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Guest post by Ajay Bhat on "The Microsoft Redmond Quiz Club". Ajay is an alumnus of COEP, where he graduated along with some of us. The club also has another old BC hand - Satyen Kale, who used to drop by the BC occasionally. When : Every other week – usually on Wednesdays 6 PM. Where : Microsoft Building 50, Redmond, WA. Who : Mostly Microsoft employees (of Indian origin) and associates (vendors who work on-site here, spouses.). Non-Microsoft employees are welcome – drop me a line at ajayvb[a t]gmail{d o t}com if you are in the Seattle area and are interested in coming to our quizzes. Origins There had been idle talk more than once about having a quiz club in Microsoft Redmond - a number of people here missed the quizzing action from their college days. AID (Association for India’s Development) in Seattle organized an India quiz in August ’07, which got an overwhelming response with around 35 teams of two registering. This prompted a small number of people to start ...

Set and Conducted by Yash Marathe. Results: 1st: Aditya Gadre and Suvajit Chakraborty : 155 2nd: Abhishek Nagaraj and Maitreyi Gupta : 100 (Won on tiebreaker to come second) 3rd:Aniket Mandavgade and Abhishek Sathe: 100 4th: Nikhil Motlag and Avaneendra Bhargav (sub Yasho Tamaskar) : 70 5th : Saroj Kumar Singh and Sudeep Sengupta: 55 6th : Swanand Gadgil and Abhishek Khandelwal :20 Quiz was quite good for a debut effort. The elims were pretty bad with about 36 one liner random trivia questions and 4 good questions. The first round was conducted by some other guy (whose name I've forgotten). It was quite bad. Most questions were very boring and /or too easy. The next four rounds were conducted by Yash. These were quite good. Some questions were great, while there were quite a few chestnuts. The quiz was quite a close fight with Team B and Team E ending up tied for second place with 100 points. Team E (Abhishek and MAitreyi) eventually won the sudden death tie break to come secon...

This is college quizzing season. Which means a lot of people will be setting quizzes for their college fests. It also means that a lot of people will be setting and QMing their first quizzes. This is by far one of the most important experiences for quizzers. However, it takes experience to grasp the nuances of setting, organising and making questions for a successful quiz. It's not difficult or anything, its just that you need to fall and fail to realise what went wrong. The good thing is, a few stalwarts at the BCQC have already done some excellent writing on the issue of a) making good quiz questions and b)organising a quiz event. You can find these essays here on our website . This Quizmaster's Checklist is a must-read especially if you are organising a quiz event. (cross-posted on my personal blog )

Date: 22 Feb, 2008 Venue: Maharashtra Institute of Technology (M), Pune Set by: Siddharth, Kaushik Conducted by: Siddharth Theme: General Quiz Final Results Format: 6 rounds in total. 5 on D&P (with round reversal) and one on identify with 3 clues (non-passing). One of the D&P round was an inverse frame-the-question-from answer round. 1st: Nikhil Motlag + Avanindra Bhargav (F) - 55 2nd: Yasho Tamaskar + Yash Marathe (B) - 40 3rd: Maitreyi Gupta + Salil Bijur (A) - 35 Joint 4th: Keyur Munot + Bharat Kandoi (C) - 15 Joint 4th: Abhishek Nagaraj + Nandan Gokhale (super- sub addition) (D) - 15 Joint 4th: Venkat Srinivasan + Suvajit Chakraborty (E) - 15 Report/Review/Post-quiz-notes in comments

Look at any of our reports , and chances are that you will find a few complaints about "chestnuts". Since this is a quiz blog, a question before we proceed: In “The Broken Sword”, a forgotten melodrama by William Dimond (1816), one of the characters, Captain Xavier, is forever telling the same jokes, over and over, with slight variations. As he repeats a certain joke involving a tree, this time making it about a cork tree, Xavier is corrected by his companion Pablo, who says, “A ---. I have heard you tell the joke twenty-seven times, and I am sure it was a ---.” What? Question from Amnesia 2006 BTW, apart from being the answer, the above question itself has become somewhat of a 'chestnut', i.e. an oft repeated question. Since most people think of chestnuts as nice questions that simply show up from time to time, let us also expand the scope to ordinary "repeats", which true to their name, have a nasty habit of showing up at the very next quiz. 1. R...

