BCQC InFest 2018 Reports | The Maazical Mystery Tour

Slot: Sunday, 21-1-2018, Morning
Quiz: The Maazical Mystery Tour
Flavour: Music
QM: Aditya Gadre and Debanjan Bose
Format: Written elims to decide 6 main teams and draft picks. Elims scores 3 carry over to finals. Seamless Infinite Re-pounce in finals.

Aditya Gadre and Debanjan Bose set an excellent, accessible and nicely distributed quiz to open Day 2 of InFest 2018. While the start of the quiz was delayed to accommodate quizzers recovering from the previous day's festivities, only 10 teams made it to the start of the quiz. A mysterious errand that came up for Shubhankar Gokhale after the elims meant that all remaining 19 quizzers were able to make it to the finals, with only one 4-member team. In recognition of the fact that (nearly) all teams that wrote the elims made it to the final, all six directly qualifying teams had their elims score (multiplied by 3) carry over to the finals.

There was quite a nice mix of musical styles, periods and personalities throughout the quiz, without venturing into the gratuitously esoteric. Questions were workable and based on interesting fundae, and the use of audio-visual clues was judicious. There were 4 written rounds of three questions each, which was the only departure from the otherwise seamless IR(p).

QM Aditya Gadre kept the proceedings at a brisk clip, despite this being perhaps one of the longest quizzes at InFest, and definitely the most AV-heavy (with the possible exception of the InFestYouUs set on Female Non-Acting Oscar Winners taken by Vibhendu Tiwari). The quiz was completed within an acceptable tolerance of its scheduled end-time.

Vibhendu and Aniket topped the elims by a large margin, and their team (augmented by the Upcoming Quizzer of the Year 2016 Omkar Dhakephalkar) carried the resultant lead through the finals. The other teams were quite evenly matched, which was made starkly evident by the three-way tie for second place.

Results:

Winners - Vibhendu Tiwari, Aniket Khasgiwale & Omkar Dhakephalkar (draft) - 180 pts

Jt. 2nd - Ranajeet Soman, Navin Sharma & Rohan Jain (draft) - 155 pts

Jt. 2nd - Annanya Deb, Anand S & Venkat S (draft) - 155 pts

Jt. 2nd - Pranav Pawar, Kunal Sawardekar & Omkar Yarguddi (draft) - 155 pts

5th place - Nadeem Ansari. Shaswat Salgaocar + Nikhil Motlag (draft) - 125 pts

6th place - Ananya Menon, Advay Aundhekar, Nikhil Nair and Aditya Lewis (points to be updated)

Report by: Kunal Sawardekar

 

BCQC InFest 2018 Reports | The Supplies Quiz

The Supplies Quiz 

Set by UNESCO Best QM Suraj Menon and Pranav 'Floyd' Joshi 
Format: Written elims followed by a team final in a University Challenge format

Results: 
1st: Aditya Gadre, Aniket Khasgiwale and Shubhankar Gokhale
Jt 2nd: Kunal Sawardekar, Omkar Dhakephalkar and Ranajeet Soman
Jt 2nd: Anannya Deb, Anand Sivashankar and Pranav Pawar

Other finalists:
Vibhendu Tewari, Maitreyi Gupta and Safal Mohammad
Shrirang Raddi, Arnold D'Souza and Sandeep Shankar
Abhinav Dasgupta, Nadeem Ansari, Saahil Singh and Shashwat Salgaoncar


For starters, let me clarify that the quiz was not about drugs or inventory management - but a surprise to all who took part.

The quiz started with a 25 question elim. At the time of writing the elims - no one knew what the format of the quiz was - but we started getting an idea when every single elims question had the name of a university in it. It also nicely ended with a quesion on University Challenge which also was the theme of the quiz format going forward. Great touch!

We made 6 teams with draft picks - and much painful wire and cable and bench movements later - we had the set up with buzzers (kindly made and provided by Shubhankar) ready for the quiz. The format was identical to University Challenge - with a starter for 10 followed by bonus questions if the team gets the answer right on the buzzer. The additional quirk added was that other teams could atempt the bonus questions by writing down the answer - this got a lot of the teams very close to each other without hitting the buzzer too often. The QMs also read out the questions as opposed to putting them on the slide which further made the experience more authentic. This also added the constraint of making the questions small enough to be read and understood for a buzzer round while keeping the workoutability intact. UNESCO Best QM and Floyd delivered a great set of questions and ran proceedings at a good clip. Hope to see more innovative, experimental formats at InFest next year as well.

Report by Aditya Gadre

BCQC InFest 2018 Reports | The Revolutionary Quiz

The Revolutionary Quiz 

Set by Omkar Dhakephalkar and Pranav Pawar
Format: Written

Results: 
1st: Ranajeet Soman and Kunal Sawardekar - 24 points
2nd: Aditya Gadre and Aniket Khasgiwale - 17 points
3rd: Anannya Deb and Anand Sivashankar - 10.5 points

Dhake and PP - aka Molotov and Ribbentrop for the purposes of this quiz - put up an entertaining set with a Revolutionary theme. There were several rounds for the written quiz - which were both quirky and interesting. I particularly liked the concept of "Torture" on the double questions which could lead to more information worth a point or a penalty of 1 point for human rights abuses!

