Landmark Quiz - Mumbai 2011

QM: Navin Jayakumar

Results:
1st: The Dukes of Cambridge, .... - Shubhankar Gokhale, Srinath and Abhinav Dasgupta : 64 pts
2nd: The Travelling Pillsburys - Vibhendu Tiwari, Sumant Srivathsan and Anil Kothuri: 49 pts
3rd: Sigh Babas of Put-a-party - Salil Bijur, Yash Marathe and Aditya Gadre: 44 pts
4th: Ani Uris - Taking the 'p' out of pani puris - Anand Sivashankar, Amit Garde and Meghashyam Shirodkar : 44 pts*

Other Finalists
Your guess is as good as mine - Prasann Potdar, Amit Pandeya and Francis R
Swami and friends - Alagarsamy, Nitish Khadiya and J Krishnamurthy
Hazare Khwaeishen Aisi - Subhashish, Navin Sharma and [one more person]
Born Losers Aniruddha Dutta and two more gentlemen (TCS)

* Lost on tie breaker

This year's Landmark open had a rather simple elim set which arguably led to a few surprises with regard to the finalists. A tougher elims would perhaps been a bit more fair and ensured that the best 8 teams in the auditorium qualified for the final.

The final itself, in my opinion, was interesting and had a good mix of new, current events and 'static' fundas. About the quality of the questions, I felt a bit of workability was compromised in trying to make the questions tougher. A lot of the questions seemed too heavy on the 'funda' and largely involved fitting situations to questions instead of working out the answer.

I felt a few questions were put in just for the gimmick or rather were asked just so that the audience would have heard of the answer, which hurt a couple of teams (particularly us and Swami and friends) as they went not go for answers they knew could not possibly feature in an open quiz final (which turned out to be the right answers!)

That said, it is indeed very difficult to balance a quiz such that you hold the interest of a largely newbie audience and hardened quizzers, and Navin Jayakumar certainly does this job better than most.

Please post your opinions in the comments.

PS: I have forgotten the names of a few finalists. Please post the names in the comments. Thanks.

Landmark Quiz 2009 - Bombay

Date: 1 May, 2009
Venue: St. Andrews Auditorium, St. Andrews College, Mumbai
Conducted by: Dr. Navin Jayakumar
Turnout: ~170 teams

Results
1st: Alagarsamy, J. Krishnamurthy, Jayakanthan: E (105)
2nd: Pradeep, Mukund, Nitish: D (65)
3rd: Sumant, Rajiv, Vibhendu: C (55+tiebreak)
4th: Vikram, Rishi, Hanisha: G (55)
5th: Souvik, Govind, Dhananjay : H (45)
Jt. 6th: Dipan, Arnab, Arka: A (40)
Jt. 6th: Suraj, Salil, Aditya G: F (40)
8th: Meghashyam, Amit G, Anand S: B (25)

Cutoff seems to be 31.5 on 40

Best Corporate Team: TIFR
Best College Team: IIT Bombay
Best School Teams: 1st: Dhirubhai Ambani Intl. School; 2nd: BJEM School
Best Team Name: 'Pigs Fly, Swine Flu'

Report
Perhaps not making it to the final of a quiz is a better way of enjoying it. This blogger found the first Bombay Landmark quiz more favourable than the corresponding Pune fixture earlier this year. There were a couple of peeves as usual, but more on that later.

There is almost no margin for error in these kinds of elims (as we would soon realise): the questions are biased towards being 'all-quizzer-friendly', which meant that once again, they were significantly based on events currently in the news or of immediate local interest, and the cut-offs were very high. The selection of questions & their framing were quite good, in the balance.

The finals had several interesting questions, and a couple of the teams gave some outstanding answers. There weren't any obvious 'recent repeats' this time, though there were a few easy ones that hardly had more than one viable options to guess.

The preference for items very recently in the news was clear, and it could partly be because of the excessive load of setting 3 full-size quizzes in about 8 months (with 2 more to go on Aug 15). This blogger thinks some of the questions could still have had the same impact if asked outside the current time-frame, and wished this preference for current affairs wasn't so prevalent in this quiz. Some of the India-related questions were good.

The theme, though mercifully better than the Pune one, was too easy: most teams got it on the 2nd attempt. Like some of us in the audience, they must have been eying the answer after the very first element of the theme. Mixing the theme with questions sometimes results in contrived question making, and could have been avoided. The 'steal' points (just 5) in the first buzzer round seemed to present very little incentive to any one wanting to take a risk early in the quiz.

In summary, the quiz was well-attended and well-conducted. The audience questions were a little sparse and the Playstation round for schoolkids in the middle dragged on for too long. A little less emphasis on just the last couple of months would have been preferable, but the team that won deserved to do so, and did so without really breaking into a sweat.

