Charles in Charge

 

Chuck Yu of Trust the Butt made Overall Team of the Week in Week 4 with an impressive 18(6).  It was a long 4.5 hour trip down to Silver Spring MD. We met at Matchbox on a Saturday morning for their very affordable  Unlimited Bruch special and the following interview.

Rich: Congrats on Team of the Week for Week 4. How many team of the weeks have you made in your OQL career? I remember you had a recent 17(7), is that your best score ever?

CY: Thanks! I’ve made a handful within my division but only overall once or twice. I’m about as capable of getting 1 direct as I am of getting 6 in a given week, so it’s still a fun thing to see myself up there every so often. I’ve never had a full house, and the 17(7) was my first time getting 7 directs, but I think my highest score was probably 18(6) sometime in my first few seasons. 

Rich : How did you first get into OQLUSA  and tell us about the teams you have been on and how the team name was made?

CY: As a lot of folks probably were doing, I was looking for ways to play more trivia during the pandemic, and saw that some LearnedLeague players were talking about OQL, and I asked to be put on a scratch team. We were called “The Replacements”. I was just starting to improve my LearnedLeague get rate at the time and was feeling pretty good about myself until the first two directs I got were about things I had no hope of knowing. I really enjoyed it though, because we also had a newborn and I’d sometimes just take the baby in the stroller, leash up a dog, and take a walk while playing…win-win for everyone…me, my wife, the baby, and the dog.

Our roster had folks from the US and UK come and go for a few seasons, including a short stint with UK Chaser Mark Labbett (though I never played a match with him). I actually took over as captain when our first captain, Bryce Warwick, took a break, and we became “Ragequit Against the Machine”. We effectively stayed a scratch team, though- we took on a decent number of single players who were getting their feet wet with the league, and most of us only met in person at SporcleCon.

The team eventually disbanded, and I picked up with Taco Belly Rubs soon after at the invitation of my good friend, Rachel Shuman, who I met through the DC area Jeopardy Alum group. When that team disbanded (soon after, unfortunately…I wonder if I’m a bad omen…heh), I took a break for a year or two, sort of coinciding with the birth and early months of my second child, Ethan, before answering a call for scratch players a couple of seasons ago for Trust the Butt, which brings us to the present.

Rich: Stephen Fleming-Cooper also made Team of the Week last week with you. Please tell us how you came to join his team and did you ever make TOTW alongside another team mate in the past?. 

CY: I’m sure I have- Stephen is a very good player, of course, and I’m sure he could make TOTW a lot more often if he passed fewer rebounds to me :)

We had some really solid players on my past teams as well who made TOTW more often than I did. This is my second season with Trust the Butt, and I joined because I saw a call for scratch players, as they had to fill out their roster, and I was kind of itching to play OQL again after taking a break. Stephen and the rest of the team, Yvette, Ken, Ryan, and random fill-ins have been nothing but kind to a random stranger they met on the Internet, and it’s been a great experience so far.

Rich: Besides OQL, what other online leagues do you compete in?

CY: LearnedLeague (where I just hit 1000 matches without a forfeit a couple of seasons ago), BPTrivia (for whom I also host live games in Potomac, MD), and QuiP (on team House Music for Mr. Biswas). My QuiP team has folks from a lot of places, but we could also very easily play from the same living room- I happen to live about 10 minutes from Rachel and Kent and one day we’ll make it happen.

Rich: How did you first get into playing any form of trivia?

CY: My parents bought me the “Brain Quest” decks when I was in elementary school, and I remember watching Carmen Sandiego and Jeopardy as a kid, despite not knowing any of the answers. Competitively, I was a mathlete for a long time and I still try to do math for fun now, but in my junior year of high school, one of my math teammates and another classmate invited me to quiz bowl practice, and I probably got hooked the same way everyone else did- the buzzers were fun to play with. I remember my first tournament was done in a written format, and I won a small prize (a button with the Taco Bell dog on it) for putting down the funniest wrong answer. 

Rich: What is the live trivia scene like in your city? Do you play every week at a regular place?

CY: There are so many places to play, but I actually rarely get out. Occasionally, I’ll meet up with my old frisbee teammates to play in downtown DC at Last Call, which is a dive bar located in an old warehouse, but most of my fix comes from hosting once a week for BPTrivia at Potomac Pizza. My 5-year old daughter, Skylar, is starting to be kind of interested in trivia- she knows I host (and has seen me do it once), and my wife got me a mug with a QR code that leads to a question of the day, and Skylar always asks me for the question, so maybe someday soon we can go out together and play.

Rich: Besides trivia, what are your other hobbies?

CY: Too many. I have friends that joke that there is nothing that I do in a non-competitive manner. Among other things, I’m an avid chess and bridge player and I have a collection of board games. Athletically, I have played ultimate frisbee for over 20 years, including a brief stint on DC’s semi-pro team, the Breeze. I enjoy golf and currently work as a caddie. I also fairly recently took up basketball, since non-contact sports weren’t cutting it for me. In the past, I’ve done competitive karaoke in DC as well, which was a lot of fun. Adjacent to trivia, I have a 1,300-day completion streak on the New York Times Crossword Puzzle (and it would be around 2,300 if I didn’t forget about it on a random Tuesday a few years ago). I try to do them as fast as I can. I haven’t been able to make it to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (or any tournament) yet, but when it comes to Philly next year, I hope to go and get humbled by everyone.

I am a software engineer by trade, and like working on my own projects during my downtime (and this is where I plug the tool I built because I hated using When2Meet for scheduling OQL matches- https://www.meetyouat.net - it’s similar to W2M, but more mobile-friendly, and with, in my biased opinion, better features)

Rich: What films have you watched in 2026 and which of them deserve Academy Awards?

