On Trivia Night, Quizmaster Pete Brings His A-Game . . . & a Beer

Pete Sullivan sits in the corner of a dimly lit and exceptionally loud pub, nursing what he calls the “crappiest” beer he can find—a Michelob Ultra, but Bud Light or Budweiser also would do. The 69-year-old retiree, and downtown New York native, is “sweating bullets” — and giving one-word answers to anyone who tries to talk to him.

He is at O’Hanlon’s, a bar on the corner of 14^th St. and First Avenue in the East Village, and he has to get his head in the game. O’Hanlon’s Pub Trivia, a weekly knowledge competition, has turned Pete into something of a local celebrity.

Quizmaster Pete, as he’s known to everyone who goes to trivia night, has always been a little bit obsessed with knowledge. He tried out for “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” twice; religiously shouts out the answers to “Jeopardy!” and grew up playing a homemade game of “Dictionary” with his family in Stuyvesant Town, where one person would pick the most random word they could find and everyone would take turns guessing the definition.

Fun facts, random tidbits, obscure words, pretty much any sort of knowledge is interesting to Pete. It can be personal, like Teddy Roosevelt being born mere blocks from him in what is now a federally preserved townhouse in Gramercy Park and having a house a couple miles from him in Long Island, or extremely broad, like actor Mark Harmon actually being related to singer Ricky Nelson.

“That’s what I really like, the tiny little things that connect us all together,” Pete says.

He is constantly interjecting with random trivia, whether related to the topic or just something he’s thinking about. Like the fact that “Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings is a Mormon, or the word “milt” means fish semen. He rarely smiles, but when he pulls out a good piece of trivia that he knows will elicit a reaction, his toothy grin lights up the room.

He attributes a lot of it to his hometown: “The fact that I grew up in New York, there’s so much history in New York, and every block is a different part of history,” says Pete. Of course, he wouldn’t dare set foot above 23rd St. But he spent a lot of time in the library at Washington Square, at NYU—where he spent hours researching anything that piqued his interest; he especially loved the rare books section.

A career in journalism didn’t work out for Pete, so he hopped around from job to job: at the department store Gimbels, where he worked as a sales associate and then buyer (until the store went bankrupt); at a Greek cruise line company (until 9/11 happened and international travel came to a halt); at an ad agency as a finance manager despite having no background in finance, where he worked for about 16 years until he retired.

It was after COVID hit, and a hard few years for Pete (his wife’s death from cancer, his own cancer, now in remission), that he had the idea to bring trivia nights to O’Hanlon’s in the hope that it would attract a larger crowd. He had been going to O’Hanlon’s for years; it was a quiet but popular spot that often attracted locals. Pete had played trivia, years ago, at a bar over on Third Ave. with his friends. He suggested to Tom, the owner of the bar, that he start the trivia night, and offered to introduce him to the woman who did trivia at another bar, who he thought was fairly good. Tom only agreed to do the trivia if Pete hosted it, and so, one week later on a random Wednesday in October, Quizmaster Pete was born.

He chose the name “Quizmaster Pete” because, well, he is in charge of the whole event. He picks all the trivia categories and comes up with challenging questions, creates posts once a week on the O’Hanlon’s Instagram account to promote the trivia nights, and shows up every Wednesday to read his questions to the crowd. Without Pete, the trivia nights are simply not possible.

Pete allows people to submit categories for trivia, anything from “running” to simply the name “Nelson,” and he finds creative ways to trip them up with questions. “The problem with it is... if you say a category like “Star Wars,” there’s a bunch of “Star Wars” nerds who know every little piece of trivia about “Star Wars,” and everyone else knows nothing about it,” Pete says. “I don’t like it to be a listing of statistics.”

The rest of the trivia is more accessible, which Pete does on purpose. He adds a pop culture round, which is normally a crowd pleaser, and a general round, which typically is just random facts he learned that week. To keep things interesting, Pete added one question to the end of every round called the “free drink question.” If you get it right and you are the first person to hand him your piece of paper with the answer written legibly, you get a free drink. It has started a trend of people flying down the bar the second the round is over to get as close as possible to Pete in order to hand in their answer first. But Quizmaster Pete, lover of all things fair, will intently watch for the first hand to reach his way, even if it’s all the way down the bar.

On a recent night at O’Hanlon’s, the bar is packed with an air of anticipation. People are crowded around the five tables that are in the front, and those who arrive even a minute past 7:45 have to make do with what’s left. They huddle around the bar, sit on the floor, or even just find a nice spot to stand next to a wall so they have somewhere to write their answers.

Pete comes around to hand everyone the answer sheets for the night, saying “Hi” to regulars as he goes. It’s incredibly loud, everyone is chattering away, but the second Pete starts talking into the mic there’s a resounding “Shhh” and a collective click as pens are uncapped. The vibe in the room completely shifts: people sit up straighter and hide their blank pages from the teams around them, straining to hear the first question as it comes through the speakers.

Weekly trivia has given Pete the opportunity to create community in his life while also doing something that he loves.

In doing trivia game-night prep, “the number of hours that I actually spend doing it is probably, I don’t know, five or six, but the hours that I think about doing it? I’m thinking about doing it right now,” he says.