BCQC May Open Quizzing

We're pleased to announce the next set of open quizzes in May. The details:

Date: 4 May, 2008 (Sunday)
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems Limited

Quiz 1: "dekho magar pyaar se" - a Visuals-only quiz
Theme: General, Visuals
Quizmaster: Niranjan Pedanekar
Reporting Time: 9:30 am
Quiz Time: 9:45 am to 12:30 pm
Teams of 2, 6 team finals, no prior registrations needed
Prizes for all finalists, best school/college/newbie teams, audience

Quiz 2: "Brain Damage"
Theme: General
Quizmasters: Abhishek Nagarak, Aditya Gadre
Reporting Time: 2:15 pm
Quiz Time: 2:30 pm to 6:00 pm
Teams of 2, 6 team finals, no prior registrations needed
Prizes:
Winners: Rs. 1500 Landmark GVs
2nd Place : Rs 900 Landmark GVs
3rd Place : Rs 300 Landmark GVs
Prizes for all other finalists as well

Prizes for the Best school/college/all-ladies teams, Best team name prize, and audience goodies.

In addition, there will be a special audience-only quiz (top 3 places get 1 GB pen drives).

Visit http://bcqc.org/may08 for updates

Rotaract Pune Open Quiz 2008

Set and Conducted by Rohan and Karan Jain, Rouhaan, and others.

Results:
1st: B.V.Harish Kumar + J Ramanand (B) : 120 pts
2nd: Pradeep Ramaratnam + Amit Pandeya (D): 110 pts
3rd: Salil Bijur + Venkat S (E): 80 pts
Jt. 4th: Niranjan Pedanekar + Yash Tamaskar : 70 pts
Jt. 4th: Amit Garde + Samrat Sengupta : 70 pts
6th: Akhil + Apoorva : 60 pts

Report (also see comments)

The Rotaract Club of Poona organised the second edition of their Open quiz, once again at the Ladies Club. The weather was a little inhospitable for quizzing, in contrast to the nicely organised event. Participants were well looked after (except for some chip-less munks), which made up for any shortcomings in the actual quiz.

The finals were led by Salil and the Hoosier Cat but they hit a brickwall exactly after the half-way stage. This is when the visitors from Bombay picked up steam to remain in the lead right upto the last five questions. They lost the lead exactly once and unfortunately for them, the quiz ended soon after. There were several imaginative guesses from all the teams, which coupled with some bonhomous banter, meant that no one received any "bhajji" points for noxious behaviour.

The quiz was slightly blighted by a few 'sitters' (like identifying Hitler and Mussolini) and 'chestnuts' (A.G.Bell's attempt at inventing a metal detector). There were more than a few 'identify two people' questions which got a little tiring.

On the positive side, many of the answers were quite audience-friendly. I liked the mostly assured style of the quizmaster (Rohan) who managed to avoid a a major pitfall that many newbie QMs fall into: that of not knowing what to do with partially correct answers. He did this by clearly specifying what he expected as the answers to such questions. (Though, forgetting some of the answers midway took the sheen off his performance :-)). There seemed to be a genuine attempt to ask topics across genres (rock vs hindi films vs india vs geo), which was fairly successful. Finally, there weren't too many complications in the quiz, which helped on the hottest day of the season when energy was at a premium.

BBC Sport Mastermind

Several of my fellow quizzers are massive sports fans with a 'citius altius fortius' complex, so I'm sure they would have wished they could participate in BBC's new "Sport Mastermind". Perhaps we should do a home-made Sport Mastermind at, well, home, just to make them feel better. Though going by precedent, we'll have topics such as World Cup football and World Cup cricket and the racing career of a part-time footballer :-).

IIPM Management Quiz 2008 - Report

Date: 02 April, 2008
Venue: IIPM Tower, ICC Tower
Set by: Students of IIPM, Pune
Conducted by: Meghashyam Shirodkar
Theme: Business and General, College quiz

Quiz Final Results
1st: SIBM
2nd: Symbiosis Law School
3rd: AISSMS
Other Finalists: SIBM-2, ICTM, SCOE

Link: Report in the Indian Express.

Abhimanyu Update

Aditya Bhedasgaonkar blogs charmingly about Abhimanyu. He has a picture there too for you to put faces to names. Here you go.

