Date: 4 Aug 2013
Set and Conducted by: B V Harish Kumar
Flavour: General
Format:
Teams of 3 for prelims. ~20 teams participated. 2 rounds of Infinite Rebounds (20 qns each) + 1 written round. A "DRS" pounce system. Prelims cut-off: 4.5, prelims highest: 15.5
Results
1st: Team F - Ranajeet Soman, Samrat Sengupta, J Ramanand (125)
2nd: Team A - Ayush Agrawal, Samridh Kapur, and Aditya Pawar (55)
3rd: Team B - Abhishek Upadhya, Arnold D'Souza (briefly substituted by Avaneendra), and Maitreyi Gupta (50)
4th: Team D - Ajachi, Suraj, Abhinav (45)
5th: Team C - Lakshmy, Roshith, Venkat (drafted in as a 3rd)(30)
6th: Team E - Abhinav, Saikat, and Kshitij (20)
Venue sponsored by Extentia (many thanks especially to Vcat for organising the place!)
Report
The last time Harish conducted a quiz was six years ago, a time when there was no such thing as an infinite pounce (except in the minds of some lewd quizzers) and Amit Varma (remember him?) was still a quizzer. To some of the younger quizzers at the quiz, the selection of topics and their framing into questions must have felt like a throwback to an older era.
The low scores in the prelims may have been because of time constraints (people like me who went for a late lunch returned even later and had about 10 minutes remaining on the clock), but also because the questions were on topics that weren't a lot of people's strengths. Politics, Sports, and India has traditionally been Harish's forte and that showed in the choice of topics. The framing was minimal, which made the clues easier to spot, but only if you trusted the 'bounce' (a finite one).
The finals carried on from the prelims - the answers to most of them were not too obscure, but most teams did struggle to score. Harish had his own version of the pounce, the aim of which was not necessarily to counter sitters, but to provide teams with the ability to compete with those that were close to them in the scoring. Based on their current scores, teams were paired for the pounce every five questions and they could only pounce when a question was presented to the team paired with them. Interesting, but I'm still unconvinced (discussion in the comments, if anyone's interested.) The pairing was a little subjective in the end, but fortunately, it wasn't too complicated to pull off for Harish.
We built up a good lead right from the first question, but as the scores will show, the rest of the teams were bunched up together, and it was a very tight finish that may have looked differently given another 10 questions.
Uncomplicated (except for the pounce system) quizzing - that was the order of the day.
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