Quiz: Test Match Special
Date & Time: 10 July, 2022, Noon
Venue: COEP
Theme: General (NOT cricket)
Format: Written Elims for teams of 2 to get seeds + Final for all participants
QM(s): Suraj Menon
Results:
Winners – Team 1: Kunal Sawardekar, Aditya Gadre, Brajendu Bhaskar, Arnold D’Souza & Pitambar: 230 pts
Second place: Team 6: Vibhendu Tewari, Rajiv Rai, Amit, Snehil & Palak Shah: 180 pts
Third Place: Team 2: Venky Srinivasan, Anannya Deb, Sania Narulkar, Abhinav Dasgupta & Anurag: 170 pts
Other Finalists:
Team 5: Piyush Kedia, Shubham, Naman Jain, Akshay Parale & Soham – 140 pts
Team 4: Samrat Sengupta, J Ramanand, Sandeep Shankar, Pravin & Madhura – 130 pts
Team 3: Anmol Dhawan, Sahil Gupta, Charles Matthew, Pranav Joshi, Ghanashyam – 75 pts
Suraj Menon is known by monikers like UNESCO Best QM and BQMI (Best QM in India) – so when he said he wanted to set 90 questions and do a ‘Test Match style’ quiz with an elims and 3 sessions over 6 hours– needless, to say, everyone was quite excited.
The quiz started with a 30 question ‘elims’ which were on the simpler side – nice and accessible for everyone with sufficient clues – the hallmark of any good elims. At the end of the elims answers, Suraj revealed a surprise – that the elims were not an elimination at all – but just a written round to determine the teams in the finals, and that all present would take part in the finals.
We thus ended up with 6 teams of about 5 people each in the finals. The final were structured like a day of Test Cricket – 3 sessions of 20 questions each. You had 4 DRS attempts i.e. pounces available in each session. The limited pounce made the quiz very nice and easy going, and also kept it moving along at a nice clip. We finished the quiz in 3 hours which was really remarkable in terms of time management – for we, as participants never felt rushed or pressured to give answers quickly. If the elims were good, the finals were even better – a number of excellent questions and fundas. There were a few peters and simple ones there but hey, this was 90 questions set by one <cough splutter> retired quizzer.
As for the quiz itself, Team 2 took a couple of early negs on the pounce, while Teams 1 and 6 chugged along to build up a bit of a lead. At the end of the first session, the quiz was extremely close with most teams separated by 2-3 questions – Team 1 having a narrow lead over Team 6. Much like Test cricket -where things can change quickly and a team can own one session and collapse in the next, session 2 mixed things up quite a bit. Team 2 made a roaring comeback and Team 6 were clinical as they went into the sole lead, while things unraveled a bit for Team 1 with 3 consecutive negs on the pounce. At the end of the 2nd session it seemed like Team 6 would take this out with some fight possible from Team 2.
But yet again, session 3 threw up some more surprises. Team 2 collapsed this time and Team was a bit too conservative with their pounces – Team 1 kept getting points by supplying the full answers on at least 3 occasions. By the end, Team 1 won comfortably by 50 pts.
All in all, it was a great leisurely day of quizzing, with minimal SMQ bullshit – peak Pune quizzing style.