Shyam Bhatt Open Quiz 2016 - Report

Shyam Bhatt Open Quiz 2016

Set by J Ramanand, BV Harish Kumar and the Choose to Thinq team

Conducted by J Ramanand (with a little help from Deven Deshpande)


Results: 
1st: Shrirang Raddi and Aditya Gadre :185 pts
2nd: Abhinav Dasgupta and Shubhankar Gokhale: 145 pts
3rd: Balakrishnan satyam and Rahul Kottalgi: 140 pts
4th: Omkar Dhakephalkar and Pranav Pawar: 100 pts
5th: Meghashyam Shirodkar and Varun Suresh: 75 pts
6th: Anurakshat Gupta and Kaushik Chatterji: 65 pts
7th: Rohan Danait and Anand: 60 pts
8th: Aman Sheikh and Divij Ghosh: 40 pts

Report:
The 30th edition of the oldest quiz in Pune, started with a 30 question elim, divided into three sections of quicks (short questions), deliberates (longer questions) and two pointers (well, two parts per question for a point each). Overall I liked the elim for the fundaes it covered, but felt it was a bit too tough. The cut off was 14/35 and the top score was 22/35. On the content, my general feeling was that a lot of the questions had a good hook, but gave one clue too less and the teams were left with too many legit guesses (not a good situation to be in for an elims IMO)

The finals were a very crisp set of 30 questions on Infinite Rebounds with JR's now-standard Chetan pounce system - 3 mistakes and you're out. The double deterrent of a minus 10 for a wrong answer + losing a pounce, coupled with typically complex but well framed questions and BDFL* using a firm consistent approach in dealing with split points as well as vague answers meant we saw almost no pounces in the final. I particularly liked the written round with their little gimmicks - especially the magic square and not-so-obvious theme at the end.

On the content of the finals - the questions were well framed - crisp and clear on what was expected as an answer. The quiz covered a lot of accessible areas for the audience which is always desirable.

A couple of negatives for me were the undue importance given to social media - with 2 questions in the elims and a whole round on emojis in the final. Also the general lack of balance in the finals - almost no sports questions for example. Like the elims - a few questions had a good hook, but gave too few clues and thus became completely know-it-or-you-dont.

Overall, it was a fine quiz, and BDFL was a masterclass in keeping control of a quiz  without resorting to rudeness or shouting. Teams trying to do maaz were comfortably out-maaz'd by BDFL

Team E (Shrirang and Gadre) topped the elims and led from start to finish in the finals. Team G (Meghashyam and Varun) started strongly but fell away after the written round. Team H (Bala and RSK) seemed to be well on course for second place - but Team C (Shubhankar and Abhinav) pulled off a remarkable late surge to leapfrog both Team B(Omkar and Pranav) and Team H into second place.

A shoutout to Omkar, Pranav, Aman and Divij - the all college teams on stage for a great performance. One hopes to see them qualify and win opens in the future.

* For infidels who don't know - Ramanand is BDFL

BC InFest 2016 - Report

BC InFest 2016 went off quite smoothly and as usual there were some great quizzes and more importantly a lot of laughs and general merriment. Here is what happened: 

(All reports by Aniket Khasgiwale)

Day 1:

InFestYouUs

InFestYouUs 2016 in its shorter avatar saw 22 people take part on topics of their choice (some even took part in topics not of their choice as some people didn't show up)

This time, InFest took place in a room and not on BC lawns which IMO took away from the "mob effect". None-the-less the quizzes were enjoyable - with no set being inordinately difficult or easy skewing the results.  

Kunal justified his military god tag was on target for 7 of his 10 questions on Fighter Aircraft of the Cold War to finish with the top score.

Results (only scores above 5/10)

Kunal Sawardekar (Fighter Aircraft of the Cold War) - 7 points 

Omkar Yarguddi (Sitar in Hinudstani Classical Music) - 6 points

Sampuran Singh (Flags of the World) - 6 points

Pranav Joshi (Life and Times of Alexander the Great) - 5 points

Arnold D'Souza (Eponymous Etymology) - 5 points

Omkar Borate (Indian Badminton) - 5 points 

Days of the Year Quiz by Omkar Dhakephalkar

Omkar finished his highly anticipated "Days of the year" series of quizzes by asking questions on each day of the year from 1st October to 31st December. The quality of questions varied a bit, but to be fair to the QM this was something he had warned us against. Most of the questions were quite good with a lot of good trivia and only a few peters. Omkar also conducted it quite well and the quiz was quite enjoyable on the whole.

Results:

Winners: Suvajit Chakraborty, Rishwin Jackson, K Chakraborty, Uday Bansal

First runners up (tied): Kunal Sawardekar (sub), Pranav "Floyd" Joshi, Snehashish Panda & Kunal Sawardekar, Anurag Danda, Gokul Panigrahi

Day 2

The Samuel Beckett memorial quiz by Aditya Gadre

This was an experimental quiz where all questions were on the secondary claim to fame of famous personalities, hence the tribute to Samuel Beckett who was a First Class cricketer. The presentation of the quiz was also quite good with a grid being used to go through the questions which made it more interesting. Some questions were peters, but that was expected as the theme itself restricted the content available to the QM. The winners were quite appropriately given the Brian May trophy - named after the famous British Astrophysicist.

Results:

Winners (tied): Suvajit Chakraborty, Sumeet Pai, Pranav "Floyd" Joshi, Omkar Yarguddi & Aniket Khasgiwale, Anurag Danda, Robin and Omkar Borate

Autobiographical Quizzes

The Autobiographical quizzes featured 10 questions based on things that the QMs had personally experienced. The QMs for this year's edition included Avaneendra Bhargav, Navin Sharma, Kunal Sawardekar and VCat. Although the mandate mentioned that they ask questions on event in the last year, many QMs went beyond that, asking questions on everything from their birth to their travels

Avaneendra Bhargav: This was the most offbeat of the four sets, featuring  locations such as Ratnagiri and Khandesh along with very local questions as well. Also kudos to Avaneendra for sticking to the theme of things he has experienced in 2015 and not going beyond.