Date: 16 Feb, 2008 Venue: Vishwakarma Institute of Technology (VIT), Pune Set by: Maitreyi Gupta, Nilay Puntambekar, Rohit Khaladkar, Gokul K. Conducted by: Maitreyi Gupta Theme: General Quiz Final Results Format: 55 questions in IR with a round reversal halfway 1st: Niranjan Pedanekar + Yasho (F) - 75 Joint 2nd: Venkat Srinivasan + Suvajit Chakraborty (A) - 65 Joint 2nd: Nirad Inamdar + Salil Bijur (C) - 65 Joint 2nd: Prasann Potdar + Mukund Krishnan (D) - 65 3rd: Meghashyam Shirodkar + Abhishek Nagaraj (B) 4th: Arnold D'Souza + Anu Salelkar Notes: This was the 6th edition of Quiz-O-Mania, the annual open quiz conducted in VIT, now part of the literary fest Epiphany. Considering it was the first open quiz the current setters conducted, it was a decent effort on their part. Elims had only about 25 questions followed by a written environment quiz won by Prasann and Mukund. The finals started late because of the JAM elims (the JAM-quiz clashes at lit fests are beco...

Set and Conducted by : Safal and Vivek Results: 1st: Aditya Gadre and Suvajit Chakraborty :110 2nd:Aksha Vyas and Rudra Sen : 80 3rd : Srideep and Subhodeep : 55 4th : Abhishek Nagaraj and Yasho Tamaskar : 50 5th: Team E : 0 6th : AIT : -10 The Quiz started off with a very tough 25 question elims . Cut off was just 5 . The finals themselves featured a very good mix of music , movies ,TV and other stuff both Indian and western. I particularly liked this quiz since I learnt a lot from it. Quite a few questions went unanswered . A lot of hardcore trivia was asked (eg. stuff like Chubby Checker and Narnie Nixon ) . The only dissapointment was probably the long delay in starting the quiz and the lack of turnout . Another minor crib was that there were multiple questions on some people . For Example Satyajit Ray , Buddy Holly , Simpsons and Guru Dutt featured twice each. Overall , it was a good quiz. Rather different from other ent quizzes but good nonetheless.

The face-off quiz was disappointing - especially after having seen the brilliant sports quiz conducted by Aniket and Aditya a few days ago. The seating arrangement of the finalists on stage was bizarre. The finalists were bunched up on one side of the stage - in a semi-circle and the screen which played the audio-visuals was placed at the other end of the stage. So three teams were sitting with their backs to the screen. Not that they required to watch the screen because most of the questions in the A-V rounds had nothing to do with the video/visuals.Aniket and Suvojit qualified and did well under the circumstances. The questions ranged from being bad to not-so-good. The Quiz-master's display ranged from being mildly irritating to almost puerile. There were some questions, the answers to which were shown as 'trivia bytes' in the video played during the interval between the elims and the finals. There may have also been some repeats from the Delhi round. One question in the ...

Results: 1st: Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre (both COEP) : 120 2nd: Amit and Gaurav (both AIT) :110 3rd: Abhishek Nagaraj(COEP) and Suvajit Chakraborty (SLS) :90 4th: Rohit Bahulekar(SIT ) and Rohit Chandrachud (PVG):80 5th: Team A (Dont know names) :60 6th: TEam F( " ) : 15 Quiz was disappointing to say the least . All the questions were either too simple or too difficult. A lot of peters appeared and there were no new interesting questions . Positives: Quiz started and ended on schedule. The simple, and difficult questions were well distributed since there were a lot of questions (60 to be precise) . A lot of sports were covered . Negatives: While a lot of sports were covered the quality was very uneven . The cricket questions were quite good but the football questions were very simple. F1 and Tennis almost didn't feature at all.

Date: 15 Feb, 2008 Venue: Alpa Bachat Bhavan, Pune Organised by: Times of India - Newspapers in Education (NiE) Quiz Master: Brian Tellis Theme: General Quiz Final Results Format: 8 rounds of D&P - Science, GK, Trivia, Sports, History, Audio, Video, Sponsors Special (Bharat Petroleum) 1st: Abhinava Vidyalaya EMHS 2nd: Kalmadi Shamrao HS 3rd: St. Josephs, Pashan 4th: Symbiosis Secondary 5th: Vikhe Patil Memorial HS 6th: St. Vincents HS Notes : NiE Fun-Da-Mental, considered Pune's biggest schools quiz in terms of participation (around 120 schools) and prizes (this time, i-pods and GVs were given as prizes) has been organised by Times of India's Newspapers in Education (NiE) for over 10 years now. Earlier there would be semifinals and a grand finale with a celebrity QM but for the past few years the finals have been conducted b Brian Tellis. This time there were no semis but a direct 6-team final after elims.

Date:13th Feb, 2008. Venue: AFMC, Pune. Set and Conducted by : Safal Mohammad and Vivek Mathew 1st: Aditya Gadre and Abhishek Nagaraj (COEP) - 175 pts 2nd: Yash Marathe (Modern) and Yasho Tamaskar(COEP) - 170 pts 3rd: Suvajit C and Raghav C (Symbiosis Law) - 165 pts 4th: Team D - 125 pts 5th: AIT - 110 pts 6th: AFMC - 45 pts This years Shyam Bhatt Memorial started with a 30 question (rather tough) elims. Question were pretty decent, while there seemed to be a slight lack of turnout. The Main Quiz itself consisted of 48 dry questions and 10 'Who/what am I?' questions with 4 clues per question.The questions were excellent. Nearly all questions were workable and/or very interesting. Most importantly lots of new areas seemed to be investigated. This was a good example of a quiz where each question was not "taxing" but interesting nonetheless while not decreasing difficulty. The emphasis on "pop-culture"/sports was less, and we saw more questions o...

Date: 10 Feb, 2008 Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSL, Pune Set and Conducted by: Salil Bijur, Anupam Akolkar Theme: General Quiz Final Results Format: 18 questions in an Aleatory format; 16 (3qns+connect) + 18 questions IR; total: 52 questions 1st: Rishi Iyengar + Sumant Srivathsan (B) - 155 2nd: Samrat Sengupta + Meghashyam Shirodkar (C) - 110 3rd: Anand Sivashankar + Vibhendu Tiwari (E) - 100 Jt. 4th: Aditya Gadre + Niranjan Pedanekar (A) - 80 Jt. 4th: Venkat Srinivasan + Aniket Khasgiwale (D) - 80 6th: Harshal Modi + Suvajit Chakraborty*(F) - 50 Scorers : Mohit Karve, Salil Elims standings (out of 30 questions): Aniket+Venkat (23), Aditya+Niranjan (20), Meghashyam+Samrat (17), Rishi+Sumant (17), Vibhendu+Anand (15), Saransh Verma* (had to leave before finals; substituted by Suvajit) + Harshal (12) Best School team: Rohit Sahasrabudhe + Satyavrat Wagle Best College team not in finals: Samit Sura + Nandan Gokhale Best Newbie team: Mrinmayi & Sameer Katdare N...

Date: 10 Feb, 2008 Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSL, Pune Set and Conducted by: Aditya Gadre, Aniket Khasgiwale Theme: Sports Quiz Final Results Format: 2 halves of seamless IR; one 6 questions written round, 46 questions 1st: Yash Marathe + Keyur Munot (B) - 125 2nd: B.V.Harish Kumar + Yash Tamaskar (A) - 110 Jt. 3rd: Anand Sivashankar + Vibhendu Tiwari (C) - 95 Jt. 3rd: Niranjan Pedanekar + Samrat Sengupta (E) - 95 5th: Abhishek Nagaraj + Suvajit Chakraborty (D) - 60 6th: Ritoban Sengupta + Subhodeep Jash (F) - 40 Scorers : Avnish Dhondge, Aadinath Harihar Elims standings (out of 38 questions): Abhishek+Suvajit (28.5), Harish+Yash (28), Niranjan+Samrat (24.5), Vibhendu+Anand (24), Yash+Keyur (24), Ritoban+Subhodeep (23) Best School team: Sanket Bhilare + Aditya Karve (Abhinava Vidyalaya) No. of teams: ~25 Notes : This was the first Open Sports quiz conducted by the BCQC and was put together by two very good sports quizzers (we have a surfeit of good sports q...

Quiz-o-mania 2008 The annual open quiz at VIT Pune, Quiz-o-mania, is happening on 16th Feb (saturday next) as a part of Epiphany . Details are as follows: Date: 16th Feb, Saturday Flavour: General Time: 1:00pm (Reporting Time) 1:30pm sharp (Elims Begin) Venue: VIT Auditorium Team size: 2 Teams that qualify for the finals: 6 Prize money: Rs 15,000 QMs: Maitreyi Gupta, Nilay Puntambekar, Rohit Khaladkar Between the elims and finals of Quiz-o-mania, we're having an Environmental quiz with a huge bumper cash prize. In addition to this quiz, there will be audience quizzes on F.R.I.E.N.D.S, T20 Cricket and Comics & Cartoons... (schedule for these quizzes coming soon) Registration: On-the-spot, 40 bucks per team (Registration desks of EPIPHANY will be up in many colleges from 8th Feb onwards. Others can register on the 16th itself) Location: Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, 666, Upper Indiranagar, Bibwewadi, Pune-37. Contact: Rohit Khaladkar - +91-99701-55360 or em...