The Chakravyuh Open Quiz - A part of COEP's MindSpark 2012
Conducted by: Neelima Jha
Attended by ~100 teams
Results:
1st: Kunal Sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav: 120 pts
2nd: Aditya Gadre and Vikram Keskar: 115 pts
3rd: Debanjan Bose and Hari Nair: 60 pts
4th: Vikram Joshi and Abhinav Dasgupta: 40 pts
5th: Ranajeet Soman and Rohan jain: 20 pts
6th: Nikhil and Vishvesh: 5 pts
This year's Chakravyuh happened on a Saturday, a welcome change from last year which meant that a few of us could travel from out-of-town to take part.
The elims were, there is no other way to say this, bad. Ambiguously worded questions and no prior thought into what the expected answer was led to the post-elim period turning into a bargaining contest - teams tried to convince the QM about how their answer was correct as per their interpretation of the question and the QM actually gave in on far too many occasions. One thing that irritated me was that the visuals were run only at the end of the elims - thus giving the teams only a couple of looks at the picture and not much time in case you wanted to spend time on that particular question (which is the biggest advantage of a pen and paper elims as opposed to a ppt elims).
Once we had gotten over BDFL not qualifying (that I have never seen BDFL this happy to not qualify, says something about the elims) - we got onto the finals.
The positive was that there were only about 5-7 god-awful peters so about 35 odd new /kinda-new questions(a decent figure for a college quiz). Also there were some nice fundas explored.
With respect to content three major issues that really put me off in the finals were
1. Too many questions simply said "Give Funda" which other than saying "Guess what I am about to ask you" is the worst way to ask a quiz question. Some great fundas were ruined by this lazy framing.
2. Serious problems with the notability of some of the answers. Calling them arbit would be an understatement (eg. 1981 TV movie about a sport that practically NO-ONE watches in India)
3. The theme was worth 70 points (!) with points for individual answers (another 70 points!). So hypothetically, I could be a space nut and win the quiz by simply cracking the theme and answering all the questions correctly and not knowing anything else across the quiz. Not blaming the organizers too much for this due to their inexperience but certainly this is something the QMs should keep in mind for future events.
The same issues about lack of clarity from the elims in expected answers led to several more bargaining sessions.
Another issue in terms of conducting the quiz was that what was written on the slide in terms of rules/ what was expected / half points policy was frequently changed throughout the quiz.
Overall, I would say the quiz was okay at best. There was some decent material and the quiz could have been a lot better by ensuring simple things - like writing out real questions, clarity in points, runnign through the quiz in your head once before actually conducting it etc
In terms of an experience, the quiz was awesome fun, at least for those of us on stage - constant trolling, funny answers, Kunal's fatwas and Ranajeet's rascism - made it all a fun few hours spent.
Winners list so far
2001: Shrirang Raddi and Amalesh Mishra
2002: Shrirang Raddi and Amalesh Mishra
2003: Niranjan Pedanekar and Samrat Sengupta
2004: Gaurav Sabnis and Neeraj Sane
2005: Sudarshan Purohit and Amit Garde
2006: Gaurav Sabnis & Shamanth Rao
2007 (Apr): Kunal Sawardekar and Shamanth Rao
2007 (Oct): Avinash Mudaliar and Harikrishnan Menon
2008: J. Ramanand and B.V.Harish Kumar
2009: Anand Sivashankar and Amit Garde
2010: J. Ramanand and B.V.Harish Kumar
2011: Meghashyam Shirodkar and Yash Marathe
2012: Kunal Sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav