Monday, July 28, 2014

The Cricket Quiz - Report

The quiz was set and conducted by Arnold D'Souza. It was originally supposed to be IR with all teams in finals but since we had a good turnout it was conducted as a written quiz.

Results
1st - Aniket Khasgiwale and BV Harish Kumar  - 37.5 pts
2nd - Ranajeet Soman and Samrat Sengupta - 23 pts

Report :

The quiz had 46 questions plus two other rounds. The first round was a doppelgangers round where celebrities from non-cricketing fields were shown and we had to guess the cricketer they resembled. It was a nice non-serious start to the quiz (the Nathan Bracken - Amelie Mauresmo part especially).

There were two sets of 22 and 24 questions respectively with a healthy share of tough questions. The questions were well framed, however, some of the answers weren't 'workoutable' at all. There were a few record/statistics based questions which seem unavoidable in a cricket quiz. Even though the quiz was tough, the questions were not arbit (barring a couple). There was a heavy English county bias and a lot of questions from the late 19th/early 20th century. Indian domestic cricket felt slightly left out I am sure.

The third round was a bar graph representation of the runs scored over a batsman's career. This was the most enjoyable round of the quiz. The quizmaster's choice of batsmen for this round was excellent.

As themed quizzes go, this was a good quiz and a very nice debut by Arnold.

Questions are here.

July College Quiz - Report

The quiz was set and conducted by Vibhav Bhave who will be fleeing leaving the country soon. The quiz had a 25 question elims and finals with two 15 question IRs and 2 written rounds including an intensely confusing "auction round".  The finals had a 6 + 3 draft system. Following are the results :

1st : Team 2 :- Rohan Danait, Ranajeet Soman + Sampooran Singh (not Gulzar) - 179 points
2nd : Team 1:- Aniketh Rallabandhi, Daipayan Roy + Dhananjay Jagtap - 162 points
3rd : Team 5 :- Omkar Dhakhephalkar, Pranav Pawar + Saikat Sarkar - 146 points

Other finalists : Team 3 :- Alok Kulkarni, Rohit Sahasrabuddhe + Kshitij Jyoti
Team 6 :- Kinshuk, Arundhati Kulkarni + Aman Shaikh
Team 4 :- Anurag Gangras, Anway Karmarkar + Divij Ghose

Report :

We had a very good turnout of 22 teams considering the recent times. The elims were of a good quality for a college quiz with a lot of teams making it into double digits. There were no arbit questions and a couple of very good ones. The cut-off for the top 6 was 15/30.

It was great to see new faces making it to the top 6 pushing a couple of seasoned teams in the drafts.
The finals had a 'double-dip' pounce with one wrong answer on the pounce fetching a -10 and the second one barring the team from pouncing in that IR round. Team 2 led from the first question with Team 1 and 5 following not very far away.

The second round was the auction round which caused disparity between the scores of the top 3 teams and the rest. There were 6 topics consisting of 3 one lined questions on each topic. A team could bid for a maximum of 3 and a minimum of 1 category from the points they score in the first IR round. I will spare you the intimate details of the scoring since trying to remember them is making my head spin. Team 2 pulled away with a 40 point lead in this round since Rohan Danait seemed to have understood the scoring system perfectly.

The third round was much easier to understand. It was another written round with stuff blanked out from comic strips. A wider variety of comics apart from Asterix and Scrooge McDuck could have easily been managed considering the amount of webcomics floating around.

The last round was another 15 question IR where Team 1 did really well drawing dangerously close to first place. However, Team 2 kept scoring consistently on the bounce and the pounce staying just out of reach.

The quiz was a decent quality considering the Pune college quizzing scene isn't very strong. However some questions would have definitely been better off in a school quiz (What is the capital of 'Slovakia' and 'Who started the currency 'rupee' in India' being examples). There was brevity in a lot of the finals questions which could have been framed better. A few questions like the WTC headquarters were excellent.
A college quiz once a year is a not a bad tradition to set.


Friday, July 25, 2014

July quizzes - a College quiz and an Open Cricket Quiz

The BCQC is organising two open quizzes in July. Details:

Date: 27 July 2014 (Sunday)
Venue: Academic Complex., COEP, Pune (next to the BC). Given the venue, we have to declare a dress code: no shorts, as COEP has become finicky about not allowing people wearing shorts in the Complex.

Quiz 1: College Quiz


Set & hosted by: Vibhav Bhave
When: 10:30 am to 1:00 pm 
Theme: General
Format: written prelims, followed by finals
Registration: free, open to college students (cross-college teams allowed)
Teams: teams of two members each
Certificates for all the finalists

Quiz 2: The July Open

Set & hosted by: Arnold D'Souza
When: 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm 
Theme: Cricket
Format: written prelims, followed by finals
Registration: free, open to all
Teams: teams of two members each 
Certificates for college finalists, top college team