Thursday, November 29, 2007

ACES 2007 School Quiz

Date: 4 Nov, 2007
Venue: Tilak Smarak Mandir
Organised by: Abhinava Vidyalaya, Pune and BCQC
Set by: BC quizzers, primarily Abhishek Nagaraj, Aditya Gadre, Salil Bijur, Shamanth Rao, and J. Ramanand,
Conducted by: Ramanand

Quiz Final Results
(40 IR questions + 1 theme + rapidfire)
1st: Abhinava Vidyalaya (F): 125
2nd: Kalmadi Shamrao (B): 110
3rd: SPM English (C): 75
Jt. 4th: Bal Shikshan Mandir (D): 50
Jt. 4th: Symbiosis Secondary (E): 50
6th: Modern (A): 15

(sadly, I left the paper with the names of finalists behind - if someone knows, please put in comments)

Report

* The 3rd ACES quiz was also the second time the BC was involved. The flavour of the quiz was sports + general
* Kalmadi Shamrao and Abhinava also had the best contingents, with about 6 teams from these schools missing out because of the only-one-team-per-school-in-finals rule. Perhaps a end of season Derby between these two teams should be held! They are clearly the two best quizzing schools in the city today.
* Though Kalmadi Shamrao chased Abhinava all the way, drawing level a couple of times after being far behind, Abhinava never lost the lead after picking it up in the end of the 1st quarter
* The organisation was excellent and smooth. Compared to last year, the turnout was very high, with about 60 teams from 15 schools showing up. The hall was packed during the finals with an enthusiastic audience.
* The quiz had a single "Aldus Manutius" theme round (images that spelt out the name of a sportsman, with five such sportsmen to be connected). A small rapid-fire "free throw" round was held for all teams, with one person coming forward to answer 4 questions each. There were four "quarters" in the quiz, each of 10 qns each.
* Last year's report. With this win, Abhinava successfully wrested back the ACES trophy which they lost to DES last time.
* Many thanks to Abhinava Principal Mrs. Pai, teacher-in-charge Mrs. Gandhi and the volunteer teachers and students for the fine show and the opportunity to do a quiz for school students.

Sample questions:
1. Stade de Gerland, Lyon. 3 June 1997. Brazil vs France. Score 1-1.Why is this match remembered?
2. This was invented by Allan Plaskett, an English computer scientist, who also invented another device called "Flightpath". It is pretty simple in practice, consisting of some radio antennae pointed at a particular kind of sportsperson. What is this?
3.She was born in Copenhagen in Denmark, which is where her father was stationed at the time. They later returned to their home-town of Mangalore. She would go on to make her movie debut in the film “Aishwarya” opposite Kannada superstar Upendra. Who?
Answers at the end of this post


(Original Announcement)
Abhinava Vidyalaya E.M.H.S. along with BCQC is organising an inter-school quiz next week.

Details:
Date: 4th Dec 2007
Time: Elims at 9am, Finals at 10.30am
Venue: Tilak Smarak Mandir, Tilak Rd., Pune
Participation: Teams of 3. For school students only.
Entry: Please contact BCQC or the Abhinava Vidyalaya school office
Flavour: A sports heavy general quiz

(Answers to sample questions)
Roberto Carlos' famous curling free kick, Snickometer, Deepika Padukone

Monday, November 12, 2007

The BCQC Landmark Comics Quiz Report (18 Nov)

The quiz was successfully held on Saturday for an audience of about 40-50 people. These consisted of ages from about 10 years to vannila-flavoured adults, housewives to students to dentists to one size fits all software types. The quiz was conducted by Sudarshan and myself, with other BC members chipping in from time to time. The questions (about 150 of them) were set by BC comic enthusiasts, ranging from Indian comics, Western superheroes, Graphic Novels, Disneylanders, Franco-Belgian comics and so on.

Comic-phile Shubhashis won the title of "Starocomix" in a 3 person playoff, triumphing over some worthy contenders, which included a couple of very good schoolkids.

Thanks to all who came, all the BC members who provided questions, and those that were able to help out during the two hour event.

If you have any feedback, please leave them in the comments. I personally enjoyed this style of 'walk-in-the-park' quizzing, which is very similar to our BC sessions.


Previous announcement

When? 6-8 pm. Saturday, 17th November
Where? Landmark Bookstore, Moledina Road, Pune.(opposite Magnum/Kakade Mall)
Prizes? Lots of goodies courtesy Landmark. Children will receive extra kindness from us!

We are doing a Comics Quiz for our partners Landmark , the brilliant bookstore at Moledina Road, in their store. So if you know your Popeye from your Tom and Jerry and your Asterix from your Tintin - do drop in!

It will be an informal interactive audience quiz, we'll be asking questions and throwing out prizes. No writing, no teams, no "big organised quiz". We make up the rules as we go along, and have lots of fun in the process.

Hope to see you there, with friends, family, children, parents, grandparents.(I don't think Landmark allows pets inside!)

Whodunits - BCQC November Open

Quizmaster: J. Ramanand

Date: 4th November

Format : Written elims. Top 6 teams go through. Next 6 teams play a playoff. Top 3 teams get chosen, and each of these 6 people are randomly assigned to a team which has already qualified.

Results: (Team names assigned by QM, after innovative murder devices)

1st place : 85 Conch Shells (Niranjan, Harish, Vishal)
2nd place : 65 Armadillos (Anupam, Akhil, Rachana)
3rd place : 55 Bonsai (Meghshyam, Samrat, Anand)
4th place : Designer Jeans (Aditya Gadre, Salil Bijur, Vikas)
5th place : Exploding Cows (Abhishek, Meghana, Amit)
6th place : Godfathers (Gaurav Singh, Yasho Tamaskar, Venkat)

Notes:

The day started off with a few innovations in the elims itself. Like CAT 2005, this elims introduced "differential" marking for the first time. Elims sheets were separate from the answer sheet, an innovation which enabled participants to keep the elims sheet and facilitated quicker(and some might say more accurate) correction. The finalists were chosen as described above.

Playoffs: This went on for about half an hour, had out-of-turn written responses (for closeup-confident teams) and regular passing for the yellowing rest. Scoring was also accordingly modified.

Finals: A 44 question final promised enough masala packed in every question to cause headache to most teams. Lots of brilliant questions, a few new areas touched upon - and cascading presentation of each connect element made clear a quiz which had been made with such painstaking detail that would've made Margaret Mitchell proud. This quiz was crafted more than set. Everyone had a thoroughly brain-rackingly good time. The experience of grizzled-hair teams like NP / BVHK or Samrat, Meghashyam made them the fair horses right from the start. But team Armadillos came up with some inspired answers and seemed to prosper near the middle of the quiz, when most teams were surrendering to mental exhaustion. Team Designer Jeans too made up some ground near the end with some good answers. Overall, decent showing from the on-stage teams - though no one was really on fire.

However, there were a few "buts" as usual. By 7pm mental fatigue, large average passing lengths and dwindling audiences meant that though the last 10 questions still remained, the QM chose to rush past them ("in the interest of general human rights") meaning that a lot of the good work was to no avail, as teams feigned thinking while dreaming of food. It all ended in a rather sombre mood of finality, with some teams "dazed and confused" and others in pseudo-eureka moments of having discovered a "flaw" in IR.

Overall, somehow though the quiz was excellent in itself - the experience seems to lead us towards another cusp in the BCQC development cycle, where we have been forced to re-evaluate what exactly we want to do and how to go about doing it.


[Request from Ramanand]: Since I may reuse the questions for a Bombay Quiz Club session, I request any commentators to refrain from specifically mentioning any answer keywords. Harish, I have modified your comment accordingly.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

"Whodunits" - BCQC November Open 2007

whodunits 2007

The BC Quiz Club will be organising an Open General quiz on Sunday, the 4th of November, 2007.

The details:

"Whodunits"
Date: Sunday, 4th Nov
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems Ltd. (see this link for directions)
Time: Prelims start at 1 pm sharp, so please report by 12:45 pm
Flavour: General
Who can participate: anyone; it's an Open quiz; Entry is free
Format: Prelims + Playoffs + Finals for 6 teams
Team Size: 2 per team
Details of the format will be published at this link
Conducted by: J. Ramanand
Prizes sponsored by Landmark, Pune
Contact:
email: contact@bcqc.org
phone: Ramanand (97642 58560), Harish (93733 04910), Salil (98231 12258)

Thursday, October 18, 2007

BarQing Mad!! (the Open MELA Quiz at Mindspark 2007) - Report

Date: 7 October, 2007
Venue: College of Engineering, Pune

Set by: Aditya Gadre, Aniket Khasgiwale and Yasho Tamaskar
Conducted by: Yasho Tamaskar
Theme: Movies, Music, Entertainment, Literature, Arts

Quiz Final Results
(4 rounds of IR + 1 speciality round + 1 long connect)
cutoff: 17.5/30

1st: Sayak Dasgupta and Suvajit Chakraborty (E)
2nd: Meghashyam Shirodkar and Prasann Potdar (F)
3rd: Sumant Srivathsan and Ravi Venkatesh (D)
4th: Samrat Sengupta and Salil Bijur (C)
5th: Amit Varma and Rishi Iyengar (B)
6th: Nandan Gokhale and Mrinmayi Katdare (A)

Notes

  • An entertainment quiz generally ends up being biased to the tastes of the QMs in music and movies. The quiz setters here made an effort to include questions on generally ignored topics such as Indian literature. The trend however was seemed to be toward cinema - Hollywood and Indian.
  • Sayak and Suvajit generally do very well at ent quizzes and were in full form here too. They gave correct answers in all domains right from Alan Arkin to Chhaayawaad and led right from the beginning. Team D (Sumant and Ravi) and Team C (Salil and Samrat), not far behind, were mostly battling for the 2nd spot.
  • The speciality round was in terms of 'contrasting pairs of topics' eg. "Sherlock Holmes + Hrishikesh Mukherjee films" or "Rock music + Hindi literature". The team who chose that speciality had the option to double their points while the others could write down the answers in case the original team got it wrong, however with a penalty for getting it wrong again. Meghashyam and Prasann made a stunning rush to the top in this round by doubling their questions and gobbling others' leftovers. Teams C and D slipped slightly here because of negatives leaving D tied with F at the 2nd spot and were tied at 3rd spot.
  • The last round was a long picture connect - the points reducing after every slide. Suvajit cracked it on the very first slide and registered his team's victory. By this time the tie at the 2nd 3rd spot had remained so it was resolved by the elims score.
  • Plus points: Interesting and workable questions as usual. Lots of domains covered - esoteric as well as pop culture. The newbie team from Fergusson Junior College gave some good answers that passed most teams. The quiz on the overall saw a lot of excitement with a lot of "jumping on the couch", sledging and leg-pulling within the teams.
  • Cribs: We saw a reappearance of the infamous finger-of-God. And some more fiery disputes over point distribution and authenticity of answers.
Feedback as usual in the comments.
Chakravyuh (Open Quiz at Mindspark 2007) - Report

