Resonance 2005, MESCOE Sports & Entertainment Quiz

11th Aug 2005

Results:
1st: Siddharth Dani & Salil Bijur (VIT)
2nd: Arvind Iyengar & Nitin Satyamurthi (MESCOE)
3rd: Anupam Akolkar & Anand Ayyadurai (VIT)
4th: Abhishek Nagaraj & Kapeesh Saraf (COEP)
Joint 5th: Anirudh Kasbekar & Arnab Pal (VIT), Rahul Phadnis & Mihir Kulkarni (MIT)

Quiz setters: Karan Oberoi

Report: Resonance '05 was the IEEE organised event in MESCOE where the quiz was one of the sub-events. The quiz was a purely 'Sports & Entertainment'. The elims were rather long, with 50 questions, mostly from western entertainment. The elims questions were decent: many original, some were recycled, some lifted straight away, some really obscure.

The finals began with 2 separate infinite rebounds rounds of entertainment and sports each. Anand & Anupam took a lead in the Ent round when Arvind and Nitin caught up in the Sports round. Siddharth and I scored in the connect the pictures round that followed next. The connects were extremely trivial eg. Connect pictures of Austin Powers, a martini, the logo of Aston Martin (with the words) and Timothy Dalton. Ans: James Bond. There were some (Da Vinci Code, Schindler's List) where the answer appeared clearly in the picture clues. For all of them, though the connect could be obtained by 2 clues, the explanation of the other details were given points. The next round was the audio round with buzzers (rather, banging of desks) and the clips being mostly dialogues from movies or voices of sportsmen (Ian Smith, Pat Symcox). The last round was called 'Cryptic', something like the one in Chakravyuh, where a team got to answer subsequent questions on a topic (for increasing points) after the first answer they got.

Some cribs as usual: Improper distribution of half-points is always a volatile issue, and there were plenty of disputes where half-answers and scoring was concerned. The topics in the Cryptic round could have been better. Some of them were Apoorva Agnihotri and pool/billiards championships. There were plenty of Pg. 3 type questions in the entire quiz that required knowledge of ex-girlfriends and love interests of singers, actors and sportsmen. Now this may be a fair topic for some and 1-2 in a quiz are OK. About 10-12 of such questions? I don't think so.