CY: I’ll be honest here - when I have the time, I’d rather do a lot of other things over watching a movie - my attention span isn’t very long. Free advice for anyone playing me in LearnedLeague, I guess - put 3 points on the movie question. 

The last movie I watched was K-Pop Demon Hunters (for the parents out there, IYKYK). My daughter loves “Golden”, and my son loves “Soda Pop”. He was just learning to talk when the movie was big, and it was so cute to see him running around the room while singing along with the “Hey, Hey” in the intro. I will say that I am actually excited about an upcoming film, though not in 2026 - I will definitely watch “Spaceballs: The New One” when it comes out next year.

Rich: I am one of the biggest K-Pop Demon Hunters fans around. They deserved all the awards they won!

CY: I’ll pivot and say that do watch some TV, though, and my favorite show is “Taskmaster”. I’ve discovered a lot of comedians and personalities through it, including Chris and Rosie Ramsey, who host a podcast together called “Shagged, Married, Annoyed”. My wife and I both listen to it, sometimes together on car rides, sometimes separately. Most weeks, one of us will say to the other, “Did you listen to Chris and Rosie this week? God, I felt so seen”.

Rich: Have you ever been on any game shows and if so, which ones?

CY: I was fortunate to be on Jeopardy! in 2017 - as much as I like Ken as the host now, I’m glad that I got to be on when Alex Trebek was still there, since I watched him as a kid and learned English partly from the Wheel of Fortune/Jeopardy block that was appointment viewing every night. I’ve auditioned for a handful more - the Chase a few years ago, and Trivial Pursuit most recently - but no callbacks.

Rich: If you could have dinner with any five people from history at the same time, who would you choose?

CY: Billy Joel, because I grew up playing classical piano but I loved his style a lot more. Garry Kasparov for being probably the greatest chess player of all time during his career, and for his political work opposing Putin today. As a mathlete, I’d want to meet Katherine Johnson. I enjoy cooking and baking, and I’d bet it’d be fascinating to hear from combination spy and TV chef Julia Child. Finally, I said that I don’t really like watching movies, but my favorite movie is Forrest Gump, and I’ve seen most of Tom Hanks’s other movies as well and enjoyed all of them, and he seems like a lovely human to boot, so I’d love to have him as well. 

Rich: What sports teams and athletes are you a fan of?

CY: I have been a fan of the Cubs and Vikings for most of my life. I’ve been told that this is the most “Iowa” combination possible, which makes sense because I started out living in Iowa City when I first moved to the U.S. in 1990. I also thrive on heartbreak and hate it when my teams win championships, so it’s worked out pretty well.

I did take an impromptu flight from DC to Chicago in 2016 for the Cubs’ championship parade, though, and that was an absolute blast of a party with a few million friends. I got in trouble for playing hooky from work for it, but I’d 100% do it again.

RICH: What is the dining scene like in Silver Springs and what are  your favorite cuisines?

CY: I very much appreciate really good food, and Silver Spring (and greater DC) has a lot of diverse options, so this might get long. Starting simple, the place we usually order from with our kids (and other families) is Four Corners Pub, just down the road from our house - they do a very good white pizza with house-made sausage, and if I have a night to myself for whatever reason, I’ll sometimes head over there and sit at the bar with a beer and some extra spicy wings. Up the road in Wheaton, there are a ton of Asian options that we frequent between Pho, Thai, Chinese, or Ramen. My personal favorite, though, is Korean barbecue. Our spot is Firepan in downtown Silver Spring. We have the common struggle of getting our kids to eat veggies, but, for whatever reason, my son loves kimchi, and my daughter will eat the pink pickled daikon radish, and because they’re both small, they eat free, which you can’t beat. 

I’ll shout out a few other places in the general area that my wife and I love and folks should check out if they’re around here. Supra is a Georgian place in DC. The food is wonderful, but the wine selection is unique - Georgia was one of the first places in the world to make wine, dating back 8000 years, and their wine list includes some traditional flavors that I haven’t tasted anywhere else. Maketto is a place on H Street in DC that recently got a Bib Gourmand, and might be easy to miss because it looks like a trendy clothing store in front (because it is), but they have my favorite fried chicken - it’s coated in a five-spice caramel and served with homemade bread. Generally, their food is a combination of a lot of Asian cuisines, and reminds me of some combination of dim sum and street food. Finally, Peking Gourmet is in Falls Church, VA, which is a bit of a hike, but there’s a good reason we’ve had multiple birthday dinners there. Their signature is the Peking duck, which comes with the usual fixings - pancakes, scallions, hoisin, and cucumber, and is carved tableside, and if you go inside, you’ll see the walls completely covered in pictures of politicians, celebrities, and other figures that have eaten there. One of my friends said that “every dish there is the best version of that dish that I’ve had”.

Rich: What bands are on your playlist and who is your favorite musician of all time?

CY: Billy Joel is my favorite musician, with Elton John a close second, and my favorite band is the Eagles - my karaoke go-to list includes multiple entries from each of those. I’ve been trying to get into more recent music, partly for trivia reasons, and partly because I figured I need to expand my own tastes a little. I’ve been enjoying Alex Warren and Sabrina Carpenter, to that end.

Rich: Have you ever been to Geek Bowl, SporcleCon, Trivia Nationals or any other major trivia competition?

CY: I got into the game a little late, but I went to the two SporcleCons that were held in DC. I loved getting to actually meet a lot of the folks that I had only seen through a screen or heard through a podcast. I was hoping to make it to Chicago, since it’s my favorite city, but that didn’t quite work out for various reasons.

Rich: Thank you for your time I hopefully we get to play in a trivia match in the future.