Navin Sharma: This was the quiz where you felt bad about your life as Navin asked questions from his travels ranging from Melbourne to California and covering exotic places like Brazil on the way. Navin unfortunately couldn't make it to InFest to conduct the quiz in person since he was running the Marathon in Mumbai on that day - something which featured in the quiz as well.

Kunal Sawardekar: Kunal's set made no attempt to stick to events from 2015, in fact his set included questions from 5 million years ago as well. But Kunal covered a wide range of topics by including questions on Food, Business, Education and Travel, thus making for a very interesting quiz.

VCat: VCat also went beyond 2015 to make this set with questions predictably featuring Newcastle, China, Malaysia and Hong Kong but disappointingly not featuring Bhubaneshwar or the Trans Siberian railway. The quiz was also unique in two aspects: it was the only quiz where the QM danced after giving out the answer and it was also the only one to feature a multiple choice question, which somehow still passed two teams. As expected, this was a highly entertaining set by BCQC's QM of the year.

Jai Hind Jai Maharashtra by Aniket Khasgiwale:

This was an India quiz with a greater focus on the state of Maharashtra, since the QM felt that the topic was not adequately explored in the usual BCQC quizzes. It started with a written round which checked the participant's awareness about the state of Maharashtra, with most teams doing quite well. This was followed by 42 questions on IR. 4 teams were quite close to each other at the halfway stage before Team 1 pulled away by answering a few Army themed questions and managed to hold on to their lead till the end.

Winners:
Team 1 - Anurag Danda, Omkar Dhakephalkar, Anurakshat Gupta: 126 points

2nd:
Team 5 - Kunal Sawardekar, Vrushabh Gudade, Shantanu G: 96 points

3rd:
Team 3 - Pranav "Floyd" Joshi, Sumeet Pai, Omkar Borate: 95 points

BC InFest 2016 - Schedule announcement

This is the schedule for InFest 2016:

Saturday, January 16th:

10 AM - 1:30 PM: InFestYouUs: the quiz where you take on the mob in your topic of specialty. The participants and topics are as follows: 

1:30 PM - 2:30 PM: Lunch break

2:30 PM - 4:30 PM: A quiz by Omkar Dhakephalkar

Sunday, January 17th:

10 AM - 12 PM: An Unreal Quiz by Aditya Gadre

12 PM - 1 PM: Lunch break

1 PM - 3 PM: The autobiographical quiz. QMs Navin Sharma, VCat, Kunal Sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav will ask a few questions based on things they have seen or done over the last one year.

3 PM - 5 PM: Jai Hind Jai Maharashtra by Aniket Khasgiwale. An India quiz with a special emphasis on my homeland of Maharashtra.

Other administrivia:

The venue for all quizzes will be the Boat Club at the College of Engineering, Pune.

Teams, if at all, for all quizzes will be made on the spot. All quizzes are open to everyone, so feel free to drop by and attend the quizzes.

In case of any queries, you can reach out to the IOC (InFest Organizing Committee) - Aniket Khasgiwale, Samrat Sengupta and Aditya Gadre by either sending us an email at <thebcqc@gmail.com> or by commenting here

BC InFest 2016 - Announcement

Presenting the BCQC's more-or-less annual more-or-less quizzing anti-fest: The BC InFest also known as BCQC.orgy!

InFest 2016 will take place on the 16th and 17th of January at the Boat Club, COEP.

For those who have no clue about InFest (i.e. all but 6 of the people reading this) - its this thing where we organize a lot of fun stuff over one weekend - some great QMs will be conducting interesting quizzes AND we have InFestYouUs

InFestYouUs is one of our main events at InFest.  It is a mastermind style event to crown the person who has the least amount of work to do in real life and can win a quiz in his topic of specialisation against a mob of quizzers. 

This time we will be running a shorter, version of InFestYouUs which will take place on Saturday,16th Jan, 2016 at 10am.

The format is as follows:
Each person chooses a topic of their interest. The taker would be asked 10 questions. The taker will be awarded 1 point for getting a question right. If missed, the question would go to the "Mob" i.e. everyone else present. The Mob is not allowed to discuss among themselves, and must decide who among them would go for the answer if the answer given by the participant is wrong. If the chosen one is right, the taker loses 1/2 a point. If not, the confident chosen one will get beaten up by the rest of the Mob.

So if you are interested, this is the course of action:
- Fill up this form ( http://bit.ly/1y9FfB7 ) and tell us your name and your topics of choice.Please ensure that all fields are filled in - if we can't contact you, your registration does not exist.
- The deadline for registration is 27th November 2015 (We need to give enough time to people to set questions for you)

The largely autocratic BCCI-esque IOC (InFest Organizing Committee) will be picking the best 15 topics. Topics will be judged on:
- Interesting-ness
- Not done-to-death-ness
- Fun-ness (for the general public attending)
- Willingness of someone to set questions for the topic

Indicative list of topics that will certainly be rejected are World Cup Cricket, World Cup football, Asterix, Tintin, Friends, Douglas Adams, Big bang theory, Oscars etc

Topics that have featured before in past editions: Indian Beauty Queens, NSFW, English Monarchy, World Chess Championship, History of Israel, Cultural references in xkcd, Indian train names, Detectives in fiction, Hindustani Classical music, The Discworld series, Indian Women Politicians, Gulzar with Vishal, Indo-Pak wars, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Life and times of Shivaji etc

If you have any queries, mail us at <thebcqc@gmail.com>

BCQC October Open 2015: The Report

This Sunday (25th) saw the BCQC October Open being conducted at Extentia in Kalyani Nagar.

The event consisted of two quizzes with an impressive contrast in QMs – a short written quiz by post-Aashiqui (post-HAHK even) Pranav “Floyd” Joshi followed by the main Gen quiz by pre-CHOGM Samrat Sengupta.

QUIZ 1:
Name: What's In A Name? Maybe There's Something In a Name
QM: Pranav "Floyd" Joshi
Style: Written (20 questions)
Flavor: General

Results:
1. Aditya Gadre + Arnold D'Souza (16)
2. Omkar Dhakephalkar + Pranav Pawar (12.5)
3. Shivam Sharma + Suraj Prabhu (11.5)
4. Samrat Sengupta + Gokul (10)
5. Vineet Chaurasia + Sampooran Singh (9.5)
6. Divij + Dhananjay (9)

This was originally billed as a quiz with no proper nouns in any of the answers. This is an interesting idea and automatically forces the setter to frame questions in a more "work-out-able" structure. However, for certain reasons unknown to us, the QM decided at the last minute that perhaps strict adherence to this theme wasn't completely necessary and a few proper nouns did slip in here and there.

