Saturday, September 28, 2013

Chakravyuh 2013 - Report

The Chakravyuh Open Quiz - A part of COEP's MindSpark 2012

Set by Vibhav Bhave, Rohan Danait and others 
Conducted by: Vibhav Bhave

Attended by ~100 teams

Format: Written elims of 30 questions. Finals comprising 36 questions on IR (with 3 pounces per half) and one LVC

Results:
1st: Meghashaym Shirodkar and Amit Garde: 150 pts
2nd: Kunal Sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav: 145 pts
3rd: J Ramanand and BV Harish Kumar: 135 pts
4th: Aditya Gadre and Aniket Khasgiwale: 115 pts
5th: Shrirang Raddi and Ankush: 105 pts
6th: Abhishek Upadhya and Debanjan Bose: 100 pts

This edition of Chakravyuh was certainly more "quizzer friendly" than last year with more mainstream (perhaps some would say "normal") questions. 

The elims were largely simple and very high scoring with the top score being 27.5/30  and the cut off being 22. Vcat & Rohan and Saikat & Kshitij were unlucky to miss out on the tie break. The elims were quite good with a reasonable range of topics covered and accessible answers. A few cribs about the elims were more in terms of execution than the question themselves - there were questions which were incomplete on the slide and needed supplementary information from the QM which led to a lot of confusion. Also the star marked questions weren't, well, actually marked in the ppt leading to unnecessary attention from the QM being devoted to informing the star questions. 

Coming to the finals, one consistent crib was that the quiz was far too simple. The questions themselves may not have been all that simple, but the fact that there were a lot of peters certainly made them easy. And given the easiness of the questions, only 3 pounces meant that seating position had something to do with your final score. While there were some good questions but the same spread seen in the elims was not replicated in the finals - the first half was almost 50% a business quiz. The biggest crib I have about the content however is the sheer number peters - with so many of them the passing round becomes a game of luck especially with all finalists being established quizzers. 

The other major crib was in terms of execution - there was an occasion where a question had to be scrapped because it was not complete on the slide and one occasion where the dreaded finger of god made its appearance and effectively cost Kunal and Avaneendra the quiz. 

A lot of these cribs can be attributed to inexperience with Vibhav conducting his first quiz at this level. Perhaps going forward, college quiz setters should be more proactive in reaching out to BC alumni in ensuring that at least the repeats are kept to a minimum. 

Coming to other aspects, the quiz was fun with the teams indulging in typical BC banter and  occasional goodnatured trolling. By pure history, this was one of the strongest fields ever with 7 of the 12 finalists on stage being former Chakravyuh winners. The quiz also saw the return to the circuit for one of BCQC's founders Shrirang Raddi (and he made it seem like he had never left). 

Meghashyam and Amit went into the last question of the quiz trailing by 5 points and answered it to pull off a dramatic victory. 

Congrats are especially due to Amit as this victory now makes him a three-time Chakravyuh winner - more than anyone else. 

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
2013: Meghashyam Shirodkar and Amit Garde

11 comments:

J Ramanand said...

I thought the set would have made a great college quiz. As an open, the 'pitch' became too flat for the people in the finals. But as a standalone selection of trivia elements, it was quite good. Execution could have been better, no doubt, but Vibhav seems to have been a one-man army on this, so I'll give him some benefit of doubt.

Side-note: the fact that so many on stage were Chakravyuuh veterans (and former C'vyuuh QMs as well), perhaps either shows that quizzing is an old man's game, or that the oldies are doing an SRT and blocking the Ajinkya Rahanes. Something to mull over.

Avaneendra said...

How about Chakravyuha college edition?
Same elims for everyone but two tracks, one for college students exclusively and one for everyone.

Kunal said...

While there were some genuine issues such as the Peters and the Finger of God, I think the organisers deserve praise for keeping Chakravyuh the last Open quiz in Pune organised and set by college students. I remember my first Open quiz was similarly critiqued for an abundance of Peters, but the thing is, the only way to set quizzes free of questions people first d simple or repetitive is to attend and set more quizzes and Vibhav & Co. are on their way there.

Congratulations to Meghashyam and Amit on their well-deserved win (whatever the griping about Finger of Gods, the clearly knew more answers than the other teams, and probably would have built a much bigger lead had there been more pounces).

So while it went right down to the wire, in the end, quizzing was the winner :-)

Kunal said...

While there were some genuine issues such as the Peters and the Finger of God, I think the organisers deserve praise for keeping Chakravyuh the last Open quiz in Pune organised and set by college students. I remember my first Open quiz was similarly critiqued for an abundance of Peters, but the thing is, the only way to set quizzes free of questions people first d simple or repetitive is to attend and set more quizzes and Vibhav & Co. are on their way there.

Congratulations to Meghashyam and Amit on their well-deserved win (whatever the griping about Finger of Gods, the clearly knew more answers than the other teams, and probably would have built a much bigger lead had there been more pounces).

So while it went right down to the wire, in the end, quizzing was the winner :-)

Meghashyam Shirodkar said...

"Congrats are especially due to Amit (Garde) as this victory now makes him a three-time Chakravyuh winner - more than anyone else." Hear, hear!!!
I loved the overall experience this year, what with the (already mentioned) good-natured banter & trolling, et al. Kudos to Vibhav for putting up a good set overall (inspite/due to the lack of sleep the previous night!)...also to Rohan & the rest of the OC.
Tip of the hat to Kunal for being so gracious as to shrug off the fingers-of-God (yeah, NOT 'finger of gods', like 'Postmasters General-not-Postmaster Generals', LOL)...irrespective of how-many-answers-we-probably-knew-more, the fact remains that within the format on the day, w/o the 'Fender Bender' f.o.g, they would've worthily defended their title. Cheers!!!

J Ramanand said...

Kunal: that's what I said to Harish yesterday, the same thing has happened at a couple of Inquizzitions. That's how it goes, I suppose.

And as for records, I would like to see someone beat our (Harish & mine) dubious record of coming 2nd four times ;-) (we were almost thankful we didn't do so yesterday!)

College Chakravyuuh sounds like a nice idea, but I fear that budget, time, organising etc. is always going to get in the way.

Kunal said...

Hey now! How did this go from "Common thing in college quizzes" to "Common thing in Inquizzitions"?!

J Ramanand said...

That's the first place I remember noticing this problem :-)

Anonymous said...

OCTOBER 5-- GERMAN OPEN(WRITTEN QUIZ)

CONTACT-- GERMAN QUIZ ASSOCIATION,DQV

WEBSITE-- www.quizverein.de

iamayush@gmail.com said...

Post-CHOGM noob alert: What's a Finger of God?

Aditya Gadre said...

@Ayush: Finger of God is when the QM accidentally goes to the next slide of a question and reveals the answer thereby needing to scrap the question