Date: 6 October, 2007
Venue: College of Engineering, Pune

Open Quiz - "Chakravyuh"
Elims set by: Abhishek Nagaraj
Finals set by: Abhishek Nagaraj, Aditya Gadre and Aniket Khasgiwale
Finals conducted by: Aditya Gadre and Aniket Khasgiwale
Theme: General

Quiz Final Results
(~60 seamless IR with round reversal)
cutoff: 25.5/35
1st: Avinash Mudaliar and Harikrishnan Menon (A) 115
2nd: Meghashyam Shirodkar and Samrat Sengupta (F) 110
3rd: Uddata Baruah and S. Balakrishnan (D) 85
4th: Sumant Srivathsan and Ravi Venkatesh (B) 80
5th: Salil Bijur and Maitreyi Gupta (C) 65
6th: A.P. Alagarsamy and Prasann Potdar (E) 60

Notes

  • Chakravyuh 2007, the annual COEP quiz had already happened in April. This year, COEP organised "Mindspark", a technical fest with contributions from all departments, meant to be an annual event. The general open quiz, for the sake of legacy and permanency, was called Chakravyuh. That way the year 2007 had two Chakravyuhs and Chakravyuh henceforth is going to be a part of Mindspark.
  • Elims which were set by Abhishek were very workable and conformed to the "my mom knows of the answer" kind. A high scoring elims and appreciated by most. There was a sizeable participation for an open quiz in a college and lots stayed back to enjoy the finals.
  • Finals turned out to be a tight affair. Team A (Avinash and Harikrishnan) team F (Samrat and Meghashyam) led right from the start with teams B and C making good starts. Team D (Udatta and Balakrishnan) made a silent comeback midway by cracking some good questions to end up at the third spot.
  • The first time Aditya (the silent one) and Aniket (the singing one) conducted an open quiz of this level representing the new generation of COEP.
  • Lots of very good questions, interesting picture connects and visuals. A few questions were the kind of i've-seen-something-like-this-one-somewhere-before. But QMs cant be blamed since the honest effort was apparent.
  • Like in any other quiz, this one had its share of inconsistencies in point distribution and disputes concerning accuracy of answers. The heat that was generated only added to the excitement of a very close finish.
  • Cribs: There were many questions where more than answer is required and the policy of allotting points kept changing. A uniform approach though difficult, is desirable. Secondly, the flash presentation seemed to have some usability issues making it cycle through all questions from the start causing slight irritation to others.
Please leave comments on this post if you have any suggestions, criticisms, corrections to offer.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Amnesia - September 2007 BC Open General Quiz - Report

Date: 16 September, 2007
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSPL

Open Quiz - "Amnesia"
Set and Conducted by: Niranjan Pedanekar
Theme: General

Quiz Final Results
(~50 seamless IR)
cutoff: 20.5/45 1st: Meghashyam Shirodkar + Samrat Sengupta (B) - 100
2nd: B.V.Harish Kumar + J. Ramanand (C) - 85
3rd: Avinash Mudaliar + Harikrishnan (F) - 75
4th: Sudarshan Purohit + Abhishek Nagaraj (E) - 60
5th: Anand Sivashankar + Vibhendu Tiwari (D) - 55
6th: Kaustubh Bhat + Aditya Gadre (A) - 20

Best School teams: Nandan Gokhale + Samit, Satyavrat Wagle + Rohit Sahasrabuddhe
Best College teams: Aditya Gadre+Kaustubh Bhat, Yasho Tamaskar+Aniket Khasgiwale
Best Newbies: Arnab + Ramanathan

Notes

  • Undoubtedly, the best quiz of the year (even though we have had many good quizzes this year). Perhaps I should say "so far" :-)
  • Terrific elims, one of the best I have ever taken. Almost every question seemed to me to be genuinely workable or at least v. interesting. Only, was too long, thus causing a cascading effect of longer correction and "moderation" and so on.
  • Excellent finals questions - many people would have experienced Niranjan's style of questions for the first time: requiring a heavy dose of lateral thinking, a variety of elements per question, big and structure-intensive questions. I think most of them warmed to it.
  • Some questions were, as happens each time with Niranjan, bordered on the strange ("dard-e-disco" ;-)). Some could have had a few more clues, but then we'd have been there into the wee hours. Some of the split decisions could have been more consistent.
  • Superb performance by Meghashyam, with able support from Samrat. This team had, at the beginning, admitted to not being historically good at connects, Niranjan-style. But if this performance is anything to go by, they have nothing to fear here. Some of the answers were wonderfully intuitive.
  • Perhaps one aspect to a good quiz is how well it can inspire its participants to respond - on that count, we had some very fine answering by all teams, including the rookies Aditya and Kaustubh, making their BCQC Open debut. The audience too was in fine fettle cracking some tough nuts that none on stage could even unwrap.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Trivianomics - September 2007 BC Business Open Quiz - Report

Date: 16 September, 2007
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSPL

Open Quiz - "Trivianomics"
Set and Conducted by: B.V. Harish Kumar
Theme: Business

Quiz Final Results
(22 seamless IR + 4 Pune round + 4 final connects round)
cutoff: 10.5/25 1st: Anand Sivashankar + Vibhendu Tiwari (F) - 50
1.2nd: Samrat Sengupta + J. Ramanand (C)
1.3rd: Vishwajeet Narvekar + Mrs. Narvekar (A)

2nd: Salil Bijur + Harsh Ketkar (B) - 40
2.2nd: Abhishek Nagaraj + Suvajit Chakraborty (E)
2.3rd: Arnab Bhattacharya + Ramanathan (D)

Notes

  • The reporting results will clearly show that this quiz was not played in the usual way. It began like a conventional quiz format, with 6 teams. But after a couple of rounds, the bottom two teams were "bought-out" by the top 2, resulting in 4 remaining teams. Finally, we had a face-off between 2 teams of 6 people each. Salil-Harsh rightly called it the "qawwali" format :-)
  • The quiz was nice and not too taxing. Most questions were interesting and workable, presenting a pleasant face of business quizzing
  • The elims were quite good too

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Announcement - Next BC Quizzes

The Boat Club Quiz Club is organising two quizzes on Sunday, 16th Sep 2007. Entry is free.

Venue: Dewang Mehta auditorium, Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd., Senapati Bapat Road, Pune-16 (see this link for directions)

Details:

Quiz 1: "Trivianomics 2007" - Open Business Quiz
Time: 9.30 am to 12.30 pm; reporting at 9.15 am
Teams of 2, 6 teams in the final.
QM: B.V. Harishkumar
No prior registration.
Certificates and prizes for all finalists, as well as audience prizes.

Quiz 2: "Amnesia 2007 - Surviving Factual Harassment"
BCQC September Open General Quiz
Time: 2 pm to 7 pm, reporting at 1:30 pm
Teams of 2, 6 teams in the final.
QM: Niranjan Pedanekar
No prior registration needed.
Open to all.
Prizes for all finalists; Prizes for best all-school, all-college, and newbie teams as well as for audience

All prizes sponsored by Landmark, Pune

Special Prizes:
The 'HEISENBERG' Award
for the determined efforts to be uncertain regarding the answer

The 'MARADONA-HAJMOLA' Award
for impeccable passing ability

The 'X-FILES' Award
for providing vague answers that could only be explained through the paranormal

The 'RGV ki AAG' Award
for confusing creativity & creating confusion

The 'ANU MALIK' Award
for gross manipulation of available resources

The 'UPA' Award
for consuming exorbitant time in taking a 'trivial' decision

Contact:
Email: contact (at) bcqc (dot) org

Keep visiting http://bcqc.org for updates and online quizzes

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

July 2007 BC Open Quiz - Report

Date: 1 July, 2007
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSPL

Set by: Ganesh Hegde and Shivaji Marella
Conducted by: Ganesh Hegde
Theme: General

Quiz Final Results

(60 seamless IR)

1st: Sudarshan Purohit + J. Ramanand (A) - 100 - (Elims: 23.5)

2nd: Kunal Sawardekar + B.V.Harish Kumar (E) - 90 - (Elims: 24)

Jt 3rd: Niranjan Pedanekar + Meghashyam Shirodkar (F) - 80 - (Elims: 20)
Jt 3rd: Manish Manke + Abhishek Nagaraj (C) - 80 - (Elims: 17.5)

5th: Daniel Ghevarghese + Anubhav Chatterjee (A) - 50 - (Elims: 20)

6th: Salil Bijur + Harsh Ketkar - 40 - (Elims: 20.5)

Elims cutoff: 17.5 out of 35

Best school prizes: Mayuresh+Nikhil (Muktangan), Aastha+Anmol (Indian School, Al-Ghubra)

Best college team: Kaustubh Bhat + Aditya Gadre

Best newbies: Nilay Puntambekar + Rohit Khaladkar

Attended by: about 25 teams

Notes

Ganesh and Shivaji provided a very nice quiz last Sunday, covering different areas and asking some good questions. A few questions were a little eyebrow-raising in their arbit-ness, but overall, it was very good. Shivaji couldn't make it to the quiz. So Ganesh conducted the entire quiz, and did so with commendable patience, especially for one who hasn't really done many formal quizzes before.

The final was a tight affair with at least 4 teams in the hunt throughout. Ganesh will hopefully post the questions before leaving for his post-grad studies. The Shivaji-Ganesh pair first came into prominence with their shock 2nd place in Verve 2000, and have been stealth hunters on the circuit ever since. Good luck to Ganesh for the days ahead. Thanks to everyone who participated, despite the heavy rains that hit these parts that weekend.

Our next open quiz will be in September.

As usual, please leave comments if you have any feedback.

