Monday, February 26, 2018

Report on The Shyam Bhatt Memorial Open Quiz 2018



Date: Saturday, 23rd February 2018
Quiz: The Shyam Bhatt Memorial Open Quiz 2018
Venue: Armed Forces Medical College, Pune
Fest/Organized by: Silhouettes 2k18
QM: Major Chandrakant Nair
Flavour: General
Format: Written elims of 30 questions to decide 8 qualifying teams. Finals had 34 questions on Infinite Bounce/Rebounce and two ‘themed’ written rounds with 7 questions each.

Results:
First Place -Suraj and Ramanand (258 points)
Second Place – Shaswat Salgaocar and Kavin Adhithyan (155 points)
Third Place – Kunal Malhotra and Apratim Mukhopadhyay (143 points)

Other Finalists (in order of scores):
Anirudh Anilkumar and Arnab (AFMC) – 138 points
Kunal Sawardekar and Arnold D’Souza – 115 points
Debanjan Bose and Prithwish Dutta – 105 points
Ranajeet Soman and Srirang Raddi – 60 points
Omkar Dhakephalkar and Pranav Pawar – 58 points 

Pune’s oldest and arguably biggest Open Quiz – The Shyam Bhatt Memorial didn’t seem to suffer too much from being conducted on a Friday afternoon – with about 35 odd teams in attendance! While outstation teams didn’t quite throng the event like they have in past years, a large number of the Pune regulars (presumably through honest means and not through sudden illness), did turn up. A hard-fought prelim of 30 questions with 37 points at stake, saw 8 finalists go through without any unexpected twists and turns involving sudden death/starred questions and so on. For the statistically inclined, the highest score was 30 with the ‘cut-off’ being 21 on 37 – with a bunch of teams clustered around the 25-26 mark towards the middle of the pack.
Major Nair is by far India’s most prolific quiz master and certain folk, the report writer included – consider him the best in the business. It was easy to see why that is a very popular opinion among quizzers as he walked through an excellent final set to cap an accessible prelim set. Questions as usual, were interesting, workable and included the trademark old ‘funda’ repackaged tastefully to bring to light something new about an older established fact. One minor crib that was heard on stage was that the theme for the second written round – words used to refer to people – led more than a few teams down the wrong garden path, but I think safe to say it did not impact the final standings too significantly – while the individual questions in the round themselves were quite interesting and well set.
The final saw a raging battle for the second, third and fourth positions – with very little separating these teams right up to the end. The young college team of Anirudh and Arnab could consider themselves unlucky to have just missed out on a podium finish, but can take considerable cheer in the fact that they almost ran a bunch of very strong open teams ragged in the process.
Overall kudos to Major Nair on an excellent quiz. As young Floyd is won’t to say “Much fun was had” and we look forward to next year’s edition as always.

Report by: Suraj Menon