Sunday, April 20, 2008

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.

7 comments:

Harish Kumar said...

Nice entertaining quiz and a good mix of topics. You could have probably had a quiz with 50 nice questions than a 64 q quiz with 10-14 sitters :)
Mussolini - had to lock the self respect somewhere to accept points for that one.

Vcat said...

Well conducted - good effort put in by the organizers. Thanks, Jains and the Rotaract folks.

Thanks, Hoosiers. ;)

Anonymous said...

@harish : Well, i just had to put in some simple ones.Audience attention is what i was looking for.
Basically the idea was to do some fun quizzing instead of some serious quizzing.

Nonetheless thank you guys for trooping in. :)

Hail Mussolini(?)

Abhishek said...

@rohan: BTW, I've asked for the elims/finals to be mailed to me at cheerfulguy AT gmail. Possible?

Harish Kumar said...

And yes - finally someone other than Georrge Thomas cares about Dogstar and I get to answer it :)

Samrat said...

Good show by the organizers.
Exciting end to the quiz.
Did not like too many "identify" questions.

QM didnt believe in half-points,I believe there were some questions where the half-points could be given.

Anonymous said...

Rohan said :

yes Samrat sir, will keep that in mind next time around :-)