Tag cloud of themes:

arts(1) biz(2) ent-misc(1) ety(3) films-india(2)
films-west(6) gen(9) geo(7) history(10) india(3)
lit(2) military(4) music-west(3) myth(3) pol(1)
scitech(5) sports(12) tv(2)

(note: some questions have been tagged with multiple tags; don't have a roll-up to more general categories such as Entertainment. Though Sports seems the highest, the quiz didn't have any bad skews overall, with many of the sports questions being part of multi-tagged questions.)

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

"The Interrogative" - July 2007 BC Schools Quiz - Report

Date: 1 July, 2007
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSPL
Set and Conducted by: Abhishek Nagaraj and Suvajit Chakraborty
Theme: General

No. of Teams: 63, 15 schools
Quiz Final Results (team no. with elims score), cutoff: 13/30 1st: Pushkar Pandit + Vibhav Bhave of Abhinava Vidyalaya (F - 21)

Other Finalists:
Viraj Bathe + Sarvesh Deshmukh of SPM English (C,13), Rushabh Banthia + Rohit Telang of Symbiosis Secondary (D,15), Kaustubh Deshpande + Abhishek Rajopaadhye of SPM (E,16), Anmol and Aastha Kakaria of Indian School Al-Ghubran, Oman (A,15), Rohan Danait + Sanket Bhilare of Abhinava Vidyalaya (G,18), Punarvasu Pendse + Nachiket Deo of Kalmadi Shamrao (H,20), Nikhil Deshpande + Mayuresh Hooli of Muktangan (B,14).

Report:

The organisers of the BCQC School Quiz "The Interrogative" were in for a big surprise: the turnout was a staggering 63 teams from 15 schools! That means 126 young quizzers, half of whom had never quizzed competitively before, took part in the first major school quiz of the Pune calendar. To prove we aren't fibbing, here's a pic of the auditorium during the elims.

(Packed it was)

The elims were very competitive, but 8 teams finally made it through from 6 different schools. We even had one out of the two participating overseas teams (Indian School, Al-Ghubra, Oman made it and Northview High School from the US was the other - ok, they were on vacation but still they came, didn't they? :-)) in the finals

Chocolates and a break later, the finals began. Abhishek, as usual, had a terrific presentation lined up. The questions were good and so were the finalists. Some tough questions were answered with panache, many connects were cracked, but the Abhinava team that would eventually won was always in control.

July 07 School 2

(Starlit Finale)

Each finalist received a certificate and a Landmark gift voucher. The winners also took home a trophy each. The Interrogative will be back next year too, and a couple of school quizzes will happen in December and January. Thanks to all the principals, accompanying teachers, and parents who came over on a very wet Sunday morning. Thanks also to all the BC volunteers and to Abhishek and Suvajit for conducting a very enjoyable quiz.

(Quiz masters, winners, not-so-innocent bystander)

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Welcome to Qurio City!

Qurio City is our new weekly quiz series, where you can win a prize each week and learn interesting new bits of trivia in the process. The first question will be posted on Monday, June 25.

All the details at this page.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Announcement - Next BC Quizzes (School and Open)

The Boat Club Quiz Club is organising two quizzes on Sunday, 1st July 2007. Entry is free.

Venue: Dewang Mehta auditorium, Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd., Senapati Bapat Road, Pune-16 (see this link for directions)

Details:
Quiz 1: "The Interrogative" - General school quiz
Time: 9 am to 12 pm; reporting at 8:45 am
Teams of 2, 8 teams in the final.
Prior registration is necessary. Last date of registration is Friday, 29 June. Write to us for details.
Certificates and prizes for all finalists, as well as audience prizes

Quiz 2: July Open General Quiz
Time: 2 pm to 7 pm, reporting at 1:45 pm
Teams of 2, 6 teams in the final.
No prior registration needed.
Open to all
Prizes for all finalists; Prizes for best all-school, all-college, and newbie teams as well as for audience

Prizes sponsored by Landmark, Pune

Contact:
Email: contact at bcqc.org
Phone: B.V.Harish Kumar (93733 04910/bvharishkumar at gmail), Salil Bijur (98231 12258/salilb at gmail)

Keep visiting http://bcqc.org for updates and online quizzes

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Making quizzes popular

We at the BC are constantly asking questions: what makes quizzes good, what made a *good* quiz good, why do we quiz, why don't more people in Pune quiz, and what can we do to help spread the fun and cheer that we get out of this sport.

One such introspection provoked this post by Salil, which received a lot of feedback. A discussion amongst some of us much later also elicited a lot of comments. Salil has put together some of the key extracts of the later discussion (featured below; read the link above for the original set of comments). As you may know, we organise open quizzes once in every two months and we'd like to know what you think of the content in our quizzes, whether you find the quizzes interesting, and what you look for in quizzes. General suggestions welcome too.


Following are from a thread of discussion on attracting more people for our formal quizzes and making them more popular.

Shamanth:

If I were a first time quizzer, I'd expect to be able to answer a few questions, and at least be able to relate to most of the others. Now, judging from the low scores of first time teams in BC quizzes past and present, I'm afraid not too much of that is happening.

If we want people to come back for our quizzes, we'll need to make the quizzes more answerable. Now, I've set aam-junta quizzes – quizzes for first timers a couple of times – and I'm clear that to set a quiz that everyone can enjoy, answer and relate to, does NOT necessarily involve dumbing down of questions – you do NOT have to ask 'how many sisters-in-law does Mrs Agarwal have in KKKKusum?'. You can ask a question about KKKusum/Himesh/pop-culture and still keep it workable. That would be something a KKusum/Himesh fan would appreciate the same way that BC regulars would applaud a involved-literature/history/60s-movie question.

To reach out to a first timer AND pique his interest, we need put in questions that aren't obvious, aren't direct, but are in the area of his interests, and are such that he can figure the answers out very easily, so he at least stays back for the finals, and comes back to the next quiz.

We need to look at who we are setting questions for. What I'd suggest is to have(in the prelims), say, 20 questions targeted at regular BC quizzers, and say 15 at newcomers – the latter comprising of nice, easily workable, non-factual questions on topics that would still interest a non-quizzer – say cricket, Indian history, politics, current affairs, non-intricate business. I know our quizzes comprise questions on these topics already, but most questions aren't easy enough for a first timer.

Yes, there're going to be voices that we're pandering to aam-junta, that we'll become populist, and that we don't need to give 'grace marks'. But hey, quizzing is a two way activity – like I said, we always need to keep in mind who we are setting the quizzes for. And besides, we aren't altering our style of quizzing, we're still staying true to our essence, which is to ask workable questions and stay away from factual recollection based questions.

We need to convey to people why we enjoy quizzing, and for the same reason we think they will enjoy quizzing too. Yes, we can merely say let-them-come-if-they-are-interested, but they simply wont show up if they cant make head or tail of the first quiz they go – I myself remember being almost put off while watching a greek-and-norse-myth filled quiz back in my first year of college.

Besides, 'elitism' is overrated – a lot of the times, all it entails is recollection of a petered funda, that we simply happen to know because we've been quizzing for a long time. First timers who are well read, but simply haven't quizzed before wouldn't do particularly well in a lot of our quizzes, simply because they aren't in touch with our quizzing repertoire.

In the comparison with Bangalore-Chennai we could look at the Landmark-Odyssey quizzes, that regularly see 500+ teams taking part(of 3 members). They've 40 question prelims, and at least 10 of those are the sort that everyone can answer. Finals of course are different, and comprise what we at the BC would call standard questions. However, finals still have some quantity of local/pop-culture questions that are tough to figure out, so the audience relates to it once the answer is out.

I don't know if you should call it a dumbing-down as much as a setting-questions-for-the-audience-you-cater-to.

Abhishek:

I agree with Shamanth.
[...]
A common question I ask is, has my mom heard about the answer while setting a newbie quiz - and that helps me remove some biases that are natural once one has quizzed for a long time.

Shamanth:

Yes - this is a nice way of looking at it. It's a very good criteria for picking newbie questions. Perhaps, in addition to this - 'Would my mom be able to answer this question? If not immediately, at least after some prompting and clue-dropping?' would do well.

Harish:

A thumb rule like this can and should be applied to all questions and not just the newbie questions.
Any quiz which does not cater to the lowest common denominator of the audience is not a good quiz. And this has nothing to do with dumbness etc. There are so many Qs in Niranjan's quiz which are in the so called areas of specialities of so many of our 'recognized' quizzers...you can check how many were actually cracked by those guys.
[...]
Having only seamless rounds with infinite rebounds, while being fair to quizzers on stage is not very audience friendly - it is drab. Rounds like the Chakravyuh round or buzzers or negatives make it interesting. I know it is difficult for such suggestions to pass through the standard format of our quizzes.

Siddharth Dani:

One of the toughest things to do is to try and convince a non-quizzer that he would prolly enjoy going to a quiz because he will prolly increase his knowledge of topics he may not have too much knowledge about or that he will get an ego boost by seeing that he really can answer a few "up his alley questions" or just happen to pick up a nice goodie or some cash. (The goodie/cash thing does work sometimes).

Shamanth:

[I]n Landmark/Odyssey, you do not have 500(or even 300) teams of quizzers. Of these 400-500 teams, only 40-50 will have quizzed with some amount of regularity - most of the teams are family teams - parents and a kid or dad and two kids types.

They just come because they think it's a nice way to spend a weekend afternoon. Now that impression is inculcated simply because Landmark used to put publicity(and majorly) in schools and colleges. Also, people like it because it always has questions that they could answer and get a few right, and win audience prizes - there's lots of audience prizes in it. Besides, there're prizes like best team name and best school team prizes, so hajaar junta show up.

It clicked because they put in enormous publicity the first time, and made a lovely quiz. The first edition, I'm told, did not see that huge a response. Because it was a brilliant quiz, people told friends, who showed up the next year and it grew.

Speaking for me personally, it was a major influence - to see that sort of crowds, and that number of people having fun, and finally being able to answer questions in my first attempt at quizzing drew me. My first Landmark quiz was in my first year when I hadnt done any sort of quizzing, when hostel junta who'd quizzed in school told me to try it and that it'd be fun. I was pretty overawed by the entire experience.

I dont see why that sort of thing cant be done here. Get crowds - make sure they enjoy themselves, and they'll not only come back, they'll bring friends along.

Kunal Thakar:

I am not very sure about this (above mentioned) approach of asking questions.

If we stick to asking questions where the answers are known, this is going to stagnate the quizzing scene for sure. There will be more depth but the questions will heavily favour the zeitgeist. Asking new trivia or venturing into new areas which aren't known to everyone isn't a bad thing.

Having said that, I do believe that we need to make our quizzes more audience friendly. IMO, the most popular quizzes I have seen in Pune have been conducted by [...] Derek, Pickbrain and Parnab. Whatever be said of their questions, it can't be denied that the audience loves the stupid humour, the excitement created by the jumping QM etc. Infact, Parnab quizzes are super arbit but they ensure good turnouts because of his excellent dramatic skills.

Sudarshan:

1. Question topics and wording:

I had feedback from a total newbie, non-techie person this time :
My wife. Though she's a cricket buff, her reaction to nearly all of the questions was that 'they simply go over one's head' because of the cryptic phrasing.
We need a few simply-worded, straightforward questions in both the elims and finals. They don't have to be easy to *answer*, just easy to *understand*.

One suggestion : Let's have two people organizing each open quiz. There are definitely enough people willing to do it. There'll be more questions to choose from, some amount of editing and reviewing, and some checks on questions that look simple to the creator but are verbose/abtruse.

2. Getting more people :

I second Shamanth's point about the massive publicity and word-of-mouth generating the crowds. Look at Crossword's so-called 'sale' which features a single shelf of books at 10% off - but look at the publicity they give it, and the people that go consequently. We need something to make new people know about BCQC.

3. Making quizzes more enjoyable overall :

- Make it a point to have questions with humorous answers/fundas, and more straightforward audio-visuals. Audience interest needn't be generated by jumping up and down or needling the participants - accessible humour, movies, and music are more longlasting ways.

- Abhishek, your flash template for quizzes is really good. Do you think you can add some bits of animation in there? Such as fades between questions, perhaps flashing numbers when the score changes, a special screen to dislpay scores ?

- Audience questions are definitely a good idea. Audience questions with straightforward A/V identifies are easy to do and are best to pull people in.

- Let's also think of different prizes for people rather than throwing normal chocolates at them. Keychains? 10-buck coupons for pepsi? Pens? Comic books? Think cute, fun, envy-inducing on a low budget.

Ramanand:

* Acc. to me, I'd like to help popularise quizzing as "a intellectually stimulating recreational sport". I don't know how many people are inclined towards something like this - re: the point that Dani makes. But in general, IMO, the most enthusiastic quizzers are "geeks", where geeks are defined as people who are passionate about something in great depth. It may be sports or films or music or books, but talk to them and soon they're spouting love-poems to their favourites. Some of my friends, non-quizzers, are in this category and I find them being fascinated by certain aspects of quizzing when I share questions with them. We need to at least attract and retain these. We also learn a lot from these people in turn.

* I feel we should "enable" everybody who wants to quiz or thinks they can quiz to participate. Our model of no fees, walk-ins etc. is perfect for this. But mere enabling is not sufficient as you have all pointed out. We will continue to tweak our "offerings" - hopefully, every change is designed to achieve something.

* I don't like the idea that we have to necessarily dangle carrots-on-steroids to get >100 teams. [D]o we really want all those ppl who come in only for prizes? Not IMHO. But we do want to make it a happy activity for those 80 coming for the content. We really want to be the pleasant domestic life of quizzing in these parts, not an annual one night stand. If we can also get to do the grand-nights-of-passion sometime, then fine - but I won't lose sleep over it.

* In addition to quizzes having some questions even for the (lowest common denominator), I feel the overall quiz should be pitched at the average participant, not at outwitting the (alleged) best participants.

* It should ideally have topics from a wide range AND the quiz host should be good at those topics - enough to be able to speak about the question and related context. This is hard to achieve. We know that many of us cannot claim wide-ranging interests. But we cannot get the few who seem to have wider ranges to do quizzes each time. So, if you want to be a good QM, then you have got to genuinely broaden your own horizons. Ensuring breadth by picking up questions from elsewhere won't help for long.

* Let's face it: we know exactly what certain QMs are likely to ask. And the QMs exacerbate this "incest" by hardly changing their pet themes over different quizzes. In fact, QMs must take pleasure in outwitting participants who think they know exactly how this pitch is going to behave.

* My personal subjective requirements from quizzes these days:
- breadth of topics (some familiar topics, some new that I can learn about)
-indulging pet themes of QMs fine, but only if the expectation from the quizzer is of fairly universal things to think about
- occasional reusability of old things - old wine in new and astonishing bottles
- workable, but not very esoterically so
- elims reflecting finals
- as far as possible, equidistance of topics to new and old quizzer alike - v. hard to achieve
- lack of sitters - but qm needs to be "aware" of recent quizzes
- Niranjan's idea of survivability of qn - a balance of clues to be given out and held back

* I'm not so concerned abt the number of people showing up increasing each time. [...] But we need to do the "retention" bit. I think colleges and schools should continue to be our highest priority for I feel that grown-ups have already now settled into some sort of recreational pattern and there's not that much of a dent possible unlike with the kids.

My suggestions:
* Give out trivia quizzes/trivia puzzles during the finals. Let audience guys look at that when they're bored. Perhaps the content can be related to the elims/finals questions. They can take it home, mail in answers, and we give prizes.
* What are your views on the Theme Attic thing? I think it's a mistake to get people to write down answers all together. Perhaps we should have ppl call out answers for each qn instead? Person doing it can pick the newbies first instead of oldhands, and give them chocs. Otherwise, ppl may snooze off.
* We should get more feedback from participants. Perhaps we should put up a feedback form on the website too.

* I've noticed ppl, especially kids, leave qns blank. Since guess-work is the framework of most of our successes, perhaps we should incentivise this somehow (look at me spout economics ;-)) - perhaps have -ves if no. of blanks exceeds 5. Yes, ppl will probably write nonsense, but perhaps some will be forced to think +vely

:: Salil


Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Rotaract Pune Open Quiz 2007

Organised by Karan and team of Rotaract Club of Pune, Main

Report by Harish:

Final Standings
Meghashyam and Hazardous Waste (i.e. Kunal S) - 166 (Team C)
Ramanand and team (i.e. Harish) - 162 points (B)
Salil and team (i.e. Ganesh) - 15x (D)
Doctor and Aastha Kataria - 14x (A)

Highlights -
1. A quiz held at a Ladies' Club :-)
2. The QM and the organizers were not BCQC regulars so it did come as a whiff of air - some fresh, some not so fresh.
3. Elims - 25 questions in 40 minutes.
4. There was a filler quiz conducted between the elims and the finals.
5. Finals consisted of four rounds of 15 questions each. Scoring pattern - D&P; no IR. 10,5 in the first round; 12,6 in the second, 14,8 in the third and 20,10 in the fourth round.
6. There were lot of questions which would be considered 'standard trivia' among the seasoned quizzers because of the regularity with which they appear in quizzes. E.g. Mel Blanc's epitaph (finals),Video Killed the Radiostar (elims). So it was a quiz of attrition and the team which missed the least number of questions on Directs was the winner - JR please confirm this. Please note that the team which did answer the maximum number of questions in the quiz did not win - this is empirical evidence of how IR helps in standardizing the scoring and the eventual winners are decided by the number of questions answered and not whether they were direct or passed.
7.The Doctor's team did very well answering most of their directs. Meghashyam and Hazardous waste answered some 'brilliant' questions and finally Ganesh had the pleasure of playing on home turf (well, as close to his home as is possible) and scoring heavily.
8. There was lot of enthusiasm shown by the organizers and were willing to receive feedback. The efforts put in, in terms of hospitality and making the participants was welcome - esp. after the energy sapping conditions seen at some of the recent quizzes e.g. Chakravyuh/Quizzomania.
9. One major peeve was that there were no prizes for the teams placed third and fourth. Probably the money which went into the potato chips and the trophies could have been spent on GVs for teams placed third and fourth.
10. All in all, had a pleasant experience which did not make the mind stretch a lot.

:: Harish

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Mahaquizzer 2007 - Results

Open category winner: J. Ramanand
College winner: Sandeep M. (IIT Madras)
Ladies winner: Vibha Iyer (Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics)

(Sadly, I don't remember the name of the school winner - if someone does, please leave name and school in the comments.)

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Rotaract Pune Open Quiz '07

Forwarding a notice:


The Rotaract Club of Poona, Main is organising an Open Quiz on Sunday, 3rd June 2007 at Ladies Club, Opp. Dastur School, Camp. The Registration starts at 9.00am and the Quiz will start at 10.00am.

Enquiries and Prior Registration for the same can also be done by sending an E-mail to punequiz@gmail.com or by Calling Karan - 9881896343 or Ankur - 9890164464. Spot Registration is also available.



Wednesday, May 16, 2007

KQA 'Mahaquizzer' 2007

The Karnataka Quiz Association will hold the third edition of Mahaquizzer, the annual solo quiz contest, in Bangalore, Bhubaneshwar, Chennai, Hyderabad, Trivandrum, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and New Delhi on Sunday, 27 May 2007.

Mahaquizzer is a written quiz; 150 general questions to be answered in 90 minutes.

Prizes will be awarded to the person with the top score in each city, as also to the best woman entrant, the best college entrant and the best school entrant in each city.

The person with the top score across the cities will hold the title of Mahaquizzer for this year. The winner will also receive the Wing Commander Mulky Memorial Trophy for Quizzing Excellence from Wingco's family on Sunday, 24 June at the time of the KQA Anniversary.

Date of contest: Sunday, 27 May 2007 Time: 1000hrs-1130hrs at all venues No entry fee Open to all (above the age of 12)
A list of venues and city coordinators can be seen at this link.
For Pune, the venue is:
Dewang Mehta Auditorium, "Bhageerath",
Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd,
(Behind Dominos Pizza)
Senapati Bapat Road,
Pune - 411016
Coordinator: Vishwajeeth Narvekar
Please contact Ramanand. J (9324445248) or Shamanth Rao (9881000957) for directions to venue

Please do register in advance to ensure good seating!
To register, email kqaquizzes at gmail.com with the name of the city where you would like to appear mentioned clearly in the subject header (e.g.SUB: Mahaquizzer-Mumbai)

Enquiries may be addressed to Arul Mani (arul.mani at gmail.com, call 98452-06690)
:: Arul Mani

Update - May 23 Some Instructions:
1. (If you have registered in advance) please bring a print-out of the confirmation email with you
2. Reporting Time: 0930hrs. Please ensure that you take your seat by 0930hrs
3. We wish to start at 1000hrs sharp at all centres. Please note that nobody will be allowed into the hall after 1000hrs.
4. Please carry valid identification if you are competing as a school/college student.