BCQC March Open - QuiZeitgeist - QM's report

(Also see this report)

A decent turn-out for the quiz (27 teams). Good to see many new faces and some old stalwarts like Amit Garde and Manish Manke. Just like my last year's quiz, the top three spots were decided in the last few questions, it was exciting to watch with top positions changing intermittently.

Amit Garde was in great form, as he with some able support from Aditya and Kaustubh managed to just edge out the other two strong teams marshalled by Ramanand and Niranjan. The other teams also had their moments answering some tough questions.

The audience interaction was enjoyable, with our extra finances resulting in some good prizes for them. Also I noticed that the audience was more enthused by the special rounds, than the normal IR rounds.

Another aspect was that the quiz went off quite peacefully, with no acrimony among the teams or with the quizmaster :), a welcome trend after a few arguments etc in previous quizzes.

One drawback from my side was the intermittent changing of passing order of the questions,it could have been avoided. Also a few questions were perceived as sitters, though there has hardly been any quizzes without sitters, but still as a QM one doesn't feel good about that.It is a fine line actually, because on the other hand no one likes vague and obscure questions.

Thankfully there were no complaints of chestnuts, I am sure if one scrutinizes closely, some question fundaes would have appeared in quizzes before. But if it is not so obvious it is fine with me.

A few thoughts on some of the modifications that were there in this quiz.

1. Three member teams in the finals added to the thrill, as quite a few of the questions especially connects were cracked through teamwork.

2. There was an advantage to the top two teams from the elims who had a two question lead in the finals. This was to make the elims more meaningful, rather than it being treated just as a elimination which should be its secondary purpose, it should be treated as a written round prior to the final. As a written round has the advantage of equal competition.

Srujan 2008

Date: 5th Apr 2008
Venue: Telco Colony, Tata Motors

General Quiz

Set and Conducted by Vinay N.
Format:18 on IR; 6 on D&P; 6 non-passing identify-in-3-clues; 6 on D&P

Results:

1st: Prasann Potdar and Amit Pandeya (D): 80
2nd: Salil Bijur and Nirad Inamdar (C): 70
3rd: Saransh Verma and Karan Chawla (B): 65
4th: Abhishek Nagaraj and Aniket Khasgiwale (A): 55
5th: Aditya Sharma and Anirudh Lamba (F): 40
6th: Sirisha and B.V. Harish Kumar (E): 30

Business Quiz

Set and Conducted by Vinay N.
Format:IR and D&P rounds, a 'betting round' (need clarification on this) and a D&P round connecting to a theme

Results:

1st: Prasann Potdar and Amit Pandeya (D): 100
2nd: Vishal Kelkar and Saurabh Goel (B): 95
3rd: Nikhil Motlag and Ramakrishnan Sridhar (B): 50
4th: Abhishek Nagaraj and Weena (C): 30
Joint 5th: Anubhav Chatterjee and Vijay Krishna C.V. (A): 20
Joint 5th: Yash Tamaskar and Siddharth Cavale (A): 20

BCQC March Open - QuiZeitgeist

Set and Conducted by Samrat Sengupta.

Results:
1st: Amit Garde , Kaustubh Bhat and Aditya Gadre : 94pts
2nd: J Ramanand , Abhishek N , Yasho Tamaskar : 86pts
3rd: Niranjan Pedanekar , Suvajit Chakraborty , Salil Bhargava :82pts
4th: Salil Bijur , Aditya Chandorkar and Yash Marathe :70pts
5th: Aniket Khasgiwale , Kapeesh Saraf , Venkat S : 38 pts
6th: Harsh Ketkar , Saransh Verma , Manish Manke :34 pts

Elims: Ramanand + Yasho , Niranjan + Suvajit (21pts; started with a 16pt advantage), Aniket + Venkat , Aditya + Amit (19.5pts ; started with 8 pt advantage), Yash M + Aditya C , Harsh + Saransh (17pts)
Manish and Salil Bhargava , Salil Bijur and Abhishek N , Kapeesh and Kaustubh were the other 3 teams that qualified and were randomly distributed to the other 6 teams.

Elims were quite simple and did the job of separating the top nine 9 teams from the rest. The finals had 5 rounds. Three were general rounds and 2 were special 'pick your topic' rounds.
Most of the questions were great and Samrat conducted the quiz very well. One of the best things to see at the quiz was the way he did the audience questions. One member of the audience was chosen at random and asked to give a topic on which (s)he would like to be asked questions and Samrat made the questions up there and then and asked them. This made the audience feel a bit more involved and gave a more personal feel to the quiz.
Only cribs about the quiz were the reversal of passing order 4 times in the quiz which lead to skewed number of attempts and a few sitters here and there.

BC March Open: The laME quiz

Date: 30 Mar, 2008
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSL, Pune
Set and Conducted by: Yash Tamaskar, Suvajit Chakraborty
Theme: Entertainment, Music, and a little bit of Literature and Arts

Quiz Final Results
Format: 2 halves of seamless IR, including two theme connects; ~50 questions
1st: Niranjan Pedanekar + J. Ramanand (A)
2nd: Apurva Dubey + Akhil (D)
3rd: Samrat Sengupta + Amit Garde (E)
4th: Salil Bijur + Abhishek Nagaraj (B)
??th: Kaustubh Bhat + Aditya Gadre (F)
??th: Anupam Akolkar + Chintan Shah (C)
Scorers: Aadinath Harihar

Elims standings (out of 40 questions): Niranjan+Ramanand (19.5), Akhil+Apurva (12.5), Anupam+Chintan (12), Samrat+Amit (11.5), Abhishek+Salil (10.5), Aditya+Kaustubh (10)
No. of teams: ~25

Notes:
This is an incomplete report because I don't have all the final scores, and some of the standings may be incorrect. Also, the community had much to say about the quiz on the day, so please use the comments to record them. This way, we'll have the report as well.

BCQC College Quizzer Championship 2008

For the Kunal Sawardekar Prize (the prize is named after the best college quizzer of the previous year; next year it will have the name of this year's winner)

Date: 29 March, 2008
Venue: the Boat Club, COEP, Pune
Set and Conducted by: J. Ramanand (with contributions from Salil Bijur and Anupam Akolkar)
Theme: General, Solo

Quiz Final Results
Format: 2 rounds of 12 dry + 7 audio visuals each; 5 questions in a common play-off format; IR; total: 43 questions
Winner: Yash Marathe - Modern College (A) - 75
2nd: Suvajit Chakraborty (D) - Symbiosis Law School - 65
3rd: Abhishek Nagaraj (C) - COEP - 45
4th: Gaurav Singh (F) - COEP - 30
5th: Aniket Khasgiwale (B) - COEP - 25
6th: Yash Tamaskar (E) - COEP - did not trouble the scorers
Scorer: Maitreyi Gupta

Elims standings (out of 25 questions): Suvajit (14.5), Aniket (14), Abhishek (14), Gaurav (10), both Yash-es (9)
No. of participants: 19

Notes:
Yash Marathe won a quiz that was alive right upto the last question. Suvajit, easily the most prolific winner among college quizzers this season, was leading the quiz going into the last round. However, Yash picked up the first two questions in the round to go into the lead. On the last question, everyone except Abhishek went for the risky double with exactly the same guess which turned out to be wrong, handing Yash the inaugural prize. Cash prizes were given to the winner and runner-up, with all the other finalists getting bookstore coupons.

The quiz itself was very low-scoring. The quiz was designed to be more factual and knowledge-oriented, and represented a slightly unfashionable old style, both content-wise and format-wise. Some of the finalists did not like the questions, while others seemingly did :-).

Quiz setter's note: For my part, the choice and framing of some questions were somewhat dictated by the slight lack of time, and I do not claim that all the questions were perfectly made. Some of them could have been composed better. However, the shift away from 'workability' was intentional, as was the delving into newer areas. For one, quizzing alone makes it harder to 'work out' complicated questions. Furthermore, IMHO, the quiz should try to identify a solo winner who can handle both the tough factual nuts as well as be able to apply their mind to the more 'work it out' ones. Most of the questions were not on slides, were verbally asked, and were only a couple of lines long. Naturally, this invited mixed feelings. More comments and criticisms on this welcome.

Congratulations to Yash on his fine win, and to the other finalists for their good performances.

Abhimanyu 2008

Abhimanyu is the annual intra-COEP solo quizzing event. This year's edition featured eight finalists, was conducted by Niranjan Pedanekar and others, and featured question sets from BC quizzers in and outside the country, making it quite a globalised quiz. A report:

Date: 21 Feb, 2008
Organized by: Aniket Khasgiwale

Eight finalists qualified through a written elims. The final started with a 20 question GK round set by Meghashyam. This was followed by each participant taking questions on a chosen topic of interest. The result was a very tight quiz, which was decided on the very last question of the event.

The Standings (participant, year, score, topic, topic setter)

Winner: Abhishek Nagaraj - BE - (17) - XKCD comics - Kunal Thakar
Runner-Up: Aditya Gadre - TE - (16) - World Cup Football - Yash Marathe
3rd: Kaustubh Bhat (15) - TE - Iron Maiden - Kunal Sawardekar
4th: Yash Tamaskar (14) - TE - The "Yes Minister/Prime Minister" series - Gaurav Sabnis
5th: Mohit Karve(13) - SE - Formula One - Siddharth Dani
6th: Avnish Dhondge - TE - The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov - Kunal Sawardekar
7th: Aditya Bhedasgaonkar - TE - The career of Michael Schumacher - Siddharth Dani
8th: Aadinath Harihar - FE - Tintin comics - Kunal Sawardekar

Since Aditya Gadre had one more point than Abhishek from the GK round, he began the last round knowing exactly how much he needed to win (no one quite knew what to do in case of a tie :-), with a toss up between sharing the prize and giving it to Aditya since he had a better GK - common round - score). It came down to the last question and Gadre missed it, giving Abhishek his much deserved (and much cherished, it seemed) win.

Also see this report by Aditya Bhedasgaonkar.

(In passing, this blogger would like to mention that he has several gripes about the way the event is organised and conducted in general, with how the topics are allotted and how the question sets can be very diverse in content and difficulty levels.)

List of winners
2001 - Rahul Srinivas - Asterix comics
2002 - Sumeet Kulkarni - Formula-One
2003 - Siddharth Natarajan - Archie comics
2005 - Akshay Palve - The Mahabharata
2006 - Gaurav Singh - The Harry Potter series
2007 - Aniket Khasgiwale - World Cup Cricket
2008 - Abhishek Nagaraj - XKCD Comics
(I don't quite remember if the event did not happpen in 2004 - it probably was related to that bad day Chakravyuuh had that year)

Idea Cellular Brand Equity 2008 - Pune zonal round

Date: April 2, 2008

Another entertaining event by Derek O Brien. The finalists on stage (in alphabetical order) were from BMC Software, Honeywell, Infosys, Savoir Faire, TCS, and ZS Associates. Savoir Faire from Goa had been winning the Pune round of BEQ for the last two years and were hot favourites to win again. The team from TCS, Ramanathan and Abha (Did I get the names right?) did well to pip them on the tie-breaker question by answering Roshogollas to "What is K C Das credited with inventing?".

The theme of this year was how quizzing has evolved in India over the years. There were mentions of Siddharth basu and even the cover of Mastermind 5 (but sadly, no mention of the winner of Mastermind 5 who hails from Pune) The rounds and the representation of the scores were also in line with the year that was being commemorated. The highlight for me was to listen to the audio clip of Ameen Sayani hosting the BQC on Radio. Jug and Bunny Suraiya were also present. TCS, the leaders after the first two rounds were presented with two bottles of Kingfisher beer and a chicken each - apparently that's how the prizes were way back in the late 60's. The elims were simple and interesting. Lot of teams felt they missed out on Dollies. The finals consisted of seven rounds. The bottom two teams (ZS Associates and BMC Software) got 'relegated' after the first five rounds. The scoring was 10 points for all correct answers (direct or pass); no infinite (re)bounds format of passing. Some teams did suffer because of the varying level of toughness of questions. After the Buzzer round in which all teams tried to play safe, the third and fourth placed teams (Infosys and Honeywell) were asked to leave.

TCS and Savoir Faire didn't want to take too many risks in the last round and Derek had to pull out couple of extra questions to resolve the tie.

Final scores

TCS: 80
Savoir Faire: 75
Infosys: 30
Honeywell: 25
BMC Software: 25
ZS Associates: 20

BCQC highlights

Abhishek Nagaraj answered the English Lit. question on what are called Gamps after a character Mrs. Gamp in a Dickens story, while Vasu answered the question on who gave his voice to the obituary video of Art Buchwald.

Report by Harish, who was one of the finalists.