The Blog of the Boat Club Quiz Club, Pune
Number of participants: ~30
Official final standings: keep an eye on this link. All scores are provisional pending adjudication. According to the KQA twitter feed, Arul Mani has won this year's Mahaquizzer with 87 points.
This year’s edition saw more major changes to the format. It has now moved away from the head-to-head knockout contests to a conventional quizzing IR format - a positive move IMO.
Format:
First, an elim determines 8 qualifiers. The qualifiers took part in a 60 qn format, after which 4 are eliminated. Scores are reset and another 36 qn semi takes place. The final is a one-to-one contest like last year's contest. The match consists of a home leg and an away leg. Home is basically direct questions. If one gets a direct question wrong and the opponent answers, it counts as an away goal and is used for tie breakers.
Group stages
The prelims cutoff was 12.5, with a top score of 19 by Anand. The 8 qualifiers in random order were:
Anand, Suraj, Annanya, Kaushik, Srinath, Ramanand, Pradeep, and Dipanjan. Pradeep took his spot after a tie-break decider (just the beginning of the day for him).
The Quarter Finals: Anand was in complete control of this, taking 9 points to emerge the leader. Suraj (7) was next in. Three of us (Annanya, Pradeep, and Ramanand) were tied on 6, necessitating a long drawn out tie-break threatening the reserves of the QMs before Ramanand was eliminated.
Semi Final The tables were turned - Anand, Annanya, and Suraj finished on 3 points each, as Pradeep decided to enjoy the view at the other end of the table with a comfortable 5 points. Another set of tie-breakers later, the defending champion squeezed into the final.
The Final
Pradeep v Annanya
Pradeep will never forget the Cooch-Behar Trophy, that much we can be sure of. That miss on a cricket question, a topic that Pradeep is considered a leading expert on, was to prove costly as Annanya put on a smooth performance to win 5-4. Once again, his breadth of knowledge across sports helped him win the cup (and even ensured a point or two for fellow quizzers, as I can testify in the Quarters.)
Final score 5-4, Annanya Deb wins on aggregate
The winner for BC Cup 2011 is Annanya Deb
Previous winners:
2009: Suraj and Sameer
2010, 2011: Annanya Deb
Once again, congratulations to the three quiz-masters for a very interesting and wide variety of questions on sport. Comments and suggestions? Leave it in the comments section for this post.
In Pune, the Quiz will be held at:
Seminar Hall II (Next to main Auditorium),
College of Engineering,
Pune (COEP),
Shivajinagar,
Pune-5
Coordinator & KQA Proctor: Vishwajeeth Narvekar (98201-09984)
The quiz is open to all and there are prizes for local winners in categories such as School, College, Open and Lady entrant. In Pune, we will be sponsoring additional prizes for schools and colleges.
The rest of the details can be found at this KQA link.
To check if you are registered, visit this link.
* Previous results and reports from Pune
* Questions from earlier editions.
Format:
"This is vastly, hugely mindbogglingly big quiz - if you thought Anand's lit quiz was long, that's just peanuts compared to this"
- Douglas Adams
First, a 30 question elim determines 8 qualifiers . These 8 people take part in a 60 question quarter final. The top four go through to the semi final. The semi-final will consist of 34 questions with scoring reset to zero. This is to keep the 'winning three consecutive matches' concept constant from last year's edition. The top two then go to the final.
The finalists will then face off one-on one for a 24 question final. The match consists of a home leg and an away leg. Homeleg is basically direct questions. If one gets a direct question wrong wich the opponent answers, it counts as an away goal and is used for tie breakers (as per UEFA rules:) )
So that's a total of 148 questions + tie breakers.
Administrivia
QMs: Yash Marathe, Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre
Theme: Sports
Teams: Individual
Restrictions: (or the lack of one) Open quiz. Everyone is welcome
When? 12:30 pm, Sunday, 22nd May, 2011
Where? The Boat Club, College of Engineering Pune
Registration: Free registration.
You can register by :
1. Mailing yashcmarathe[at]gmail.com
2. Calling or SMSing Aditya at 9881101291
3. Confirming your attendance on the facebook event.
This is required as we need to get elim sheets printed.
Prizes: Landmark Vouchers
Results:
1st: The Dukes of Cambridge, .... - Shubhankar Gokhale, Srinath and Abhinav Dasgupta : 64 pts
2nd: The Travelling Pillsburys - Vibhendu Tiwari, Sumant Srivathsan and Anil Kothuri: 49 pts
3rd: Sigh Babas of Put-a-party - Salil Bijur, Yash Marathe and Aditya Gadre: 44 pts
4th: Ani Uris - Taking the 'p' out of pani puris - Anand Sivashankar, Amit Garde and Meghashyam Shirodkar : 44 pts*
Other Finalists
Your guess is as good as mine - Prasann Potdar, Amit Pandeya and Francis R
Swami and friends - Alagarsamy, Nitish Khadiya and J Krishnamurthy
Hazare Khwaeishen Aisi - Subhashish, Navin Sharma and [one more person]
Born Losers Aniruddha Dutta and two more gentlemen (TCS)
* Lost on tie breaker
This year's Landmark open had a rather simple elim set which arguably led to a few surprises with regard to the finalists. A tougher elims would perhaps been a bit more fair and ensured that the best 8 teams in the auditorium qualified for the final.
The final itself, in my opinion, was interesting and had a good mix of new, current events and 'static' fundas. About the quality of the questions, I felt a bit of workability was compromised in trying to make the questions tougher. A lot of the questions seemed too heavy on the 'funda' and largely involved fitting situations to questions instead of working out the answer.
I felt a few questions were put in just for the gimmick or rather were asked just so that the audience would have heard of the answer, which hurt a couple of teams (particularly us and Swami and friends) as they went not go for answers they knew could not possibly feature in an open quiz final (which turned out to be the right answers!)
That said, it is indeed very difficult to balance a quiz such that you hold the interest of a largely newbie audience and hardened quizzers, and Navin Jayakumar certainly does this job better than most.
Please post your opinions in the comments.
PS: I have forgotten the names of a few finalists. Please post the names in the comments. Thanks.
Extentia, Pune