May 2007 BC Open Colleges and Schools Quiz (Sports) - Report

Date: 13 May, 2007
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSPL

Open Quiz - "World of Sports"
Set and Conducted by: B.V. Harish Kumar
Theme: Sports

Quiz Final Results
(40 seamless IR + 6 Numbers round)
1st: Aniket Khasgiwale + Aditya Gadre (COEP) (B) - 100 - (Elims: 20)
2nd: Omkar Nene (Garware) + Viraj (H) - 75 - (Elims: 14)
3rd: Tanmay Inamdar + Siddharth Gokhale (BMCC) (D) - 55 - (Elims: 15)
4th: Rohit Chandrachud + Rohit Bahulekar (E) - 35 - (Elims: 13)
5th: Yash Tamaskar + Gaurav Singh (A) - 30 - (Elims: 16)
Jt 6th: Vikas V (SCOE) + Arnab Pal (VIT) (F) - 20 - (Elims: 11.5)
Jt 6th: Shantanu + Ruchik (Muktangan) (G) - 20 - (Elims: 9)
8th: Rishi Deshpande + Amod Bendre (C) - 15 - (Elims: 8)
(Kunal + Vibhav of Abhinava Vidyalaya missed out on the finals by a mere 0.5 points)

QM's Notes

  • Tried to cover as many sports and areas as possible.
  • Tried to make it as un-ESPN School Olympiad friendly as possible. So mugging up from the quiz books wouldn't have helped unless you knew how to use those facts/numbers in the quiz.
  • I was impressed with the way the kids took to the style of quizzing and some of the answers were nothing short of brilliant. Aniket and Aditya were in vintage form as they reeled off quite a few 'good' questions (in the QM's Opinion) to take the lead which they never let go. Some of the other answers like Jahangir Khan and Lester Piggott were also brilliant. The team which missed out on qualifying by 0.5 point was unlucky and did very well sitting in the audience.
  • I tried to have a different format for the elims - 15 Questions on a Crossword puzzle (some of the clues were cryptic - Hindu Crossword types) and 10 Audio Visual Questions.
  • I expected very high scoring in the elims. So, there were bonus points on offer for cracking all the A/V questions/crossword clues. Though the highest score in the elims was 20 they missed out on the bonus points.
  • The idea for the Numbers round came from a similar round done by Shrirang Raddi at the Boat Club many years ago.
  • The topicality of the quiz ensured that most of those present were damn good at the topic and I really didn't have to explain too many of the answers.
  • We can do topical quizzes on these BCQC Open days - either for schools or for the Open junta (from the response seen for the India quiz) We just to ensure we don't make the topics too esoteric.
  • There were 12 teams for the Sports quiz - most of whom had turned up because they were already on the mailing lists. We need to follow the philosophy of some of the truck companies on campuses - Trespassers will be recruited.
  • People were allowed to participate in the quiz in spite of wearing t-shirts professing their love for losers like Arse-nal.

Monday, May 14, 2007

May 2007 BC Open Quiz "Indic-Nation" - Report

Date: 13 May, 2007 Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSPL
Set and Conducted by: Shamanth Rao and Salil Bijur
Theme: India

Quiz Final Results (team no. with elims score):
1st: Anand Sivashankar + Vibhendu Tiwari + Meghashyam Shirodkar (8 - 32.5)
2nd: B.V. Harish Kumar + Ganesh Hegde + Niranjan Pedanekar (4 - 33 (highest elims score))
3rd: Manish Manke + Siddharth Natarajan + Kunal Sawardekar (1 - 32) or Samrat Sengupta + J. Ramanand + Abhishek Nagaraj (6 - 30) (scores not clear)

Others: Aditya Gadre + Aniket Khasgiwale + Yashovardhan Tamaskar (2 - 25), Ketan Doshi + Ashwin Kulkarni + Sumedh Kulkarni (3 - 22.5), Rahul + Vibha + Rachna Gothi (5 - 22) (cutoff elims score), Jay Athalye + Kedar Toraskar + Akshad V. (7 - 24), Anand Ayyadurai + Krishnan Sekar + Georgie Matthews (9 - 23.5), Kunal Thakar + Arnab Pal + Anupam Akolkar (10 - 28)


Salil has the following notes to offer from yesterday's quiz:

A few "principles" we considered before setting out to make the quiz:

  1. Encourage max no. of people to be able be a part of the finals -- thats why we had teams of 3 and 10 teams in finals.
  2. Increase no. of questions a team gets to attempt, prevent the "we never got any simple ones" crib -- thats why had a large no. of questions in the finals. The no. of sitters and tough ones a team gets evens out in the end. However we didn't dumb it down too much, and a level was pretty much maintained.
  3. Reduce newcomer frustration due to repeated fundaes, tough questions and esoterica and make it more enjoyable and interesting -- thats why we had a comparatively simple elims round with 32.5/35 being the highest. We also had a few not so simple ones in the elims.
  4. Prevent boredom among audience and participants by having more innovative rounds other than seamless IR.
  5. Encourage people to guess more and not restrict their thinking -- thats why we didnt have negatives in any round and encouraged more guesses for the themes
Format of the quiz:
The quiz was styled as a 9-course meal. We had:
  1. Appetizers: 9 IR qns connected to a theme.
  2. Soup: Written round with a few audio-visual identify qns
  3. Main Course 1: 33 qns on IR.
  4. Salad: Written round with qns connected to a theme
  5. Sorbet: Audio questions based on inspired songs
  6. Main Course 2: 33 qns on IR with round reversal
  7. Dessert: Written round with qns connected to a theme
  8. Wine: 3 written qns with a stage 2 connect
  9. Coffee: A 24-picture clue connect
Now the ground realities:
* We had over 75 people attending both the quizzes, including participants and audience - which is a small record of sorts. We had lots of enthu school students attending, some with their parents who were equally enthu to answer which was really great to see.
* Lots of people + Informal atmosphere = chaos, where people randomly enter and leave and we cannot prevent entry or exit at any point of time.
* Shamanth and Abhishek's newbie quizzes which were used in favour of Theme-Attic were really popular and the audience loved them. We should have such questions instead of topical esoterica since we're targeting Theme-Attic for newcomers. Have simpler themes or themes that cover wider ranges to be newbie friendly.
* Blame the local eateries or our own latitude - but a lot of time is spent waiting for participants after lunch to come so we cant start in time often delaying the whole show.
* IMHO, it is fair for a QM to hurry a team answering at his/her discretion. However it is unfair for participants to rush the QM because they have to leave early - we are flexible to allow substitutions.
* It was heartwarming to see all newcomers showing enthu and being involved throughout. Many enquired for more details, took down contact nos., etc. so we had quite a few newcomers with potential to be regular.

On the actual quiz content:
* We avoided esoteric topics - eg. individual scores & stats of SRT or hardcore JBDY/Sholay facts. (Maybe there were 1-2 out of 100)
* Added humourous facts/trivia to make them interesting and appealing to audience.
* There will always be cribs about not having touched any particular topic or focusing on one more, but an attempt is always made to cover all. Often the reason may be that good questions in a topic weren't found or perhaps didn't suit a particular theme. We dont want to have arbit questions on a topic just to touch it.
* Not everyone likes long quizzes. But we had decided ours to be one. And we had to cater to 30 finalists.
* Plead guilty for not having only-audience questions. We were short of time and frustration levels among participants were rising due to the length. But we did have a loyal audience (that too newcomers) who patienty waited till towards the end and kept attempting qns for chocos.
* Answers in the presentation make it easier to explain to other participants and audience. It is dangerous to an extent and cost us twice :-(. But there are ways to prevent it - though they're time consuming.
* The inspired songs round was considered as 'topical' and 'antakshari-like'. I disagree. It wasn't topical because we didn't ask specifics like music director/film, etc. Most tunes were familiar ones and were based on recollection.
* Received cribs about on-the-fly scoring patterns and no. of attempts for theme that caused confusion in total scoring. I agree here - a better approach is required in dealing with written rounds and themes.


Some sample elims questions (select the whitespace in front of "Ans" to see answers)
1. Fill up:
a. A peepul tree in Varanasi.
b. A banana tree in a Bangalore temple
c. An idol in Ayodhya
Ans. Abhishek Bachchan. Funda is that all these are Aishwarya Rai's 'husbands'

2. Which Indian PM dropped his surname 'Shrivastava' because it indicated his caste? Ans. Lal Bahadur Shastri

3. Which place in Mumbai gets its name from a black stone statue of King Edward VII (as the then Prince of Wales) which is now located in Jijamata Udyan?
Ans. Kala Ghoda

4. The earlier name of the town of Nanded shares its name with a place in West Bengal. Which place?
Ans. Nandigram

Thursday, May 10, 2007

BC InFest 2007 - Report

The latest edition of BC InFest happened at on a quiet Sunday at the serene Boat Club setting amidst politely cloudy weather and many dollops of fun. It saw a good participation of about 20-25 people, and saw its share of good questions, bad humour and care-free quizzing.

We only had time for three quizzes: Meghashyam ("shyam*10^6") put on some excellent questions from a breadth of topics, Maitreyi pulled out some interesting questions from a recent quiz of hers, and Ganesh's religion quiz was quite novel and impressive.

The highlight of the day was InFest-You-Us, the new speciality themes solo quizzing section. The format was as follows: each person had chosen a topic of their interest, preferably a slightly off-beat one, to be set by one of the others. This way, almost everyone participating had set a topic. The taker would be asked 15 questions: 1 point for getting a question right. If missed, the question would go to the "Mob". The Mob was not allowed to discuss among themselves, but people merely raised hands if they thought they knew the answer. The Mob had to decide who among them could go for it. If the chosen one was right, the taker lost 1/2 a point. If not, the confident chosen one would get quite a rocket from the rest :-). Finally, no person from the mob could answer consecutively. Sounds like fun? Well, it was.

Samrat was the chief organiser/convener/whip/Benevolent Dictator For the Day, and in his own inimitable style, a report:


On sunday BCQC members had a rollicking ride at the Boat Club.

The event started off with a swig of magic potion:
Topic : Cultural References in Asterix
Person : Siddharth N, Question Setter : Shamanth S
Correct : 7 No answers: 4 Answered By Mob : 4 Total : 5
It was an enchanting set by Shamanth, who tried his best to dig out new trivia from Asterix. The experts in the mob also hunted down some stray boars missed by Siddharth

Topic : Train Names in the Ind. Railways
Person : Shamanth S, Question Setter : Abhishek N
Correct : 12 No Answers : 1 Answered By Mob : 2
Total : 11
The most offbeat topic, and Abhishek had a varied offering, criss-crossing the entire length and breadth of India.

Topic : Google
Person : Abhishek N, Question Setter : Kunal T
Correct : 6 No Answers : 7 Answered By Mob : 2
Total : 5
Abhishek had a 404 (page not found) for most of the questions , as KT had a tough non-googleable set on offer

Topic : History Of Israel (1917-1990)
Person : Samrat S, Question Setter : Kunal S
Correct : 14 No Answers : 1 Answered By Mob : 0
Total : 14
Samrat was in his best kosher form as he systematically went about conquering the Holy land.

Topic : Discworld Novels
Person : Kunal S, Question Setter : Sudarshan P
Correct : 8.5 No Answers : 6.5 Answered By Mob : 0
Total : 8.5
Esoteric set, which had some interesting pop culture references

Topic : Hindustani classical music
Person : Niranjan P, Question Setter : Salil B
Correct : 11 No Answers : 2 Answered By Mob : 2
Total : 10
A rich audio-visual offering from Salil, which appealed to all the non-musical types also. Niranjan was at his rhythmic best, but the mob also added a raga of their own to the jugalbandi of Salil and Niranjan

Topic : Monty Python
Person : Aditya G, Question Setter : Abhishek N
Correct : 8.5 No Answers : 4.5 Answered By Mob : 2
Total : 7.5
The mob was on the floor in splits with some of the questions and in danger of rolling over into the Mutha or getting stumped through their head.

Topic : Detectives in Fiction
Person : Ramanand J, Question Setter : Niranjan P
Correct : 10 No Answers : 2 Answered By Mob : 3
Total : 8.5
Excellent well-researched set. Ramanand did splendidly in this tough set. The mob led by Sudarshan also cracked a few mysteries on their own.

Topic : World Cup Football
Person : Gaurav S, Question Setter : Aditya G
Correct : 5 No Answers : 1 Answered By Mob : 9
Total : 0.5
Gaurav got lynched by the mob in this one. The football fanatics Aniket and Samrat pounced on every (mis)pass.

Topic : West Indies Cricket
Person : Harish K, Question Setter : Ramanand J
Correct : 8.5 No Answers : 3 Answered By Mob : 3.5
Total : 5.25
Very interesting collection of questions from Ramanand, captured the entire history of the brilliant and much loved Caribbean entertainers

Topic : Sandman Comics by Neil Gaiman
Person : Sudarshan P, Question Setter : Gaurav Sabnis ( in absentia)
Correct : 8 No Answers : 7 Answered By Mob : 0
Total : 8
Another of the niche areas. Sabnis wove a dream sequence for Sudarshan.

Topic : Science in India
Person : Salil B, Question Setter : Siddharth N
Correct : 8 No Answers : 2 Answered By Mob : 5.5
Total :
Salil could not unravel most of the set, and the mob was ready to score at most opportunities

Topic : The Great War in the Mahabharata
Person : Meghashyam S, Question Setter : Harish K
Correct : 14 No Answers : 1 Answered By Mob : 0
Total : 14
Meghashyam cracked the Chakravyuh with ease, and conched his way to glory.

Topic : Catch-22 By Joseph Heller
Person : Aniket K, Question Setter : Meghashyam S
Correct : 13 No Answers : 2 Answered By Mob : 0
Total : 13
Aniket made the most of the topic and was in no dilemma at all

Topic : Pink Floyd
Person : Kunal T, Question Setter : Aditya U (in absentia)
Correct : 9 No Answers : 4 Answered By Mob : 2
Total : 8
Nice workable set from Aditya.

Topic : Friends
Person : Yasho T, Question Setter : Gaurav Sabnis ( in absentia)
Correct : 10 No Answers : 3 Answered By Mob : 2 Total : 9
Another rerun of the sitcom.


We rounded off the day with a little presentation ceremony for Shamanth, with some gifts for being such a prominent member of the BC, contributing immensely to the open quizzes, and for finally leaving ;-).

BC InFest should hopefully be back next year too.

Saturday, May 05, 2007

BC May Open - India Quiz


BC May Colleges and Schools quiz - World of Sports


Thursday, May 03, 2007

BC InFest 2007

This Sunday at the COEP Boat Club. All the details here.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Abhimanyu 2007 - Results

1st: Aniket Khasgiwale ("India at the World Cup Cricket")
Other participants: Aditya Gadre ("Manchester United"), Abhishek Nagaraj ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books"), Kaustubh Bhat ("The musical career of Metallica"), Udbhav Bhatnagar ("FRIENDS the TV Series"), and Kapeesh Saraf ("The musical career of Pink Floyd")

Aniket wiped off 9 out of 10 in his topic round and had little to do in the GK round. Aditya and Abhishek gave him the most competition.

Chakravyuuh 2007 - Report

Date: 14 Apr, 2007
Venue: COEP

Open Quiz
Set by: Abhishek Nagaraj, Aditya Gadre, Gaurav Singh and others from COEP
Theme: General

Quiz Final Results
(48 seamless IR + 1 written connect qn + 6 direct speciality questions
1st: Kunal Sawardekar + Shamanth Rao (A) - 115* (won on better elims score)
2nd: Amit Varma + Sumant Srivathsan (D) - 115
3rd: A.P.Alagarsamy + Prasann Potdar (B) - 70
Jt 4th: J. Ramanand + B.V.Harish Kumar (F) - 55
Jt 4th: Samrat Sengupta + Salil Bijur (C) - 55
6th: Meghashyam Shirodkar + Aditya Udas (E) - 40

Quiz Elims Results
(cutoff: 19/30 qns)
Samrat + Salil - 22
Kunal + Shamanth, Meghashyam + Udas - 20
Amit + Sumant, Alagarsamy + Prasann, Ramanand + Harish - 19
Dhananjay Shettigar + Amit Pandeya were also on 19, but missed out on starred qns.

Solo Entertainment quiz: (set by Aditya Gadre and Kaustubh Bhat): won by Aditya Udas

Report

* The open quiz saw good attendance (I guess ~30 teams).
* A good and interesting elims. One or two could have been better designed and some dropped, but overall, was good. Was a very tight qualifiers too.
* Quiz started with a single written connect made up of 12 visual elements showed one by one. This was followed by 24 qns of regular IR. Then a set of 30 qns on different topics, of which 6 were offered as directs to the teams. This was part of the chakravyuuh round.
* Was a little disappointed with the finals content. The coverage of the questions and the design of the chakravyuuh round left a bit to be desired, IMO (see tag cloud).
* Nevertheless, there were some good questions such as the aussie guidelines qns. Moments of "should have got that" abounded. * Good organisation and effort overall, though the sound-and-light limitations of the COEP auditorium vis a vis the PSPL audi is harder to adjust to these days.

Please leave comments on this post if you have any suggestions, criticisms, corrections to offer.

Tag cloud of themes:

biz cricket eng_films eng_music etymology football
gen geo hindi_films history ind_films
ind_music india lit misc misc_ent music scitech
sports tv

(note: some questions have been tagged with multiple tags; don't have a roll-up to more general categories such as Entertainment; one question is not included as I don't remember the answer;)

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Poster for Chakravyuh

These are the posters for chakravyuh. Useful in case you missed out on any info. Also if people could put up these posters at your respective locations(workdesks, "watercoolers", notice boards etc), that would be of great help. Merci. Broadcast end. (PS : links point to printable files.)

Click here to download

Click here to download

Monday, April 09, 2007

Chakravyuuh 07

The College of Engg. Pune (COEP) will organize its annual open quiz contest Chakravyuuh 07.

The details are as follows:
Date: 14th April, Saturday
Venue: COEP Auditorium (Directions)
Registration : 2:30 pm
Elims : 3 pm
Solo Entertainment Quiz : 4 pm.
Finals : 4:30pm onwards.

Other details:
Team Size : 2
Nature : General trivia.
Restrictions : None. Open to everyone.
Registration : On the spot.
Contact information : Aditya Gadre - 9881101291
Website : Click here
Finals will be followed by a performance by COEP's award winning band.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Intechxication 2007, MIT - Report

Date: 31 Mar, 2007 (Saturday)

Venue: MIT, Pune

Quiz set by: Akshad Vishwanathan

1st: Kunal Sawardekar + Shamanth Rao
2nd: Ganesh Hegde + Abhishek Nagaraj
3rd: Suvojit Chakraborty + Salil Bijur
4th: Vivek Philip + Safal Mohammed
5th: Akansh Gupta + Siddharth Raman
6th: Rohit Prabhavalkar + Shreesh Sikaria

Friday, March 30, 2007

March 2007 BC Open Quiz - QM's (Harish) notes

(See the report on the quiz)

Some of the objectives I had set for this quiz:

1. Set a new precedent for the BCQC Open in terms of production values.
2. Increase the audience involvement during the finals.
3. Questions to be framed in such a way that every team 'type' (those who prefer to work it out; those who know a lot; those who just guess) should have an equal chance.
4. Introduce areas which have not been covered till date without losing out on the interest levels.
5. Make the quiz more interesting with new rounds/formats.

Some notes:

1. Low turnout for the quiz. We need to get the scheduling right and the QMs need to focus their energies on retaining those who do turn up.

2. Very low scoring elims. Lot of questions in the finals went unanswered. JR - can you confirm the number? (JR: 13 out of 36, seamless questions only) I don't agree with Anand's diagnosis - as mentioned in his comment. But we need to think about it.

3. The Speciality round should have been better thought out and executed. 5-pointers would have been a better idea but as Siddhu says hindsight is always 20:20. I don't think couple of teams not getting the same number of directs as the others makes the quiz any less equal. It is just that the format is different. I am also not so much 'For' this equalizing/normalizing of the scoring/format. Drama is what will make the audience interested and the audience is what will keep the club and the quizzing continue. In fact, I'd say if we have to give an edge, let the leading edge go to the audience rather than the quizzers on stage. As long as 70% of the quiz comprises of good questions, the quizzers will be happy (read will return for the next quiz) but if the audience (the not-so-regular quizzers and those who don't qualify) is not happy with the quiz, they will not return for the next quiz. Hitting the golden median is a moving target - I don't think we can achieve it. The next best alternative is to provide enough likeable points for all the stakeholders to ensure they come back and get more people with them.

