Date: 26 Jan, 2007 (Friday)
Venue: Nehru Memorial Hall
Conducted by: Derek O'Brien
Open Quiz Final Results
1st: Anand Sivashankar, Meghashyam Shirodkar, Vibhendu Tiwari
2nd: Kunal Sawardekar, J. Ramanand, Shamanth Rao
3rd: Mitesh Agarwal + 2
4th: Aadisht Khanna, Amit Varma, Rishi Iyengar
Other finalists: SAP (Bangalore), NDA (Pune), B.V.Harishkumar+Srivatsa Subbanna+Gaurav Parab, Ashwan+Hanisha+Vikram Joshi
Best Corporate Teams
1st: Pinstorm (Mumbai), 2nd: SAP (Bangalore)
Best School Teams
1st: ?, 2nd: Muktangan, 3rd: St. Marys
Quizzer of the Year
Ramanand (Other finalists: Mitesh, Anand S, Rishi, NDA representative, and SAP representative)
Best Team Name "Vaanar Brothers" (Anand, Meghashyam, Vibhendu)
Report
* Expectedly, most of the questions could be tagged by one of the following adjectives: irritating, entertaining but pointless, multiple-choice, mouth-hanging-low-at-audacity, tired, take-choice-from-a-set. There were a few nice ones, but you'd have to wait for them a while like for a PMT bus.
* Nice production values of course. Liked the idea of "this happened in 19xx" preceding every question. Audience was kept well-engaged.
* Given the over-abundance of prizes for audience and winners, it was a shame that the finalists who finished 4-8 got nothing for their efforts.
* A very silly way to run the "quizzer of the year" competition. (Don't mistake this for modesty.)
* Overall, nice beginning by Landmark in Pune. They may have slightly underestimated the turnout - many people who had come only to watch had to stand during the finals. Official teams count was about 240.
(this post is missing some details - kindly post in comments if known)
6 comments:
The Tirupati question - Lord Venkateshwara borrowed money from Kubera to meet his wedding expenses and not 'for dowry of Subhadra (?!?!?)' as mentioned by Vibhendu which got them full points.
Awarding points by checking for 'keywords' was taking the Derek-No-Brainisms to the next level.
The biggest learning from the Landmark quiz was the potential market that is available for the BCQC to attract and retain - with *good* quizzes. Also, what marketing,production values and some crowd pleasing innovations can do to an almost zero-on-content quiz. I wonder why the Rev. Bobby John is castigated for his Manorama Year book style quizzes and Derek-No-Brain's quizzes are not.
I will have to take back my words on the first Landmark quiz that I had attended - in 2004. After seeing how Derek has soiled it, I am surprised how no old hand at Landmark has taken an extreme step like self immolation (joke joke) or got Rajni/Cho to speak against him.
Ramanand is the Quizzer of the year for answering C K Nayudu scored the maximum runs in India's first Test match!?! I'm sure people don't grudge it just because it is Ramanand who won that award. I gather that they used to have rapid fire rounds of 12 Qs each to decide the best individual quizzer. Sounds better to me.
It was a real shame that none of the four quizzers on stage could answer the K D Jadhav from Kwollapoor in true Pune Quizzing style.
Also, the what happened in 19xx was misleading as the question was not related to the years on the screen. So, I was wondering why corsets were out of fashion in 1949 while he was referring to 1939-45. Damn.
The less said about the questions... I also found the allocation of points arbitrary- it worked once for us["sari"] and once against us- Monet. My first thought was that, since this was one of the "lilies" paintings, it has to be late period Monet- post-1915. But one of the teams said something close to the true answer, and Dreck passed them, which made us go for another option. Wouldn't have made a difference in the end, but still annoying. I'm sure other teams also experienced this.
All that given,a fantastic effort by Anand, Vibhendu and Meghashyam to overcome a huge points deficit. Good stuff.
(BTW, CK was the highest in the 1st innings of the 1st Test. Amar Singh was the top scorer for the Test. I'm not the 'brain with the crown' for nothing ;-) )
The "highlight", qn-wise, was the "Revisited" question. Hopefully, we shall never revisit it. Ever.
Well, I don't know much about quizzes but I sure would like to go to more Derek quizzes. I had nearly lost all interest in quizzing after going to a few so called intellectual quizzing. Any day it is more fun and attracts a lot more people to quizzing rather than scaring people away from it as has happened in Kolkata. Maybe the glass is half empty. There is no one way of looking at quizzing. But I would anyday spend my day entertained by Derek than bored to hell by some of the other so called great quizmasters. These are however my thoughts only and shared by the few hundreds who were in the audience and not the stage.
Uh... I would beg to disagree with the above post. I think that quizzes are always more fun if the questions are workable and not based on obscure statistics. This is regardless of who the quiz master is. A bad question is a bad question, whoever sets it.
(eg, the very first question in the elims was "which state in India has the longest paved roads" The answer was Maharashtra, but there is no reason why anyone would even know or remember this. If a 'maharshtra' question had to be put in the elims, it could have been something better).
I think that the team who eventually came 2nd (JR, KS and Shamant)looked totally bored by the time they got on stage.I didn't stay for the finals because of the awful elims.
Too little time was given for elims. They should have at least gone over all the questions once in the end.
I have been a member (of sorts) of bcqc for the past 1-2 years and I've enjoyed their quizes more than any quiz that I ever went for when I was in school. Most of their questions require facts+logic which sharpen your brain.
Derek O'Brien may have the cult status and may draw in the crowd, but I think that bcqc could have made a *quality quiz*. May their tribe increase!
anon: um, thanks for the little pats on the back, but we generally prefer comments to be non-anonymous, be they good, bad or ugly! Do tell us who you be.
Elims: yeah, many of the big quizzes don't like to give out elims sheets, preferring to call out questions. I'm not sure why this is so, given that there is a round of correction at the end, and that those questions would have comfortably fit in 1 page. It's just more to do with involving the crowd at the beginning, I guess. Perhaps some mixture of both need to be done. Some of the elims qns like the Maharashtra or densest fur were very tired and contrived - easily, there are better qns to ask, esp in an elims.
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