Wednesday, May 16, 2007

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.

15 comments:

Harish Kumar said...

There were some questions raised about the Q on the legitimate holders of the 100m World record and why Tim Montgomery didn't feature in that exhaustive list. This is the reason -
"Tim Montgomery's time of 9.78 from 14 September 2002 was disallowed following disqualification for banned drug use. By the time the mark was disallowed, it had been surpassed by Asafa Powell."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Record_progression_100_m_men

Aditya said...

Hey, Firstly Congrats to Harish for actually covering almost every sport which is seldom seen in a quiz.

Although we topped the elims...I didnt really like the crossword idea...its too cryptic.
Also I thought that there shd have been more questions...50 maybe...since there was just 1 f1 question , and 3 tennis questions as opposed to 8 cricket and 7 football questions.

Also the first about 10-15 questions were awesome...but then there were a few sitters like Zatopek, X games, Paraplegic and Special games,hatrick, Beccaneur, and the Man U -Chelsea question (I expeced a much tougher Man U question from Harish!!)

But the good questions were really good. Also the Numbers round was very innovative and fun.

I would have complained about there being more cricket questions than football questions , But since I was with Aniket it actually worked in our favour...:).

Harish Kumar said...

:)
The idea was to not let my personal prejudices cloud the quiz - so hardly any questions on the West Indies, United, Ferrari,Zidane, Schumacher.
The sitters that you mentioned - IMO,in a speciality quiz there will be some factual questions which become sitters only because people would have known/heard them.These kind of questions would have never crept into a general quiz or at least I would have kept them at a minimum.Also the idea was to cover as many areas as possible - Beccaneur - officials,X Games, Special games - these areas are oft neglected. I thought a specific question on a participant at the Special Olympics would be too specific. Now that I have introduced these areas in a quiz and I know that you know, expect some 'deeper' questions in the next Sports quiz.:-)
United-Chelsea - valid point.
Crossword - again idea was to try out something different to 'Take you out of the comfort zone' :-)

Anonymous said...

A mistake in one of the participants names in Team 5 ;))

Should be 'Yasho' Tamaskar, not 'Yash'.

Anonymous said...

I totally loved this quiz... The standard-fundaes-rephrased-cryptically, the ones with just-enough-info-to-figure-out-answers were quite brilliant, and ones-not-been-in-quizzes-before-but-still-gettable were all great. In fact, the best part of the quiz was that it had no esoterica or obscure fundaes - everyone could connect with most answers.

The crossword-prelims also deserves applause, which I liked because you didnt really need crossword fundaes to crack it.

The one crib, if I may call it that, is about the numbers round, even though the concept itself was innovative - I think it's best to avoid non-passing/luck-of-the-draw-ic rounds like that, it's a little unpleasant if an insanely tough question affects final results. That didnt happen, but perhaps making it a written round would ensure greater fairness.

All in all, a brilliant quiz. This might be a good place to tell our regular Open quiz attendees - do show up for our college-and-school quizzes, if only to watch. The morning quizzes we've had so far have been quite outstanding, and I'm sure Open quizzers will quite enjoy watching these.

Shamanth

Sancho said...

could someone explain the number round in a little more detail. doesn't seem to ring a bell..
Sancho

Arnab said...

great job harish IMO an excellent quiz....
i had a minor problem with the numbers round which i felt was quite arbit... other than that a great quiz which i enjoyed

J Ramanand said...

Example of numbers round:

First clue is simply a number, which is significant in sports history. Identify the milestone. The number could be points scored, distance, height, anything: 8.90

Second clue was the venue where the milestone was recorded: Mexico City

Third clue was the year when the milestone was recorded: 1968

(I could have swapped the order of the year and date - don't remember that)

At each clue, the team guesses for appropriate points. In this case, the answer was Bob Beamon's long jump world record set in the 1968 Olympics.

Omkar said...

the quiz was gr8 and as harish rightly said it covered all the sports.some questions were gr8 as they could be worked out on the spot linking 2 3 facts.

i must also say that QM was very patient.encouraging people to take logical guess.very well conducted quiz
shifting from the normal 6 finalists to 8 was also quite a good idea.

of course 7 quality cricket qs meant aniket was going to kill everyone

surely there should be more such sports quizes.may be also at the bcqc sessions.LOOKING FORWARD TO MORE SPORTS QUIZES SOON AFTER THE END SEMS..

Harish Kumar said...

d j pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppi

Harish Kumar said...

That was Navya :-)

Omkar said...

what do u mean by that harish .navya and dj pppppi

J Ramanand said...

Pay no attention Omkar - Harish likes to practice baby-talk once in a while ;-)

BTW, I was supposed to add you to the egroups, but lost your email id. Please let me know what it is, so that I can add you.

Omkar said...

ya u wre gng to.i also forgot
its nomkar007@gmail.com

and yes i can u gv me the certi for the last quiz at our next open quiz on july1.that time thy wernt available. just to show some thing hom.hehe.

are we having a sport quiz this time around toooo.before the open general quiz.

Abhishek said...

is that the youngest commentor we have on ?! Can we publicise this fact?