4. The Bid round, on hindsight again, didn't seem to have elements of equal weight/importance. Could have done a lot better on those Qs. It is a format that can be tried out but as JR says, it is a very tricky one. Getting Connects right will probably be the subject of a Mel Gibson movie.

5. I was satisfied with the effort put in and on a broad basis, the feedback I have got - during the quiz and even after the quiz, has been in line with my evaluation.

6. I hope this quiz makes other QMs think more on how to make the quizzes more interesting and that we should treat these Open quizzes as an opportunity to pit their product against the Landmarks, BEQs and Crucibles of the world. Those quizzes, whether we agree or not, have a certain brand value associated and lot of it has got to do with the effort that goes into it.

7. We should also be aware of the possibility of Landmark and PSPL pulling out of this because of lack of participation, interest levels and lack of quality (!?). We have to work towards avoiding this situation and in fact make the Open quizzes so good that they attract more sponsors and more audience and more quizzers. I don't know if I have succedded in any respect with W5H 2007 but I hope others think about it and do a good job of it.

8. The last and the most frustating aspect of the Open quizzes that irks me no end - at the end of the quiz, I see chocolate wrappers and other litter thrown all over the stage area. JR does the clean-up probably because he knows the effort that went in to get the PSPL folks to give us the Audi and thus, knows the value of it. Let's show some more civic sense. (JR: hopefully, I'd do that at other places too! :-))

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

March 2007 BC Open Quiz - Report

Date: 24 Mar, 2007
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSPL

Open Quiz
Set and Conducted by: B.V. Harish Kumar
Theme: General

Quiz Final Results
(36 seamless + 6*6 specialities + 6 bid questions + 6*8 rapidfire)
1st: Samrat Sengupta + Salil Bijur (B) - 190
2nd: Niranjan Pedanekar + J. Ramanand (C) - 140
3rd: Amit Varma + Sumant Srivathsan (D) - 115
4th: Anand Sivashankar + Vibhendu Tiwari (F) - 110
5th: Ganesh Hegde + Kunal Thakar/Sudarshan Purohit (supersub) (E) - 85
6th: Kunal Sawardekar + Shamanth Rao (A) - 55

Quiz Elims Results
(cutoff: 15/35 qns)
1st: Anand Sivashankar + Vibhendu Tiwari - 17.5 (recd. bonus of 15 pts in final)
2nd: Samrat Sengupta + Salil Bijur (B) - 17 (bonus of 10)
3rd: Niranjan Pedanekar + J. Ramanand (C) - 16 (bonus of 5)
4th: Amit Varma + Sumant Srivathsan (D) - 15.5
5th-6th: Ganesh Hegde + Kunal Thakar, Kunal Sawardekar + Shamanth Rao - 15

Report (by Samrat and Ramanand)

* Thankfully, unlike the morning's quiz, the open quiz saw much better attendance (~20 teams).
* A very good and interesting elims. Qn 24 (recounted in the samples below) was particularly memorable. Elimination was one of the lowest scoring in recent times, but the quality of questions reflected the type in the finals which is a good practice.
* In a marked departure from previous BC Opens, Harish designed the quiz to have more non-IR rounds and a greater audience focus. We have been guilty of not having much for the audience to do during the finals except watch blankly, which was corrected by Harish this time.
* The quiz began with a video from Harish's previous Open, showing the then winners having bulbs go off inside them leading to some trampoliner-imitations. This seemed to have some effect on many participants, as many of them started leaping around in the quiz. The quiz was quite an audience spectacle - with lots of drama, controversy, sledging, sulking, witticisms, and smiles.
* A summary of the new rounds: First, a specialities round where each team had to pick a topic from the likes of Non-Congress Central Govts, Jnanpeeth award winners, Page-3, Cricket coaches, Nike etc. They also had to nominate another team that would receive questions that the team couldn't answer. The 1st question was some sort of a screening qn - if you got it wrong, the rest of the questions (5 of them) would go en masse to the nominated team. Phew! This round saw a lot of drama when some teams tripped at the first question and had to sit out the other 5 in agony (most of which they knew - in Shamanth's case: all). This section provoked the most comments, which we will come later to.
* A bid round consisting solely of connects was also tried. With different bid levels, the expected amount of work to be done in solving the connects was different. Was an interesting concept.
* There was a rapid fire round at the end to wrap it up; questions were Mastermind type direct ones, though it did not hold much excitement as positions were more or less decided by then.
* A maha-connect based on answers to questions on the finals was exclusively open to audience members. There were quite a few good audience questions, unlike the usual cast-offs that go in that direction.
* Positives: The excellent audience focus; the attempt to introduce different and potentially dramatic rounds; the effort taken to cover many areas (including the oft-neglected sports); the visually-appealing flash presentation made by Sirisha; full marks for effort; there were some very good connect questions, which were quite involved but workable; some of the regular questions were nicely presented/framed.
* Negatives: The qns in the specialities round were worth 10 points each, which was too skewed. The 1st question hurdle also turned the round into a sort of Russian Roulette, impacting some teams negatively and for others a windfall. Suggestions would be to have 5 pts each, have fewer qns, perhaps go back and forth between original and nominated team each time a mistake was made.
* The rapid-fire, being at the end, became a little unnecessary. More interesting variants of this, w.r.t. content and timing in the finals could be pursued.
* Some of us were not entirely happy with the adjudicating in the bid rounds :-) Essentially, the perceived problems here were that that some of the elements in some qns were too easy to merit the same value that some tougher qns had. Anyway, connects are hard to run, and the criticisms are for how the points were given, and not so much for the content themselves.
* We had a lot of questions (nice to have), but had to hurry in answering due to possible lack of time (not so nice). Perhaps if the questions are going to need time to figure out, fewer questions but with more opportunities to get a good shot in could be preferred.
* One also felt that Harish showed that it is indeed possible to have other alternatives to regular formats without diluting content or without making it too gladiatorial. It is only a question of getting the execution right, given one's heart is in the right place. And if you will not try, how will you know?
* The finalists were the usual suspects from BCQC and BQC. Samrat and Salil (pairing up for the first time) were consistent in their performance, winning their first BCQC Open and were mighty thrilled with it. The team of Ramanand and Niranjan ran them close, and cracked a lot of good questions and jokes. The Bombay team of Amit and Sumant came third. Surprisingly the in-form team of Shamanth and Kunal had an off day; they were also unlucky in the speciality round.
* We need to get our scheduling right - unfortunately, the weekend was a little cursed in terms of constraints, but in future, we will try to schedule on Sundays only.
* A big thanks to Landmark for sponsoring most of the prizes and to Persistent for making the auditorium available. Prizes were given out to all finalists, to the best two college teams and the best newbie teams not to make it to stage. A prize for the audience-maha-connect was won by Abhishek Nagaraj.
* Theme-Attic by: Abhishek (Computers), Shamanth (Science)
* Questions will be posted on the egroup soon. Leave your email id in the comments if you are not on the BCQC/BQC groups
* As usual, if we have got any details wrong, let us know.
* Your feedback is the main thing that keeps us from going backwards or being too complacent, so let us know how the quiz went for you (use the comments box).

Sample Elim Questions
1. Andrei Shevchenko - 2005; _______ - 2006; Gennaro Del Vecchio - 2007
2. Who won The Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award in 1952 for writing about the organization he had founded "The Court of Last Resort"?
3. What are these some of the types of: up and down, circular swing (windmill), Drunk style, half-circle, figure eight, side to side, whiplash, Two up, Two down, all-out, tandem, hammer, full body?


Prahelika at Concepts 2007, PICT - Report

Date: 23 Mar, 2007 (Friday)

Venue: PICT, Pune

Quiz set by: Vikrant Agarwal and Akshaya Iyengar

1st: Kunal Sawardekar (UoP) + Maitreyi Gupta (VIT)
2nd: Vivek Philip + Safal Mohammed (AFMC)
3rd: Suvojit Chakraborty (SSLC) + Aditya Gadre (COEP)
4th: Kaushik + Siddharth (MIT)
5th: Harsh Ketkar + Arnab Pal (VIT)
6th: Harish Jakkal + 1 (WIT, Solapur)

Monday, March 26, 2007

March 2007 BC Open Colleges Quiz - Report

Date: 24 Mar, 2007
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSPL

Colleges Quiz
Set and Conducted by: Ramanand, Sudarshan (contributions from George towards questions)
Theme: Entertainment and Literature

Quiz Final Results
(35 + 43 questions)
Jt. 1st: Aditya Gadre + Kaustubh Bhat (COEP) - 90
Jt. 1st: Safal Muhammad + Vivek Philip - 90
3rd: - Abhishek Nagaraj (COEP) + Kunal Sawardekar (Pune University) - 73
Other College Teams: Maitreyi Gupta+1 (VIT) (55), Yash Tamaskar (COEP) + Suvajit Chakraborty (SSLC) (30) School Teams: Ojas Pandav+Kunal Tilak+Abhishek Kulkarni (5), another team of 2 (All SPM English) (10)

Report

* Unfortunately, the quiz was attended by very few teams , so we had to have a direct finals! :-) Poor turnout could be variously attributed to exams, scheduling it on Saturday morning, and perhaps even the themes. Lots to ponder.
* Up to the participants to comment on quality of questions.
* We had prizes sponsored by Landmark and the BC for all the teams.
* Questions will be posted on the egroup soon
* I seem to have forgotten the name of one school team - if someone remembers, please let me know.


Monday, March 19, 2007

March BC Open Quizzes

Date: 24 March (Saturday)

=================
1. Quiz for college students
Flavour: Entertainment, Literature
Eligibility: college and school students
Teams of 2; 8 Finalists
By: Sudarshan and Ramanand
Time: 8:45 am to 12:30 pm
Prizes for all finalists and Best school teams
Non-collegians are encouraged to watch the finals - lots of chocolates on offer!

=================
2. Open Quiz for all
Flavour: General
Eligibility: No restrictions
Teams of 2; 6 Finalists
By: B. V. Harish Kumar
Time: 1:45 pm to 6:30 pm
Prizes for all finalists, Best school, college, and newbie teams; Special audience round

=================
We will have a Theme-Attic as usual in the break.

