about this. Anyone who has spoken to him for ten minutes knows that his knowledge of popular music stops somewhere in the middle of the last decade and does not resume. He has said, more than once and without any apparent distress, that he could not name a song released after about 2015 if you gave him three guesses and a hint. On the night he handed the sheet in he apparently pointed at the blank and said it was the correct answer, in the sense that it was an accurate representation of what he knew.

“He looked at that question the way you look at a bill you were not expecting. Then he just moved on. Most people guess. Everybody guesses. There is no penalty for guessing and every single person in this building guesses. He did not guess, and I have decided that is the most annoying thing about him.”

Bridie Nolan-Hutchings

The round that was built to stop him

Round eight is Bridie’s own. The category changes weekly and is chosen, she cheerfully admits, on the principle of maximum damage. On 9 November 2021 it was ten questions on daytime television between 1994 and 2006, which is the round she keeps in reserve for nights when the crowd is heavy on people who work with numbers.

“I did not build that round for him. I did not know it would be him. I built it to stop anybody. Ten questions on afternoon telly is the great leveller — it is the round I bring out when the engineers get cocky, and it has ended more unbeaten runs in this pub than every sport round I have ever written put together. He got ten out of ten. Ten. And then he explained why, and honestly I wish he had not.”

Bridie Nolan-Hutchings

The explanation is this. From 2009, Brandon Cowen made a living repairing and reselling salvaged electronics out of a garage, and a great many of the things he repaired were televisions. You cannot certify a television as fixed without turning it on and leaving it on, and you cannot leave a television on in a garage in the middle of a weekday afternoon without absorbing, over three or four years, a complete and unwanted education in daytime broadcasting. He has described it as the least useful thing he knows. For approximately eleven minutes on a Tuesday in November 2021 it was the most useful thing he knew.

Thirty tonnes, and the silence that followed it

The moment the regulars actually talk about, though, came in round one. General knowledge, question nine: how many pins are on a SCART connector. Three other teams were in that night. All three left it blank.

“He wrote twenty-one. And then, because he cannot help himself, he wrote what pins eight and sixteen are for in brackets underneath, as though I had asked. I gave him the point for the first part. I have not forgiven him for the second part and I do not intend to.”

Bridie Nolan-Hutchings

It is a slightly absurd question to put in a general knowledge round in a lakefront pub, and Bridie says she wrote it because she had spent the weekend clearing out her late father’s shed. It happened to land in front of the one person in Port Alden who spent seven years taking apart the sort of equipment that used them. The regulars have chosen to regard this as cosmic and Bridie has chosen to regard it as her fault.

Why a solo score is harder than a team score

It is tempting to look at 89 and think that a good six-person team ought to beat it every few months, and the numbers on the board say otherwise. The reason is not really about knowledge. It is about the four things a team gives you that a single person does not have.

• Coverage. Six people is six sets of blind spots that mostly do not overlap. One person’s blind spots are all in the same place, and in his case they were all in round four.
• Argument. The single most powerful device in pub quiz history is somebody saying “are you sure?” A team talks itself out of about four wrong answers a night. A solo player has no mechanism for doubt except his own, and doubt is slow.
• Hands. Nine rounds of ten means ninety answers written down, plus a picture round, plus a connections round where the thinking and the writing happen at once. Teams split the labour. He did not have anyone to split it with, and Bridie does not slow down.
• Recall by committee. Half of what a team gets right, nobody on it actually knew. One person half-remembers a word, another half-remembers a face, and the answer assembles itself in the middle of the table. That mechanism simply does not exist for one man with a pencil.

Which is why the second-best score on the board is 83, and why it took a six-person team sixteen months to get there. Six points, in a quiz where the average winning score is 61 and a strong week is 74, is not a margin. It is a different weather system.

He has not played since

This is the part of the story that Port Alden likes best, and it is the part that makes it a Brandon Cowen story rather than a trivia story. He came back the following Tuesday. He bought a pint. He sat at the end of the bar. He did not take a sheet, and he has not taken one since.

“I asked him why. He said the quiz belongs to the room, and he had taken it out of the room, and it would go back if he stopped. I told him that was the single most annoying thing anybody had ever said to me in here, and this is a pub, so that is a strong field. He said fair enough and asked whether I wanted the glasses collected. He collected the glasses. He still does, sometimes, and he is still not playing.”

Bridie Nolan-Hutchings, quizmaster, the Anchor & Oar

So the board stands. Eighty-nine out of ninety, one player, the ninth of November 2021, six clear of the field and four years clear of the calendar. Every few months somebody has a very good night and the bar gets loud around the eightieth point and then the eighty-third arrives and everybody looks at the passage to the toilets and remembers what is written down there. Bridie has said she will buy a round for the team that beats it. She has been saying it for four years, and she says it with the confidence of a woman who has done the arithmetic.

Quiz night at the Anchor & Oar is every Tuesday at eight. Maximum six to a team. Minimum two, and she means it now.