Landmark Quiz 2009 - Mumbai

Details of the first ever Mumbai Landmark Quiz:

Date: 1st May 2009 (Friday)
Time: 3pm
Venue: St. Andrews auditorium, St. Dominic Rd., Bandra, Mumbai

For registration and more details, pl call Landmark Mumbai at 022-26396010 or mail murali@landmark-tata.com

History Channel's Face-Off - Mumbai Round

The face-off quiz was disappointing - especially after having seen the brilliant sports quiz conducted by Aniket and Aditya a few days ago. The seating arrangement of the finalists on stage was bizarre. The finalists were bunched up on one side of the stage - in a semi-circle and the screen which played the audio-visuals was placed at the other end of the stage. So three teams were sitting with their backs to the screen. Not that they required to watch the screen because most of the questions in the A-V rounds had nothing to do with the video/visuals.Aniket and Suvojit qualified and did well under the circumstances. The questions ranged from being bad to not-so-good. The Quiz-master's display ranged from being mildly irritating to almost puerile. There were some questions, the answers to which were shown as 'trivia bytes' in the video played during the interval between the elims and the finals. There may have also been some repeats from the Delhi round. One question in the elims had already been 'leaked' on one of the mailing lists.

There were issues with scoring - the elims cut-offs were not announced; one team probably should have qualified but couldn't because the QM started off with the proceedings before the elims-sheet in question (pun intended) was brought to his notice.

The most hilarious round was the Rapid Fire round where the participants could give multiple answers to a question. We thought Aniket clearly showed how bad the idea was when he started rattling off all the Test venues in Australia for a question - Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Sydney...turned out his first attempt - Perth was the correct answer but the QM was taken aback by the sheer audacity and ingenuity of the answer and took time to react. But worse was to follow. The Rapid Fire round with multiple attempts had one question which was a True/False one as well. We tried hard to find some sense/logic and the only thing we could think of was that there might be a 'None of the above' option as well - which no one seemed to have thought of. The team which won (Pradeep and ? ) was very good and deserved to win but I'm sure the win would have been sweeter had it come on a more sporting pitch.

Report by Harish Kumar

BC quizzers at Mood Indigo 2006

Some key results:

General Quiz: 1st (Kunal Sawardekar + J. Ramanand), Semi-finalists: Abhishek Nagaraj + Maitreyi Gupta
Indian MELA Quiz: 1st (Abhishek Nagaraj + J. Ramanand), Finalist: Suvojit Chakraborty
IMS Quiz: 1st (Suvojit Chakraborty + Kaustubh Bhat)
Sports Quiz: 1st (Abhishek Nagaraj + J. Ramanand)

Appy Fizz - Champions of the World quiz by ESPN Star Sports

Preliminary Round - Mumbai
Date: 7th Dec. 2006
Venue: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai.

Results:
1st - Symbiosis Law (Suvajit Chakravarti + 1(pls to put hand up))
2nd: Aniket Khasgiwale and Abhishek Nagaraj (in supporting role)
3rd: NMIMS, Mumbai.

The thing that peeved/flabbergasted me most about this quiz was the fact that ESPN Star (and the whole wonderful troupe that comes along) had decided to conduct a nation-wide college only (under-25) quiz on the extremely narrow theme of 'World Cup Cricket'. Now, the rights for the WC, as everyone knows, are not with ESPN-Star and the timing of this event could be only to co-incide with West Indies 07.

Anyway, after the journey to Mumbai, we turned up at the venue to find a surprisingly low number of teams who had turned up (about 25). Considering that we had come to know about it only the day before, it appears that the standard publicity machinery had not been exploited to its full extent by the organizers (perhaps deliberately?) other than Harsha Bhogle doing a Mahaan-of-sorts in the TV advt.

The round itself was a 30Q written-only style, with ESPN School Quiz type factual World Cup questions. Vinod Kambli was present to lend the now-mandatory celebrity quotient (and duly forgot who was the highest wicket-taker at the 96 WC, one in which he was an integral part if the team.)Suvajit and co. cracked it getting all 30 right, while we and the team from NMIMS got 28. The organizers told us that the top 6 are likely to go through, thus putting cut-off margins at about 22/23.

This is going to be held in 4 cities (Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata being the others) with the top 24 going through. The top 3 from each centre go through immediately, with the others are chosen at the discretion of the organizers. The finals, we are told, is to be held in Delhi sometime in January.

Appeal to fellow BC Quizzers:The writer is in the hunt for DVDs/VCDs/Books dealing exclusively with any of the cricket WCs. Esp. on the wanted list are DVDs containing all the matches/highlights from a particular WC. You can email me at : abhishek AT bcqc DOT org if you can help us out in this regard.

Sample Qs: (wording might not be exact) (Answers in comments)

1. He participated in the first 3 world cup finals in 75,79 and 83 and retired from International cricket in the year 1996. Name him.
2. Name the man of the series of the 92 world cup.(hint: His team did not reach the finals)
3. Name the only player in India's 83 squad who did not get even a single game.