Monday, May 28, 2018

The Pop-Culture Quiz - Report

Date - 20/05/2018
Set and conducted by Kunal Sawardekar
Format - 25 question elims, 36 question finals

Results
First - Team 5 - 
Aditya Gadre, Venkatraghavan Sahasranaman and Ranajeet Soman (draft) - 132.5 pts
Second - Team 2 - Rahul Kottalgi, Omkar Yarguddi, +1 - 80 pts
Joint Third - Team 1 - Aniket Khasgiwale, Venkatesh Srinivasan and Vibhendu Tewari (draft) &
Team 4 - Omkar Dhakephalkar, Pranav Pawar and Nadeem Ansari (draft)  - 75 pts

Other Finalists 
Anannya Deb (draft), + 2

Report

Kunal told us that the elims would be fairly simple and displayed a lesser seen side of the Dunning-Kruger effect where people with superior ability in a task assume it is equally easy for others. To put it simply, the elims were not at all simple and the spectre of self-doubt was haunting every quizzer present after the first few questions because nobody seemed to be getting anything. This improved in the latter half and questions became accessible. Ingit sir and Gadre topped the elims with an outrageous (for us) score of 14, with the main draw cut-off at 9 and the draft cut-off at 6.

The finals were really good with Kunal having hit his question setting stride. The quiz had due apologies to Faiz Ahmed Faiz as its tagline and there was no India shit. The western fundae were sufficiently popular to qualify as 'popular'-culture. The quiz had a decent amount of AV content which made it less taxing than dry quizzes tend to be. Team 5 picked up where they left off in the elims and were cruising throughout the quiz. Teams 1, 2 and 4 were reasonably close at the halfway mark before Team 5 pulled clearly ahead.

The only crib one would have was the difficulty level in the elims which could have been rectified with timely guinea-pigging. Apart from that, it was an enjoyable quiz. We hope Kunal turns this into at least a biennial event rather than a quinquennial one.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

May Open - Written Quiz Report

Set and conducted by Omkar Dhakephalkar
Format - Written, 40 questions
Flavour - General

Results: 
1st: Aniket Khasgiwale and Venkat Srinivasan (not vcat) - 25.5 points
2nd: Rahul Kottalgi and Pratyush Jha - 23 points
3rd: Venkatraghavan S and Aditya Gadre - 22 points

Omkar put together a great set of workoutable, interesting and accessible questions. The questions covered a wide range of topics. Also kudos to Omkar for crisp framing of the questions - it was very clear what exactly was required in each question.

No negatives I can think of for the quiz - except that perhaps some questions might have been better used in a live passing setting than at a written quiz  

BC Cup 2018 Report + BC Cup of BC Cups Report

BC Cup 2018

Set by Aditya Gadre, Aniket Khasgiwale and Yash Marathe

Format: 30 question elim to determine the 8 quarter finalists. 60 question quarter to determine the top 4 for the semi finals. 40 question semi-final to determine the top 2. A 28 question final to determine the winner.

Report

The 10th edition of the BC Cup saw easily the strongest field we have ever seen at the BC Cup with at 6 past winners and general studs travelling from all over the place for the quiz. The elims were a bit easier than previous years and thus high scoring. Prithwish top scored with a phenomenal 21 out of 30 and Deepanjan was close behind with 20.5 points. The cut off was 14.5 and some very good sports quizzers just missed out with 12 to 14 points. This included former winners Ramkey and Shrirang, Venky, Souvikda, a regular quarterfinalists Shubhankar, Kaushik et al 

The Quarter Finals

The top 8 in the quarter finals were:
Prithwish Datta, Deepanjan Deb, Venkatraghavan S (Ingit Sir), Suraj Menon, Anannya Deb, Kunal Malhotra, Samrat Sengupta, Anand Sivashankar

Ingit, Suraj and Anannya started strongly with Kunal hot on their heels. Prithwish took a while to get going but when we did, he consistently kept climbing. Suraj and Ingit continued their form through the quarters to comfortably take the top 3 spots. Anannya and Kunal kept going neck and neck. Kunal tied their scores on the second last question and somehow the last question passed all the way roun for Anannya to answer to dramatically take the last spot in the semi

The Semi Finals: 