The quiz had a good spread of topics, but I felt it was a little on the easy side.

QUIZ 2:
Name: The Quiz For October
QM: Samrat Sengupta
Style: Elims + Finals
Flavor: General

Results:
1. [C] Aditya Gadre + Arnold D'Souza + Pranav Joshi (draft) (212)
2. [A] Omkar Dhakephalkar + Pranav Pawar + Sampooran Singh (draft) (191)
3. [F] Venkat "Vcat" Srinivasan + Rohan Jain + Divij (draft) + Dhananjay (draft) (139)
4. [B] Shivam Sharma + Suraj Prabhu  + Suraj Prabhudesai (draft) (98)
5. [E] Omkar Yarguddi + Deven Deshpande + Charles (draft) + Vineet (draft) (75)
6. [D] Gokul + Ankit + Sanath (draft) (62)

As there were only 10 teams in total, it was decided that all teams would be included in the finals. The elims were run in order to decide the allotment of the draft picks, with teams that qualified 5th and 6th being given 2 drafts instead of 1 to squeeze in the extra 10th team. Additionally, the elims scores were carried forward to the finals with 50% weightage.

The elims were 20 questions long (10 points each question) and saw Omkar and Pranav finish on top with a score of 116 (so they would start the finals with 58 points, for example) ahead of Aditya and Arnold with 110.

The finals were divided into two sets of 15 IR questions, separated by a themed written round. The QM was in a generous mood on the Pounce front and gave each team a 3-strike Pounce opportunity per half with +10/-10 points. As it turned out, over the entire quiz of 30 questions, I believe a total of 2 lost strikes (i.e. across all 6 teams in total) were used up. In other words, 2 strikes out of a maximum of 36.

The written themed round involved questions on 10 pairs of people with similar names. The pairs generally consisted of people from the same field, so as to further add the confusion between them. I really enjoyed this round, and so did team F, apparently, as the round saw them leapfrog into an easy third place.

The finals were a little on the difficult side, with quite a few questions going unanswered (especially for an Open). This may have been due to the general lack of open quizzers who turned up. However, even if difficult the questions certainly weren't obscure, and there were many occasions when my teammate and I felt like we really should have known the answer.

I also felt that there was a definite #Kolstylz tinge to some of the questions [1]. One of the reasons for saying is that there was in general a high ratio of pounces to correct answers on IR. There were a few questions, where a team pounced confidently and then no one else came close to the answers.

One good thing about the quiz was that there were almost no sitters/Peters. I think the max pounce on a question was one question with 4 pounces. It's fairly common these days to see at least a couple of questions in a quiz where all teams pounce.

My biggest grouse with the quiz, however, was the preponderance of multi-part questions—including a couple of questions with up to 5 parts in the answers! The QM, citing the Law of Conservation of Points, decided that he would announce the parts that were answered correctly in the middle of the passing itself and award part points for those. These parts could no longer be attempted by any further teams. The reason why I abhor this system is because you can in effect have teams (those late in the passing order) that are playing for as little as 2 points. This goes against the very principle of why Infinite Rebounds came into the picture—to award every team an equal number of attempts (as far as possible) and this means attempting at an equal number of points.

The fundas involved with the multi-part questions were definitely interesting and I think they made good questions, but they should be saved for written/elims and not Infinite Rebound rounds!

Overall, the Open was quite enjoyable with both quizzes moving along at a brisk pace and one left the venue far less exhausted than one normally is.

Notes:
[1] I think I should clearly state over here that I do not mean this in a negative way at all. As I have said before, I have started to appreciate good #Kolstylz questions and sincerely believe that they are the best test of knowledge. However, the general quizzing public does not appear to share my sentiments on the matter. Unless, of course, one is in Cal.

Chakravyuh 2015 - Report

Set and Conducted by Chinmay Tadwalkar

Attended by ~100 teams

Format: Written elims of 25 questions. Finals comprising 32 questions on Infinite Rebounds and a 6 question written theme round 

Results:

1st: Aniket Khasgiwale & Aditya Gadre: 185 pts
2nd: Kunal Sawardekar & Arnold D'Souza: 170 pts
3rd: J Ramanand & Debanjan Bose: 130 pts
Jt 4th: Omkar Dhakephalkar & Pranav Pawar: 80 pts
Jt 4th: Suraj Prabhu & Rohan Danait: 80 pts
6th: Uday Bansal & KN Chakraborty: 75 pts

An good solid quiz put up by Chinmay. 

The quiz started with a 25 question written elims. The elims was a close affair with all of the teams that qualified bunched in the 13.5 to 17 bracket. I felt most of the questions were based on nice fundas but were not sufficiently clued - making the elim a bit more "seasoned quizzer friendly" than is ideal.

The finals had 2 rounds of 16 questions each on Infinite bounce - with 5 pounces per half at +10/-10 

The content of the questions was interesting, and the majority of the questions were framed well. There were a few questions where I felt a really nice funda didn't get its due owing to verbose / vague framing.  

The written theme round was excellent - though the individual questions were on the easier side. 

Also Chinmay was a patient QM and conducted the quiz with full control of the proceedings. I also liked that the quiz went along at a leisurely pace. 

A couple of negatives: 

I felt the elims went on for way too long - almost 90 minutes! Also the QM had every question of the elim sheet on the slides instead of just the visuals - so a lot of unnecessary time-wastage happened.

The quiz finals took place in M13 and not in the auditorium which was a bit of a disappointment 

As for the teams, the finals were very close with Team 1 and Team 5 being neck and neck throughout- and for the most part were separated by just 5-10 points. Team 3 started slowly and ended the quiz strongly but could not catch up with Teams 1 and 5. In the end, Team 1 just scraped past Team 5 in the last few questions to win the quiz - for their first Chakravyuuh win in 4 attempts.

Winners list so far:
2001: Shrirang Raddi and Amalesh Mishra
2002: Shrirang Raddi and Amalesh Mishra
2003: Niranjan Pedanekar and Samrat Sengupta
2004: Gaurav Sabnis and Neeraj Sane
2005: Sudarshan Purohit and Amit Garde
2006: Gaurav Sabnis & Shamanth Rao
2007 (Apr): Kunal Sawardekar and Shamanth Rao
2007 (Oct): Avinash Mudaliar and Harikrishnan Menon
2008: J. Ramanand and B.V.Harish Kumar
2009: Anand Sivashankar and Amit Garde
2010: J. Ramanand and B.V.Harish Kumar
2011: Meghashyam Shirodkar and Yash Marathe
2012: Kunal Sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav
2013: Meghashyam Shirodkar and Amit Garde
2014: Anannya Deb and Anirudha Sen Gupta
2015: Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre 

BCQC September Open Quizzes Report

Quiz 1: Pop Culture Quiz by Kunal Sawardekar

Format: Written quiz with 26 questions. Every question carried 2 points. Teams had the option of pouncing on questions by "staring" them. The scoring was as follows:  +3/-1 if number of starred question was less than 10;  +3/-2 for 10-20 questions starred, and +3/-3 for more than 20 questions starred

Results:
1st: Shivam Sharma and Pranav Pawar: 49 pts
2nd: Shantanu G and Shantanu P: 45 pts
3rd: Vikram Joshi and Suraj Prabhu: 43 pts

The quiz was a nice one, but to be brutally honest - not up to what i expected from Kunal - especially given how mind-blastingly brilliant his last pop culture quiz was .

Positives:
- There were a few brilliant questions that had everyone spontaneously clapping
- There was a lot of AV content which made the quiz fun to go through

Negatives:
- Unlike the last quiz there were few questions which could be genuinely be worked out
- I also felt there were a few too many questions on Video games which were a bit of a turn off for me.
- Finally with regards to scoring - I didn't the see the point of 2 points per correct answer other than to make the pounce scoring reasonable. I am saying this especially as the QM gave no half points  - which I would have rather have given - considering a lot of teams got a lot of fundas but not the exact answer (which could easily have been incorporated by giving 1 point per somewhat correct answer). IMHO the idea of no half points make sense in a specialist quiz pitched to hard-core enthusiasts but not to one held for the general public.


Quiz 2: Open General quiz by Vikram Joshi

Vikram had not prepared an elims and intended to run the entire quiz as a direct finals, however since too many people i..e more than 24 showed up (but still less than the last time Vikram conducted a quiz at BCQC) the QM decided to conduct the whole quiz as a written quiz.

The quiz comprised 47 written questions for 2 points each with the option to "stake" a maximum of 15 questions (for a +5/-2 score)

Results:
1st: Kunal Sawardekar & Aditya Gadre: 101 pts
2nd: Shivam Sharma & Pranav Pawar: 69 pts
3rd: Aniket D and Omkar Dhakephalkar: 53 pts
4th: Suraj Prabhu & Debanjan Bose (for about 17 questions): 52 pts
5th: Deven Deshpande and Omkar Yarguddi: 44 pts

Report: 

Positives: 
- I felt the quiz as a whole was nice - with interesting fundae and some absolutely beautiful questions.
- Vikram ensured great coverage of topics and had a nice mix of well worded questions.
- I thought Vikram showed exemplary time-management and finished off the quiz in a very crisp manner appropriate to the level of the quiz

Negatives;
- I did feel that some questions had me questioning "Why is this being asked?"  - leading to the age old question of whether everything that is interesting is actually askable in a quiz or not.
- I would have rather that the QM had conducted the quiz as he intended even if there were more teams than he expected - the quiz would have certainly been more fun as a passing quiz
- I am not not a big fan of 2 written quizzes back to back - IMO a "stage" quiz leads to better engagement

Please leave your comments in the ...errr ... comments section. 

BCQC August Open - Anurakshat Gupta AFMC Quiz Report

Anurakshat Gupta conducted a general quiz on 23rd of August as a part of the BCQC August Open at Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC). This quiz was conducted in two parts ie. the Preliminary round and Final Round for the Top-6 teams from the prelims.

Results :

1st : Kunal Sawardekar, Arnold D'Souza and Shivam Sharma - 100
2nd : Anmol Dhawan, Ashwin Mahesh and Nikhil Joseph - 90
3rd : Suchishree Chatterjee, Kaushik Chatterjee and Rohan Setlur - 70
4th: Venkat Shrinivasan, Rohan Danait and Deven Deshpande - 20
5th: Uday Bansal, Khagendra Chakravarti and Saraswat Chatterjee - 20
6th: Pranav Pawar, Debopriyo Maulik and VG Sreeram - -10

Comments :

The prelims started out at exactly 1605 hours as was told by Anurakshat Gupta before the small break between his quiz and the previous quiz. The questions were interesting with a certain bias on History/Geography, thus building the tidings for a HisGeoHeavy quiz. Prelims had many descriptive questions with answers being either a Country name or a Capital city name. Thus guessing/chimping/Eenie Meenie Miney Mo was a legit strategy to go ahead with for some of the questions where you had little to no knowledge. Top 6 teams from the Preliminary rounds made it to the finals with 3 other teams being drafted into the top 6 teams.

There were a total of 35 questions in the Finals which were divided into two rounds of 17 and 18 questions per round. Every round gave you the opportunity for three exhaustive finite pounces. The finals began with Vcat pouncing prematurely on 2 questions, thus earning his team an early lead, albeit a negative lead of -20 points. Team 5 tried to smartly answer the question by shouting out two different answers that they were fixated upon in a bid to try and get points, but the QM was no stranger to such antics by the quizzers in general and thus he asked them to give him one final answer. Turned out that both the answers were wrong. The finals went smoothly with Team 6 catching up very rapidly in the second half to the leaders, finally ending the quiz with only a 10 point gap.

The questions, IMO, were well framed and had enough hints for people having background knowledge in the subject to work it out. The quiz was a bit too heavy on His/Geo for it to qualify as a gen quiz. Nonetheless the questions were based on some brilliant fundae. Cherry on the cake, Anurakshat Gupta explained every question's answer/funda after the teams were done answering. The question on elderly people driving license stickers on Japanese cars was one of the questions that contributed to the continuous process of cerebral explosions.

This quiz was a major boost to my His/Geo knowledge. Hardly had any peters, but then again I speak out of my limited experience. Enjoyed the quiz overall and all the brilliant fundae. Much fun was definitely had.

The Not So General Gen Quiz - Report

Arnold D'Souza conducted a 30-question written quiz on topics of not-so-general general interest on 23 August 2015 at the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune as part of the BCQC's August Open Quizzes.

Results:

1st: Anurakshat Gupta & Kunal Sawardekar - 370 pts
2nd: Venkat Srinivasan & Rohan Danait - 180 pts
3rd: Suchishree & Kaushik Chatterjee - 170 pts
3rd: Gokul Panigrahi & Shayak Chatterjee - 170 pts
5th: Anmol Dhawan & Ashwin Mahesh - 155 pts
6th: Deven & Shivam - 140 pts

Report:

This was a quiz that was clearly billed from the get-go as being heavy on the QM's own interests, and within those bounds, it was fun and very interesting. Participants hoping for a wide coverage of topics would have been disappointed though - the only India-related question was on cricket, and none of the answers were Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

The questions were (IMO) framed well, and despite the QM's professed admiration for Kolstylz questions (i.e. questions which are not workable and where you have to know the answer), many were quite work-out-able, and one of them (on a group of 44 ladies) did blow my mind, as advertised. My one quibble was questions requiring multi-part answers - there was one question where you were asked to name two, unrelated bands from their unrelated band-name-origin-stories - though antipathy to multi-answer questions is something in which I appear to be quite alone in modern Indian quizzing.

The major innovation in this quiz (one that I expect will be much debated in the comments) was the pounce system - the first I've seen in a written quiz. The questions were worth 10 points for a correct answer, but you could "star" questions in which case you got 20 points for a correct answer and -10 for a wrong one (including partial or incomplete answers). This meant that teams that were really sure of an answer could double down and take a risk (and a payoff if they turned out to be right). As with all quizzing innovations, this was controversial among the attendees, but I think we can expect to see more variations of this in future quizzes.

Please post your feedback in the comment section.

CineWest - a quiz on posters from the world of Movies & TV

Ready to make history? Participate in the world's first* ever posters quiz on Sat, 29 Aug.

Venue: COEP Academic Block
Time: 1:30 pm
Format: written prelims, followed by a 6-team final. Some college student teams will get to be part of the final.
Theme: a movie & TV quiz through the lens of posters.

Attending the quiz? Join the event page:https://www.facebook.com/events/973328172708443/?ref=4&action_history=null

* this may be a completely false claim.

BCQC July 2015 Opens - Report

(Report by Arnold D'Souza)

The July Open was held on Sunday the 26th of July, 2015 at the Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC). The even consisted of two quizzes—one general and one themed.

GEN QUIZ:
Set by:
Saraswat Chatterjee and Rohan Setlur

Teams:
14 teams of 2 – (6 qualify for finals) – no draft picks.

Final Result:
1st – Anurakshat Gupta + Madhusadan (120)
2nd – Debanjan Bose + Suraj Prabhu (115)
3rd – Arnold D'Souza + Anjali Jospeh (95)
4th – Samrat Sengupta + Aniketh Rallabhandi (85)
5th – Shantanu + Shantanu (60)
6th – Gokul (25)

Comments:
The elims were an interesting change from the standard written format. There were 15 questions all of which were only on a pounce for +10/-5 each. In effect, this was like a written elims where you got -5 for a wrong answer but had the option to leave a question blank without any loss. However, since the live scores were being kept on the blackboard, this meant that one could strategically decide on each question toward the end whether one needed to risk going for an answer or not. At least this is what we did (after screwing up a couple of optimistic pounces toward the beginning) and just about managed to qualified 5th or 6th.

One downside of this issue is that it discourages guessing to an extent—but I don't think this is a significant problem. One can always guess and keep the answer to oneself if not sure. The joy of realizing that you managed to successfully work out/cleverly guess an answer shouldn't be diluted just because of the fact that it wasn't down in front of an audience. Moreover, the format encourages teams to take risks and I like that.

There were no draft picks—something that I am personally okay with—but I know a lot of other quizzers (especially college students) who feel that draft picks are important, so that was possibly one downside to the quiz.

The finals consisted of two sets of 10 questions each on IR. The initial plan by the quiz-masters was to keep +10 for direct and +5 for passed questions, but we convinced them that this is not a good idea in an IR and they willingly agreed to keep a +10 all round.

There were 3 pounces available per team for each half of the quizzes with a -5 if you got the pounce wrong.

The 20 questions were followed by a final Long #PuneStylz (LPS) written round with 10 variables in it (A-J). Each variable was worth 5 points, plus another 25 for getting all 10 correct. I quite enjoyed this round and I thought it was pretty well set. Two things need to considered in an LPS—how much knowing the previous variable helps one get the next as well as independent clues thrown in which can help someone solve a variable in the middle on their own. The latter is important because I've often seen LPS questions where if someone misses (or has no idea about) one of the first few variables, it's almost impossible for them to get any of the following ones at all and this can really skew the scores badly.

Our quiz-setters for the day had done an excellent job of finding a suitable balance between the two types of clues—forward and independent.

The LPS was rather lit/ent biased and one noteworthy highlight of it was Debanjan and Prabhu—in first place at the time—getting so overly excited about the easiness of ent questions that they somehow managed to write Peter Sellers as having acted in Lawrence of Arabia instead of Peter O'Toole. This ended up costing them not only the 5 points for the variable but also the 25 point bonus and they ended up in second.

Enjoyable quiz overall and quite a good show by the quiz-masters who may not be as experienced as some of the others we've had at the opens. There were a few peter-questions but certainly no more than can be expected.