The questions themselves were fun and interesting - a tough ask for a quiz with this kind of a serious topic. I also liked how the QMs mixed things up with scoring and topics (including very liberal interpretations of Revolution). Perhaps in hindsight the quiz was a bit too tough and low scoring - but I feel the post lunch nature of the quiz had a lot to do with that.

Hoping to see more fun sets on not traditionally fun topics from these two.

Report by Aditya Gadre

BCQC InFest 2018 Reports | Single Personality Disorder

Slot: Saturday, 20-1-2018, Evening.
Quiz: Single Personality Disorder
Flavour: General
QM: Kunal Sawardekar
Format: Lone wolf. Written elims, followed by 12 member finals with the lowest 6 dropping out after 30 questions.

Kunal had promised a quirky set for the solo quiz on Saturday afternoon and the quiz lived up to its billing. The elims had a cut-off of 9.5 with most of the usual suspects qualifying apart from a couple of minor upsets as Prithwish Datta and Aniket Khasgiwale didn't make the finals.

The finals started with a couple of tough questions and it took a while for some of the contestants to get on the scoreboard. Considering that this was a general quiz, the distribution of topics could have been better. The quiz was heavy on topics of the QM's interest - history, geography, military and also had a more western focus. However, as expected there were very good fundae throughout the quiz which made it quite interesting for the participants as well as the audience.

I liked the format of the finals, with 12 finalists it provides a better chances for people to qualify. And eliminating the top 6 two-thirds of the way into the quiz was also good idea. However in this case it was a close call as #7 (Anannya Deb) was only 15 points behind #1 so it was unfortunate that he had to drop out. There was also an innovative pounce format with the first few incorrect pounces having a minus 5 which went up to minus 10 later.

30 questions into the finals, the bottom six were eliminated, leaving Omkar Dhakephalkar, Pranav Pawar, Abhinav Dasgupta, Apratim Mukhopadhyay, Aditya Gadre and Suraj Menon to fight it out over the last 16 questions. Aditya was leading by 5 points over Omkar, Pranav and Apratim at this point but Omkar gave some great answers in the final leg to win the quiz by a narrow 5 points over Aditya and Apratim with Pranav finishing a commendable 4th.

This was a great performance by Omkar, beating stalwarts from both Mumbai and Pune. Also kudos to Apratim. We shall hopefully see a lot more of him at BCQC in the future.

Final scores:
Top 6:
Omkar Dhakephalkar: 125
Apratim Mukhopadhyay: 120
Aditya Gadre: 120
Pranav Pawar: 110
Abhhinav Dasgupta: 95
Suraj Menon: 90

Places 7 - 12:
Anannya Deb: 60 (lost to Suraj on elims score)
Samrat Sengupta: 55
Vibhendu Tewari: 50
Navin Sharma: 25

Divij Ghose: 25
Anand Sivashankar: 5

Report by: Aniket Khasgiwale

BCQC InFest 2018 Reports | InFestYouUs 2018

InFestYouUs, the flagship event of the annual InFest, is a Mastermind-style quiz in which participants choose a specialized topic on which they are asked ten questions. They play against everyone else, who collectively form the 'Mob'. The participant gets +1 per correct answer, and -0.5 for every answer they pass/get incorrect and the Mob answers correctly. 

With an attendance of over 30 attendees, we had a strong mob to challenge and answer in case the participant could not. The venue was a classroom in the Academic Complex at the College of Engineering, Pune, next to the COEP Boat Club.

The winner of InFestYouUs 2018 with a score of 10 on 10 was 11 year-old Mihir Raddi. His topic was 'Aircrafts of the Battle of Britain'. Set by Meghashyam Shirodkar, this young quizzer had come fully prepared. The questions were also framed just for him and this resulted in the youngest winner of InfestYousUs also being the first one to score a full 10. Saahil Sharma who was in town from Bangalore scored a 9 in 'Olympic Controversies' set by Aniket Khasgiwale. PavanKumar and Navin Sharma were tied next at 8.5. The former took 'Rick and Morty' set by Ranajeet Soman while the latter took on 'Nicknames of Male Tennis Players' by Samrat Sengupta.

Saahil and Mihir were given T-Shirts and  PavanKumar and Navin won notebooks. Merchandize was sponsored by Thinq2Win.

Pranav 'Floyd' Joshi once again won the Boatie for the best InFestYouUs Set for his 'Jamie Oliver's Food Tube' set. That said, the most memorable set was the joint effort of Govind Grewal and Snehashis Panda. The older generation was introduced to a plethora of new artistes thanks to their 'Cringe Pop in India' set. A special mention is also must of Suryavardhan and Manpreet Shoora from AFMCs who were super-subs for their compatriots.

A sincere thank you to all the quiz-setters for setting such brilliant sets for InFestYouUs. Heartfelt thanks to all the setters who could actually come and take their set. Extra-special thanks to Divij Ghose, Vrushabh Gudade and COEP for providing such prompt facilities on time so early in the morning.

Proxy QMs included Aditya 'Fidel' Gadre, Kunal Sawardekar and Omkar Dhakephalkar.

Report by: Omkar Dhakephalkar

Full Score Sheet: