History Channel's Face-Off - Mumbai Round

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 elims had already been 'leaked' on one of the mailing lists.

There were issues with scoring - the elims cut-offs were not announced; one team probably should have qualified but couldn't because the QM started off with the proceedings before the elims-sheet in question (pun intended) was brought to his notice.

The most hilarious round was the Rapid Fire round where the participants could give multiple answers to a question. We thought Aniket clearly showed how bad the idea was when he started rattling off all the Test venues in Australia for a question - Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Sydney...turned out his first attempt - Perth was the correct answer but the QM was taken aback by the sheer audacity and ingenuity of the answer and took time to react. But worse was to follow. The Rapid Fire round with multiple attempts had one question which was a True/False one as well. We tried hard to find some sense/logic and the only thing we could think of was that there might be a 'None of the above' option as well - which no one seemed to have thought of. The team which won (Pradeep and ? ) was very good and deserved to win but I'm sure the win would have been sweeter had it come on a more sporting pitch.

Report by Harish Kumar