It’s Tuesday night at The Bitter End on Clement Street. Britte Marsh, her boyfriend Jason Roberts and a few of their friends have staked out their table and are halfway through their first round of beers.

“You can’t go with too big of a group,” says Marsh. “It starts at 9, so for a party of eight we have to be there at 6.” Marsh has been an enthusiastic pub quizzer since an ex-boyfriend sneaked her into Tuesday night at The Bitter End while she was still underage. Now she assembles her friends for trivia night there and at the 540 Club on Clement, or at Tia Margarita, the Outer Richmond restaurant where she works. At the appointed hour, Tim, the quiz leader, takes his place in front of the tables full of already tipsy participants Tonight’s categories will include questions about pop culture, sports, history and other general knowledge. A few stragglers are absorbed into teams, and the games begin.

They say that things move from West to East—the weather, ideas, technology. Through phenomena like McDonald’s, Coca Cola and the New Jersey shopping mall, America has been culturally colonizing Europe for decades. Some European ideas, however, manage to move against the current and hop across the pond. And once they land, they are streamlined, processed and offered up for a price. But still, who doesn’t love a good drunken competition?

The pub quiz as we know it got its start in—where else?—the pubs of Britain, Ireland and the other Commonwealth countries. The format is essentially this: players show up at a certain time on a bar’s designated quiz night, in pre-arranged teams or looking for other members. Players may throw down a few bucks as a buy-in to the game, to be used later as prize money, or the pub quiz may simply be the gimmick to get people inside and the drinks flowing. There are always several rounds of questions, with topics ranging from politics to sports to geography. At the end of the night, the last team standing wins the bar’s prize of choice. Some pub quizzers make it a ritual, showing up every week to take on their rival teams.

San Francisco has a long history of good Irish bars, and so it’s no surprise that as the quiz excitement grew in the dark, smoky pubs of the United Kingdom, the news quickly spread to their satellites in the New World. For the bars, it’s an effective way to bring in clientele on an otherwise slow night. Pub quizzes are generally held Monday through Thursday, and the event is always accompanied by drink specials. But a good quiz requires a lot of preparation: you need the right questions, the right structure and the right quizmaster to preside. If a bar doesn’t have the desire to form a crack team to run their quiz nights, there is another option.

“If you’re going to have a pub quiz, it might as well be a Brainstormer quiz,” says Liam McAtasney, owner, founder and head quizmaster at Brainstormer, Inc. As his name implies, McAtasney is a genuine northern Irishman, as well as an avid pub quizzer since his weekly jaunts to the Four in Hand while attending university in Belfast. In 1996, after his move to San Francisco, McAtasney began hosting pub quizzes part time, first in one bar and one coffee shop, and eventually expanding to meet the demand.

“It’s been pretty popular for the last seven or eight years,” he says. “We don’t really have to advertise.” Word of mouth has always been Brainstormer’s best bet.

The pub quiz movement has seen a few changes since its hop across the pond. According to McAtasney, quiz night in Ireland is much more serious, more subdued than the variety you’ll find in San Francisco. “There’s no cheating, no cell phones,” he says. In fact, Brainstormer has begun to clamp down on participants who’ve been using their Blackberries to get an edge, even banning one quizzer who wouldn’t cut it out. “He would get the questions, then run outside and look up the answers on his Blackberry,” says McAtasney. “I’m thinking about getting cell phone blockers.”

While the pub quiz might be a fierce competition worthy of dirty tricks for some, for others it’s a good way to diversify their bar hopping routine. Says Marsh, “I’m more willing to go out if there’s something to do, more than getting drunk.”