---

P.O.R.N. QUIZ—PUBLICATIONS, OBJECTS, ROCK MUSIC & NATURE:

Set By:
Debanjan Bose

Teams:
Roughly the same number as the first quiz (2 per team)

Format:
Written (24 questions)

Final Results:
1st – Arnold D'Souza + Anjali Joseph (117.5)
2nd – Anurakshat Gupta + Suraj Prabhu (82.5)
3rd – Aniketh Rallabhandi + Anmol (80)

Comments:
This was a written quiz with 10 points per question—some of them had part points (including one with 4 parts for 2.5 each). Although I generally dislike questions with multiple parts in an IR, they're completely fine in a written quiz so no complaints there.

The quiz was originally supposed to be a 35 question set, but apparently time issues meant that only 25 questions were set—well 24 actually since Q24 was mysteriously absent. It's hard to tell whether this was merely carelessness or a cleverly disguised tribute to the comically haphazard July Open “Earth, Space and Beyond” quiz set by Vcat.

The framing of some of the questions could have done with some improvement in terms of clarity—the quiz-master ended up having to explain some of them as they were being read out. This was slightly disappointing because I thoroughly enjoyed the fundae in the quiz.

The quizzes were also the debut for my partner Anjali—who performed quite splendidly despite nursing a hangover throughout. At one stage toward the end of the written quiz, she would put her head down on the table, listen the quiz, sit up, say “This is so-and-so” and promptly go back to sleep until the next question.

To sum up, I quite liked the quiz—apart from the couple of gripes mentioned above—and this was not just because we ended up winning quite convincingly.

I look forward to conducting the written quiz at the next open (August).

BC Cup 2015 - Report

Set by Aniket Khasgiwale, Yash Marathe and Aditya Gadre

Format: 30 question elim to determine the 8 quarter finalists. Then a 60 question quarter final to determine the top 4 i.e. the semi finalists. A 40 question Semi final to narrow down to the top 2 in the finals. A 28 question Finals played over two legs (home and away) to determine the winner. We ditched the college finals due to lack of turnout.

Report: 
The quiz started with a 30 qn elims set which turned out to be quite tough with all contestants claiming they wont qualify at the end! Venkatraghavan (ie Ingit Sir) topped with a phenomenal 16.5 pts and Shrirang too put in a strong performance with 13.5 pts. The others were bunched up around 10 points, with Rohit Suresh just making the cut above Suraj with 9 points. A lot of good quizzers were on 8 or 8.5 points - Suraj, Kaushik, Atul, Samridh and Parijat (who also won the College section) which shows how strong the field was this year.

The Quarter Finals:

The Quarter finalists were :
Shrirang Raddi, Prithwish Datta, Samrat Sengupta, Ingit Sir, Rohit Suresh, Anannya Deb, Arnold D'Souza and Shubhankar Gokhale.

The Quarters were very even till the first half with all 8 people on 2-3 points. Anannya put in a stellar performance to top the elims consistently scoring in all sports. The QF ended up being very close with all 8 people having a chance to qualify with 3 questions to go. It ended with Anannya comfortably winning with 9 points and Samrat and Arnold also qualifying with 6 points. Ingit got a NBA question right and forced a three way tiebreaker against Shubhankar and Rohit for the 4th Semi final spot. A lengthy tie breaker later, Rohit won on sudden death to take the final spot.

The Semi-Final
Anannya continued his form from the Quarters and steadily built a lead which was enough for him to win. For most of the quiz, Samrat seemed to be comfortably taking the other final spot, by Arnold pulled off a brilliant comeback to answer two of the last four to tie scores on the last question of the semis. Another tie-breaker ensued - and Samrat won to cement his place in the finals.

(Side note: Q19 of the Semis was the 1000th question asked in the BC Cup - many thanks to all participants for continued support. We hope to go on for a 1000 more)

The Finals 
Samrat won the toss and went first. In his first home half he scored 1 goal and almost got a second. Anannya failed to score in his first home half. Things were getting interesting as Anannya got an away goal in Samrat's second home half, but Samrat rallied to get two answers in quick succession to take the score to 3-1. Anannya needed to just tie to win the match in his second home half, but he remembered the name of a Soviet gymnast and an Indian athlete just after giving the wrong answer. Anannya thus lost a successive BC Cup final and continued his tremendously consistent run at the Cup while Samrat won his first BC Cup in style.

BC Cup Champion 2015 : Samrat Sengupta
Runner Up : Anannya Deb 

College Champion: Parijat Chaudhary

As for the review of the quiz, I request those who attended to share their feedback in the comments section. 

BC Cup 2015 - Announcement

The BC Cup is the BCQC's annual solo, open quiz to crown the Best Sports Quizzer. This is the seventh edition. 

Format:   

First, a 30 question elim determines 8 qualifiers (or Quarter Finalists). These 8 people take part in a 60 question quarter final. The top four go through to the semi final. The semi-final will consist of 36 questions with scoring reset to zero. This is to keep the 'winning three consecutive matches' concept constant from last year's edition. The top two then go to the Final where they face off one-on one for a 28 question final. 

This year we are introducing an additional round for the top 4 college quizzers who do not qualify for the Open section. There will be a 24 question "College final" for these 4 college quizzers between the Quarter finals and the Semi finals of the Open Section 

Administrivia  

QMs: Yash Marathe, Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre
Theme: Sports
Teams: Individual
Restrictions: (or the lack of one) Open quiz. Everyone is welcome

When? 12:45 pm, Saturday, 9th May, 2015
Where? The Boat Club, College of Engineering Pune

Prizes: The top 8 in the Open category and the top 4 in the College get cash prizes. The total prize money will be in excess of INR 5000

If you are planning to show up for sure, please let us know by filling in your name at this link. This will help us gauge interest and save some paper.

BCQC March 2015 Open Quizzes - Results and Reports

Quiz 1: Business Quiz 

Set and Conducted by BV Harish Kumar 

Format: Written elims of 20 questions. Finals comprising 24 questions on Infinite Rebounds in four Quarters and a 4 question written round 

Results:

1st: Arnold D'Souza, Ajay Ragde and Anway: 115 pts
2nd: Raghav C, Sachin Ravi and Suraj: 110 pts
3rd: Saswat, Alok and Omkar Dhakephalkar: 105 pts
4th: Shantanu G, Shantanu P and Anurag G: 100 pts
5th: Karthik, Shivam and Pranav Pawar: 80 pts
6th: Kunal Sawardekar, Samrat Sengupta and Pranav Joshi: 65 pts

The quiz was light and interesting with a nice mix of biz fundaes and general trivia with a Business bent. Harish covered a lot of topics and even distributed a "buzzword bingo" sheet in the audience as an innovative way to take feedback on the topics covered. I really liked the quiz for the fact that it moved away from standard business tropes and did not require one to memorise faces of CXOs. BVHK showed that good business quizzes with workoutable questions are very much possible despite the stereotype attached to business quizzes these days. 

The only negative was the 15 pt pounce scoring where the team could not pounce on their own question - I know, as BVHK said during the quiz as well that "Life is not fair" - but I'd have let teams pounce on their own questions. Especially so after seeing the results where the top 4 were separated by 15 points 

Quiz 2: General Audio-Visual Quiz 

Set and Conducted by Anannya "Dada" Deb

Format: Written elims of 30 questions. Finals comprising 44 questions - 24 on Infinite Rebounds, four Triads of 3 questions each (written)  and a 10 question round on topics to be chosen by the teams 

Results:

1st: Venkatraghavan S, Aditya Gadre and Charles: 140 pts
2nd: Arnold D'Souza, Ajay Ragde,  Pranav Pawar: 112.5 pts
3rd: Raghav C, Sachin Ravi and Omkar Dhakephalkar: 107.5 pts
4th: Samrat Sengupta, BV Harish Kumar and Shantanu: 90 pts
5th: Shantanu, Venkat and Nikhil: 72.5 pts
6th: Sumeet, Shubhankar and Kaustubh*: 47.5 pts

Kunal Sawardekar and Sumeet had originally qualified but since Kunal had to leave, Sumeet picked one super-sub from the audience. 

Dada's quizzes are always entertaining and this one was no different. An excellent accessible 30 question elims and a well crafted 44 question final. One of the aspects that never disappoints in Dada's quizzes is the coverage of topics - which is always vast and the quiz is a truly "general" quiz. A small negative is that the quiz was probably slightly heavy on art and culture and bit lacking in sports. 

The 2 strikes system for each round of 12 questions also was easy going and never put any team in threat of losing out due to recklessness. 

I liked the concept of the triads - 3 questions linked in some way - most of the times the link was obvious and made it fun to work out other questions we had missed from the one odd answer we got.

Except for a couple of finger of god incidents, the quiz went off smoothly. 

-x-x-x

Please post your feedback in the comments section. 

BCQC.orgy aka InFest 2014-15 - Schedule

We will have our annual quiz anti-fest on 3rd and 4th Jan 2015. All events will take place at the Boat Club, College of Engineering Pune

The schedule is as follows:

InFestYouUs 2014-15 - Call for registrations

InFest-You-Us is a mastermind style, specialty themes solo quiz. This year, Infest-you-us will happen next year - on the 3rd of January 2015 , 1:30pm onwards at the Boat Club Lawns in the College of Engineering Pune

The format is as follows:
Each person chooses a topic of their interest. The taker would be asked 10 questions. The taker will be awarded 1 point for getting a question right. If missed, the question would go to the "Mob" i.e. everyone else present. The Mob is not allowed to discuss among themselves, and must decide who among them would go for the answer if the answer given by the participant is wrong. If the chosen one is right, the taker loses 1/2 a point. If not, the confident chosen one will get beaten up by the rest of the Mob.

So if you are interested, this is the course of action:
- Fill up this form ( http://bit.ly/1y9FfB7 )and tell us your name and your topics of choice.Please ensure that all fields are filled in - if we can't contact you, your registration does not exist.
- Then we will find people to make questions for your set for one of your topics of preference.
- Then you show up and we all have fun
- The deadline for registration is 17th November 2014 (We need to give enough time to people to set questions for you)

About the topics ...
- If the largely autocratic BCCI-esque IOC (InFest Organizing Committee) do not think your topic is interesting enough, it will be rejected. The topics must necessarily be not boring / done to death.
- Indicative list of topics that will certainly be rejected are World Cup Cricket, World Cup football, Asterix, Tintin, Friends, Douglas Adams, Big bang theory, Oscars etc
- Interesting topics that have featured before in past editions: English Monarchy, World Chess Championship, History of Israel, Monty Python, Cultural references in xkcd, Indian train names, Detectives in fiction, Hindustani Classical music, The War of Kurukshetra, The Discworld series, Indian Women Politicians, Gulzar with Vishal, Islamic conquerors, Indo-Pak wars,
We may also reject your topic if we can't find anyone to set questions for you (So don't ask for something COMPLETELY random )

If you have any queries, mail us at

Chakravyuh 2014 - Report

Set and Conducted by Rohan Danait

Attended by ~100 teams

Format: Written elims of 30 questions. Finals comprising 42 questions on Infinite Rebounds and a 6 question written round on differential scoring

Results:

1st: Anannya Deb & Anirudha sen Gupta: 365 pts
2nd: Aniket Khasgiwale & Aditya Gadre: 300 pts
3rd: Shrirang Raddi & Venkat Srinivasan: 250 pts
4th: Meghashyam Shirodkar & Amit Garde: 215 pts
5th: Debanjan Bose & Vikram Keskar: 185 pts
6th: Shubhankar Gokhale & Arnold D'Souza: 170 pts


An excellent, enjoyable quiz put up by Rohan.

The quiz started with an interesting 30 question written elims  - a throwback to tradition with printed sheets instead of a ppt. There was a surprisingly large range of elim scores with the highest score being 27/30 and the last qualifiers making 18/30

The finals had 2 rounds of 21 questions each on Infinite bounce - using the One-Finite pounce system (recently made popular in Pune circles by BDFL Ramanand) with a +15 on the pounce. The questions were interesting, and well framed (perhaps a bit verbose) and covered a vast range of topics. The effort to avoid peters was evident with 2 seasoned quizzers - Suraj Menon and Ranajeet Soman brought in to moderate the quiz. A few peters got in - but this did not diminish the experience of the quiz by much.

The written round was an airports special - while the questions were nice and interesting - I thought it was a little too specific for a Gen quiz.

