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.
7 comments:
spelt "Shubhankar Gokhale"
Am still kicking myself for missing some of the easier prelims questions - c'est la vie.
This LM quiz was considerably improved by not having a "hard core" RJ as a compere :-)
The switching between slides during the finals was quite jarring, particularly for those on stage.
Finally, given that the current format has been around for a long time, I hope Navin and co. think a little about reinventing the format of the finals in the new season.
Anirudh/Suresh/Pravin Varma were the team from TCS
Agree with JR on the Prelims+RJs.
"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" - Does the Cuba/Sicko question fall under this category? Moore claims it wasn't banned (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/18/wikileaks-us-diplomats-story-cuba-banned-sicko-film) though taking him for face value might not be such a good idea.
There's too much at stake in the theme round (~30 point swing which equals 3 questions in IR)
No cribs about the winners though. They were streets ahead of the competition on stage (they had a answering percentage of 60% while the next best team were in the 40s). All stats via Grandpa. He'll gladly share the excel on demand.
-Atul
@Ramanand: I think the slide switching problems started after the 2nd finger of God episode, and they decided to play safe after that. I'm convinced the specter of Kaustubh Bhat was lurking somewhere at St.Andrew's causing people to screw up on flash presentations.
As for changing the format, I'd like it if they did away with the 2nd buzzer round. IR-theme buzzer thingy-Reverse IR works fine IMO.
@ Atul - The Sicko question was framed to ask which country Wikileak cables said banned the movie because of the scene shown.
@ JR - I also feel 30 questions on IR + buzzer is not enough to guarantee a nonrandom result with 8 teams on stage. This is a general problem with LMQ and I really think they ought to do something about it.
The 30 qns IR format comes from the need to have a uniform format across centres. Since Chennai has to squeeze in two full blown finals along with a preliminary round with a very high number elims papers to be corrected, it has resuted in other centres also having a much truncated finals and the theme and buzzers stepping in to lend some drama to the proceedings.
But I am in agreement with most of Dr. Jayakumar's editorial choices. The elims, easy as they were still managed to hit all the right notes: elegantly framed, liberally clued and resonating with lay people and quiz-folks alike.
I saw Anand's spreadsheet. He has accounted only for the IR rounds and not the buzzer & theme rounds which I think had more questions than IR.
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