The top 4 were: Suraj, Ingit sir, Anannya and Prithwish

Anannya took forever to get off the mark and Ingit sir had a few good moments, but the semis were the Prithwish and Suraj show with both scoring a strong 7 points each to emphatically book their place in the final

The Finals:

Prithwish and Suraj faced off in a repaet of last year's very closely contested final. Prithwish won the toss and went first. He came close to answering a question but got only half of the answer. The first leg ended scoreless. Suraj gave 2 great answers in his home leg to take 2-0 lead. Prithwish's second home leg also ended scoreless. The final leg saw some surprises with both Suraj and Prithwish missing a cricket question that the crowd seemed to get immediately. Suraj put away another brilliant answer to extend his lead to 3-0 leaving Prithwish needing to answer all the last 3 questions correctly to win on away goals. Prithwish couldn't answer any of the question and Suraj won 3-0

BC Cup Winner 2018: Suraj Menon 
Runner Up: Prithwish Datta 

List of BC Cup winners
List of BC Cup Winners:
2009: Sameer Deshpande and Suraj Menon
2010: Anannya Deb
2011: Anannya Deb
2012: Sumant Srivathsan
2013: Ramkey V
2014: Prithwish Dutta
2015: Samrat Sengupta
2016: Shrirang Raddi
2017: Suraj Menon
2018: Suraj Menon


BC Cup of BC Cups 

Since this was the 10th edition of the quiz, we had a special event for past BC Cup winners. A short quiz to determine the BC Cup of BC Cups

We had 5 former winners taking part: Ramkey, Suraj, Prithwish, Samrat and Anannya

The quiz had three sections to replicate the BC Cup format - easy, difficult and sadistic

In the easy section - Samrat took an early lead with 4 and Suraj scored 3 points. Dada scored 2, Boss and Ramkey scored 1 each 

In the difficult section - we introduced an element of risk - a +1/-1 pounce system. Samrat scored 2 points with no negs to take his score up to 6 with Suraj scored an equal number of positives and negatives to stay at 3. Prithwish, Ramkey and Dada didn't see their scores move much

In the sadistic section - Suraj started with a cracker of an answer to take him to 5 points (just one short of Sammy sir). Unfortunately for him, he got a few questions after that wrong and then Sammy sir parked the bus to ride out to victory

BC Cup of BC Cups Winner: Samrat Sengupta









Wednesday, May 02, 2018

Report on the BCQC April Open 2018


Date: Saturday, 28 April 2018
Quiz: The BCQC April Open 2018
Venue: AFMC, Pune
Fest/Organized by: BCQC
QM(s): Charles Matthew, Pranav ‘Floyd’ Joshi
Flavour: Gen

Results:
1. Team 5 [145 Pts.]: Arnabh Sengupta, Rohan Setlur (AFMC) + Akshay Parale (Draft, COEP)
2. Team 1 [139.5 Pts.]: Aditya Gadre, Ranajeet Soman + Nikhil Nair (Draft, AFMC)
3. Team 2 [120.5 Pts.]: Pranav Pawar, Omkar Dhakephalkar + Aman Shaikh (Draft)

Other Finalists:
Omkar Yarguddi (Solo) + Gokul Panigrahi, Suryadipta Biswas (Drafts)
PavanKumar, Ruturaj (AFMC) + Aditya Lewis (Draft, AFMC)
Kumal Sawardekar, Arnold D’Souza

The quiz set by Pranav 'Floyd' Joshi and Charles Matthew was a fun experience. It had a 25 question Elims followed by a Final with 20 questions on IR, 11 questions Written and 1 List It!

Team 1 started well in the first Written Round but never found their footing in the Infinite Bounce Rounds with Team 2 building a lead. Team 1 made a late surge by cracking the second Written Round but again lost their lead in the second IR Round where Team 5 gave one great answer after another to go into the List It! with a 14.5 pt lead. The List It! heavily favoured Pune locals and Team 1 duly top scored, but couldn't overhaul Team 5's lead.

Positives:
- A very original quiz, very few, if any, Peters
- a lot of very good fundaes
- Questions were light and interesting while covering a wide range of topics
- A lot of nice subtle clues in the questions

Negatives
- Inconsistent scoring - especially in the written rounds
- The framing on quite a few questions was ambiguous. The QM had to provide clarifications on a lot of questions.
- Too few questions on Infinite Bounce



Report by: Aditya Gadre