Landmark Quiz 2009 - Mumbai

Details of the first ever Mumbai Landmark Quiz:

Date: 1st May 2009 (Friday)
Time: 3pm
Venue: St. Andrews auditorium, St. Dominic Rd., Bandra, Mumbai

For registration and more details, pl call Landmark Mumbai at 022-26396010 or mail murali@landmark-tata.com

BCQC April Evening Open Quiz

Set and Conducted by Aniket Khasgiwale & Meghashyam Shirodkar.

Results:
1st: Rajiv Rai, Sumant Srivathsan, Yash Tamaskar (draft) [A]: 145 pts
2nd: Atul Matthew, Abhinav, Suraj Menon (draft) [B]: 105 pts
3rd: Suvajit C, J. Ramanand, Harish Kumar (draft) [E]: 80 pts
Jt. 4th: Anand Sivashankar, Aditya Gadre, Devang Ghia (draft) [F]: 55 pts
Jt. 4th: Amit Varma, Anannya Deb, Niranjan Pedanekar (draft) [C]: 55 pts
6th: Vibhendu Tiwari, Sarat Rao, Ajith Prabhakar :45 pts

Elims: highest: Rajiv+Sumant (22/35); cutoff: 15
Participating Teams: about 40

I was quite disappointed with the (short) quiz and will struggle to think of redeeming features. Perhaps someone can comment about the silver linings. Until then, the clouds:
* Elims were ok, but many questions suffered from being vague in communicating what was expected. This caused problems during correction later. Crisp answers & minimum ambiguity are necessary, especially when people apart from the QMs are correcting.
* More than average number of cricket qns
* A couple of qns in the finals (like the Gulzar) were just bad
* Powerpoint excesses once again, as we groaned again and again about the size of the text in the question. Will lead me to believe they were pasted from a web source, so avoidable, IMO.
* Once again, a case of QMs making questions till the last minute and hence not being able to present a crisp and pleasant interface?

Ok, there were a couple of very nice questions in the finals, which provoked good answers by some of the finalists. The winners led comfortably through out the quiz, and team 2 did very well to come back. But in all, I found the quiz rather uninspiring, and I almost found myself thinking of other things I could have been doing. Wish that were not so.

'And Now for Something Completely Different' - BCQC Open (Morning Quiz) Report

Set and Conducted by Aditya Gadre

Results:
Jt. 1st : Sumant Srivathsan , Rajiv Rai and Sarat Rao : 155 pts
Jt. 1st : Abhishek Nagaraj , Hirak Parikh , Govind Grewal : 155 pts
3rd: J Ramanand , Yasho Tamaskar , Akhil : 105 pts
4th : Amit Varma , Ananya Deb , Vibhendu Tiwari : 95 pts
5th : Niranjan Pednekar , Salil Bijur , Apurva : 80 pts
6th : Devang Ghia , Kaustuv Gupta , Pradeep Ramarathnam : 65 pts

Some thoughts about the quiz:
-This was the first time I tried setting an only MELA quiz. So it was in a sense 'Something Completely Different' .
- Elims turned out to quite low scoring. So most of the teams were very closeon elim score. Amit-Anand and Suraj-Kaustubh missed out on sudden death. Looking at the answer sheets , I feel a lot fo the teams over thought answers and got some simple ones wrong which brought down the elim score. That said , Rajiv and Sumant put in a great performance to top the elims by 4 points.
- Sorry to all for the repeated changes in the finals line up . Especially Suraj And Kaustubh who went from top six to draft picks to just in on sudden death and finally to just out on sudden death.
-As for the finals , Hirak-Abhishek-Gowind and Sumant-Rajiv-Sarat were in inspired form and led pretty much from start to finish.
-The questions themselves were inclined towards factual knowledge because making them workable without making them obvious was proving very difficult for me. Maybe next time I'll give more emphasis on workability. Still I don't think it made the quiz too boring . This is my perception , do correct me if I'm wrong.
-Apologies for some of the sitters and peters.

On another note :
It was nice to see the Bombay teams come in such large numbers for the BCQC opens. It really made the quiz a lot more competitive . Hope to see them for all future BCQC events.

Please post your thoughts in the comments section.

BCQC College Quizzer Championship 2009 Results

For the Yash Marathe 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, 2009
Venue: the Boat Club, COEP, Pune
Set and Conducted by: J. Ramanand (with contributions from Suraj Menon and others)
Theme: General, Solo

Quiz Final Results
Format: 2 rounds of IR + Special round of top 4 (10 questions in a common play-off format)
Winner: Yash Marathe - Modern College (A) - 130
2nd: Aditya Gadre (E) - COEP - 125
3rd: Gaurav Singh (F) - COEP - 90
4th: Rajeev Galgali (H) - Kalmadi Shamrao Junior College - 40
5th: Yash Sinha (C) - PICT - 35
6th: Aditya Chandorkar (B) - BJMC - 30
7th: Aadinath Harihar (G) - COEP - 25
Joint 8th: Suvajit Chakraborty (D) - Symbiosis Law - 20
Joint 8th: Raghav (I) - Symbiosis Law - 20

Best First Year College Quizzer: C.V.R. Sastry
Best Junior College Quizzer: Rajeev Galgali

Notes:

The quiz started off on a low scoring note with rookie Rajeev, the only junior collegian in the finals leading at 40 after the first IR round. Rajeev didn't score in the second IR round where Yash Marathe and Aditya Gadre made huge gains with Yash at 80 and Aditya at 75.

After the IR rounds, the top 4 (Yash M, Aditya G, Gaurav Singh (at 50) and Rajeev went into a super-final. The format in this round was such that at a time, questions would be asked keeping at least 3 left open and the finalists could choose their question to attempt. A question was closed if it was answered or if there were 4 attempts. 5 questions clockwise and 5 anti-clockwise. Yash and Aditya dominated this round going neck-to-neck. At the end, just like last year, this quiz went upto the last question and Yash Marathe went into history as the first to win a prize named after himself :-).