==================================================
Date: Saturday, 24 March 2007
- Venue: “Bhageerath”, Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd., Behind Domino’s Pizza, Senapati Bapat Road, Pune
- Registrations free and on the spot
- Contact: 98810 00957, 93244 45248, contact@bcqc.org

Thursday, March 15, 2007

know-IT-all IT Trivia Quiz at COEP.

This was a part of Cynosure, COEP's comp dept's first-time fest.

Results:
1st : Kapeesh Saraf and Vineet Bhatawadekar (COEP)
Jt. 2nd: Akshaya Iyer and Vikrant (PICT)
Jt. 2nd: Suhas Mahajan and Sanmitra Kale (COEP)
Other Finalists : COEP+SSLC, and 2 MIT teams.

Quiz happened at COEP on the 14th of March and was conducted by yours truly.
Elims and finals will be available soon. Watch this space for more.

Note1: When was the last time we had 2 female participants in the top 2 (?)
Note2: Kapeesh and Vineet won easily in spite of the fact that neither of them studies Computer Science. And yes, it was not all "frivolous" IT trivia. We had "hardcore" issues like Algorithms, Data Compression and OS Design discussed too. This of course, in the usual BCQC 'fun' way.
Cheers, Abhishek

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

BC quizzing overseas - Season Opener Quiz at Georgia Tech 2007

Nupur, active quizzer at the BC lawns during her undergrad stint at COEP, conducted a quiz for her friends at Georgia Tech. A report.


Date: 17th Feb, 2007
Venue: Georgia Tech's College of Computing Building
Conducted by: Nupur Dave

Winners: Bharat Jayakumar, Deeparnab Chakraborty, and Gaurav Bhatia.

Report

* I started the QC innings at gatech with a mixed bag. Questions were made, BCQC style, very workable.
* Well received quiz. Great turnout.
* Not a lot of people have heard about the BCQC so this was a good method to get them introduced to it.
* About the quizzers who attended. Bharat Jayakumar, perusing a PhD at gatech, was the winner of the 2004 International UK vs India, University challenge. Deeparnab Chakroborty (PhD CS gatech) is also an excellent and avid quizzer from IITB. There seem to be a good pool of quizzers at gatech and with word getting around, I am sure the gatech quiz club will be gaining momentum pretty soon.
* I am being offered to conduct a similar quiz for the Association for India's Development (AID) Atlanta chapter, sometime. This would be done on a larger scale and I would love to showcase it with the BCQC connection.

:: Nupur

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Indian Cinema Quiz at B.J.Medical College - Report

Date: 18 Feb, 2007 (Sunday)
Venue: B J Medical College, Pune
Quiz set by: Kiran, Snehal, and friends

1st: Niranjan + Ramanand
2nd: Phani Babu + B. V. Harish Kumar
3rd: Safal + Satyanshu
4th: Sameer + Anand

Report

* Like last time, had an enjoyable time at the cinema quiz
* Was completely Hindi-cinema oriented this time
* Criticisms: many qns were too easy, and lifted from the Penguin Indian Cinema quizbook
* Interesting aspects: they have a very different format (with lots of buzzer questions, elims with -ve marking etc.) which forces teams to react differently
* Harish and his dad (making his debut on stage!) were off to a good and early lead. Safal and Satyanshu had one dream round where they got all 4 buzzer questions set in the era 71-85, though some of it was due to some strategic buzzing. Niranjan and I made up in the exclusively-buzzer round (we had a missed a few earlier, which given the easiness of questions was almost fatal). It was tight and could have easily remained with the leaders. Blame it on buzzers
* A nice aspect was the reading out of little tidbits about the personality or film involved in each answer. The organisers had put in a fair amount of effort to create the slides and audio/visuals, for which they are to be commended. But some more effort on content is needed.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

India Quiz at Silhouettes 2007 - Report

Date: 17 Feb, 2007 (Saturday)
Venue: AFMC, Pune
Quiz set by: Anand Misra

1st: Sajith Surendran + Nitin Arun Dikshit (AFMC)
2nd: Shamanth Rao + Salil Bijur
3rd: Ganesh Hegde + Suvojit Chakraborty (substituted by Samrat Sengupta)
4th: Safal Muhammad + Vivek Mathew (AFMC)
5th: Pallavi Rautrey + Junaira Rahman (SSLC)
6th: Prashant Singh + A.K. Gupta (CME)

Friday, February 16, 2007

Quiz-O-Mania 2007 - Report

Date: 3 Feb, 2007 (Saturday)
Venue: VIT, Pune
Quiz set by: Harsh Ketkar, Arnab Pal, Rashmi Vadnagare

1st: Shivaji Marella + Kunal Sawardekar (90)
2nd: Meghashyam Shirodkar + Abhishek Nagaraj (80)
3rd: Vibhendu Tewari + AP Alagarsamy (70)
4th: Ganesh Hegde + Salil Bijur (40)
5th: J. Ramanand + B.V. Harish Kumar (30)
6th: Niranjan Pedanekar + Samrat Sengupta (20)

Report

* Excellent elims with emphasis on business questions
* Finals were mixed: on the -ve side, there were some vague "connects", easy questions answered on the first attempt, questions that could have been framed better. On the +ve side, there were some nice questions that were very well-framed.
* Finalists outnumbered the audience members :-)
* Given the mad scramble for last spot, a new term for the wooden spoon was coined by Samrat sir (whose team fittingly won it!): the Laal LoTaa (see Lanterne Rouge) :-)

Shyam Bhat Memorial Quiz 2007 - Report

Date: 15 Feb, 2007 (Saturday)
Venue: AFMC, Pune
Quiz conducted by: Safal Mohammad and Vivek Philip

1st: Shamanth Rao + Kunal Sawardekar
2nd: Sayak Dasgupta + Abhishek Ray
3rd: Shivaji Marella + Amit Koregaonkar
4th: Cadet Nishant Karol + Cadet Pulkit Dewan
5th: Uday Mehta + Karan Rampal
6th: Salil Bijur + Suvajit Chakraborty

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Business and Entertainment Quiz at Silhouettes 2007

Venue: Armed Forces Medical College, Pune.
Conducted by: Safal Mohammad

Winners: Sayak Dasgupta and Abhishek Ray [Symbiosis Society's Law College (SSLC)]
Runners-up: Suvajit Chakraborty and Subhodeep Jash (SSLC)
Second Runners-up: Nikhil Shriram and Abhilash Chander (SSLC)
Also: Vivek Philip+1 (AFMC), Kunal Sawardekar (Pune Univ) and Arnab Pal (VIT), Nikhil Motlag and Avaneendra Bhargav (AISSMS CoE).

Comments:

- Although the elims had a good mix, the finals had only ten business questions, compared to fifty ent questions.

- Symbi Law swept this quiz, taking the first three places, putting up, as they say, a jolly good show.

- Although the questions were overall quite decent (with the customary AFMC focus on fundae rather than workability), there were a bunch of peters and rather simple questions (eg a question that was very suspiciously similar to one asked in Quiz-o-mania 05, and another that asked us to identify the tune of the US national anthem).

[Apologies for wrong spellings of names, if any. Please to correct. Also, I apologise for not getting everyones names, so please tell us the names of the gentlemen from AFMC and SCOE not named here, if you know.]

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

The Pot of Gold System of Equitable Distribution

As a perpetual also-ran in the finals(and non-qualifier) of numerous quizzes, I have always deeply felt for the 4th,5th and 6th teams who despite qualifying get nothing out of the tons of money the organizers have on offer. An audience member who answers a stupid question could end up with much more than the team which came 4th. Case in point Landmark, where everyone(including that hindi-poet guy) except teams 4,5,6 went home without anything. (That's probably better that the CD of #1 Their Greatest Hits Chapter. 2 - includes super hit tracks Channa Vey, Kabhi, Duur, Tanha Dil, Maaeri, Chhod do Aanchal that I got.)

That however prompted me to put into words this idea I have been toying with for some time now. It's called the 'Pot of Gold System' wherein, the total prize money up for grabs forms a central 'Pot of Gold', and that money is divided into the ratio of scores that the teams get in the finals. A few potential drawbacks are:

  1. Loss of 'tension' and 'stakes' for winners place : Consider a situation where two teams are locked on 1st place at 100 points. They wont go all out for the prize because they know they are going to end up with roughly the same amount of money.
  2. Lowering of the stakes: The prizes of course become less top-heavy as the amount of money remains the same, but is more equally distributed. For eg: winners at Landmark would have had to make do with probably 15,000 worth vouchers etc.
  3. If a team makes 0 points it still does not get anything whereas going by the premise that they are better that the people who did not make it, they deserve something.
  4. Arithmetic will become too cumbersome, and the show will become unwholesome for public consumption.
Advantages are obviously fairer distribution and better incentives for laggards. Teams far behind in the pecking order will not lose interest but will also try and mop up as many points as they can. Here is the system I propose which can balance all these factors, eliminating the 3 drawbacks and minimizing the 'unjust' methodologies and systems.
  1. The Pot of Gold is divided into 3 base amount initially. X,Y and Z. X / (no of teams) is the minimum base amount which every team will get. A possible value for X could be the returning of registration costs.
  2. The values of X,Y,Z are so chose that X is much lesser that Y and Z is lesser than Y.
  3. The value Z represents the Bonus Gold which represents the incentives teams get for winning. The amount Z could be divided into 2/3 parts given to the top 2/3 teams.
  4. The value X represents the Pot of Gold, for which the teams are playing.
  5. To minimize the problem of cumbersome arithmetic we can round up / down to the nearest 50 or it also be programmed into a live scoring system.
As usual the whole point of writing this is to solicit your opinions on this, and try and see if it can work. This seems to me a very logical step in making quizzing fairer. I know it still has some drawbacks like it will not work in case of prizes in kind, or people not wanting to give 6 awards / certificates. Anyway it is a very implementable system in an open environment where cash is all that one is vying for.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Indian Cinema Open Quiz - B.J.Medical College

The QUIZ CLUB , B. J. Medical College, and ANUNAD, Pune are organising an Open quiz on Indian Cinema.

Date: Sunday, 18th FEBRUARY
Timing: 10 am (tentative)
Venue: B. J. Medical College, Pune
Contact: Snehal - 9822326699, Kiran - 9881678946

Report from last year's quiz.