To summarise, a number of positives from the quiz. A wide range of questions which were largely original (There were a few peters and some of the questions were on the simpler side for an open quiz, but for this I blame the moderators and not the QM. Kaustubh Bhat will be irked that noble Chakravyuh tradition "at least one finger of god" was not being followed.

Also Rohan conducted the quiz assuredly and was always in control of the proceedings. I also liked that the quiz went along at a leisurely pace, and being on stage was fun as usual with the banter and jokes (which the QM also took part in)

A couple of Negatives on the organization front. First, the registration was chaotic - perhaps next year, there needs to be an exclusive desk for the quiz instead of the universal desk + help desk thing that was there this time. second, most would have prefered to finish the quiz at one shot instead of the hour long break between elims and finals

As for the teams, the two bearded bongs - Anannya and Anirudha - ran away with the quiz right from the start pouncing on question after question and building a 90 point lead over the second placed team - Shrirang and Vcat. Shubhankar and Arnold  had a great showing the written round, but it was a bit too late to properly mount a comeback. In the second half we (Aniket and I) had a good round and cut the Dadas' lead to 65 points and overhauled Shrirang and Vcat for second place.

Congratulations to Anannya (who has perhaps made up for a disappointing performance in the BC Cup final on his last visit to Pune) and Anirudha (stunning debut in Pune quizzing)

Winners list so far:
2001: Shrirang Raddi and Amalesh Mishra
2002: Shrirang Raddi and Amalesh Mishra
2003: Niranjan Pedanekar and Samrat Sengupta
2004: Gaurav Sabnis and Neeraj Sane
2005: Sudarshan Purohit and Amit Garde
2006: Gaurav Sabnis & Shamanth Rao
2007 (Apr): Kunal Sawardekar and Shamanth Rao
2007 (Oct): Avinash Mudaliar and Harikrishnan Menon
2008: J. Ramanand and B.V.Harish Kumar
2009: Anand Sivashankar and Amit Garde
2010: J. Ramanand and B.V.Harish Kumar
2011: Meghashyam Shirodkar and Yash Marathe
2012: Kunal Sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav
2013: Meghashyam Shirodkar and Amit Garde
2014: Anannya Deb and Anirudha Sen Gupta

The Cricket Quiz - Report

The quiz was set and conducted by Arnold D'Souza. It was originally supposed to be IR with all teams in finals but since we had a good turnout it was conducted as a written quiz.

Results
1st - Aniket Khasgiwale and BV Harish Kumar  - 37.5 pts
2nd - Ranajeet Soman and Samrat Sengupta - 23 pts

Report :

The quiz had 46 questions plus two other rounds. The first round was a doppelgangers round where celebrities from non-cricketing fields were shown and we had to guess the cricketer they resembled. It was a nice non-serious start to the quiz (the Nathan Bracken - Amelie Mauresmo part especially).

There were two sets of 22 and 24 questions respectively with a healthy share of tough questions. The questions were well framed, however, some of the answers weren't 'workoutable' at all. There were a few record/statistics based questions which seem unavoidable in a cricket quiz. Even though the quiz was tough, the questions were not arbit (barring a couple). There was a heavy English county bias and a lot of questions from the late 19th/early 20th century. Indian domestic cricket felt slightly left out I am sure.

The third round was a bar graph representation of the runs scored over a batsman's career. This was the most enjoyable round of the quiz. The quizmaster's choice of batsmen for this round was excellent.

As themed quizzes go, this was a good quiz and a very nice debut by Arnold.

Questions are here.

July College Quiz - Report

The quiz was set and conducted by Vibhav Bhave who will be fleeing leaving the country soon. The quiz had a 25 question elims and finals with two 15 question IRs and 2 written rounds including an intensely confusing "auction round".  The finals had a 6 + 3 draft system. Following are the results :

1st : Team 2 :- Rohan Danait, Ranajeet Soman + Sampooran Singh (not Gulzar) - 179 points
2nd : Team 1:- Aniketh Rallabandhi, Daipayan Roy + Dhananjay Jagtap - 162 points
3rd : Team 5 :- Omkar Dhakhephalkar, Pranav Pawar + Saikat Sarkar - 146 points

Other finalists : Team 3 :- Alok Kulkarni, Rohit Sahasrabuddhe + Kshitij Jyoti
Team 6 :- Kinshuk, Arundhati Kulkarni + Aman Shaikh
Team 4 :- Anurag Gangras, Anway Karmarkar + Divij Ghose

Report :

We had a very good turnout of 22 teams considering the recent times. The elims were of a good quality for a college quiz with a lot of teams making it into double digits. There were no arbit questions and a couple of very good ones. The cut-off for the top 6 was 15/30.

It was great to see new faces making it to the top 6 pushing a couple of seasoned teams in the drafts.
The finals had a 'double-dip' pounce with one wrong answer on the pounce fetching a -10 and the second one barring the team from pouncing in that IR round. Team 2 led from the first question with Team 1 and 5 following not very far away.

The second round was the auction round which caused disparity between the scores of the top 3 teams and the rest. There were 6 topics consisting of 3 one lined questions on each topic. A team could bid for a maximum of 3 and a minimum of 1 category from the points they score in the first IR round. I will spare you the intimate details of the scoring since trying to remember them is making my head spin. Team 2 pulled away with a 40 point lead in this round since Rohan Danait seemed to have understood the scoring system perfectly.

The third round was much easier to understand. It was another written round with stuff blanked out from comic strips. A wider variety of comics apart from Asterix and Scrooge McDuck could have easily been managed considering the amount of webcomics floating around.

The last round was another 15 question IR where Team 1 did really well drawing dangerously close to first place. However, Team 2 kept scoring consistently on the bounce and the pounce staying just out of reach.

The quiz was a decent quality considering the Pune college quizzing scene isn't very strong. However some questions would have definitely been better off in a school quiz (What is the capital of 'Slovakia' and 'Who started the currency 'rupee' in India' being examples). There was brevity in a lot of the finals questions which could have been framed better. A few questions like the WTC headquarters were excellent.
A college quiz once a year is a not a bad tradition to set.

July quizzes - a College quiz and an Open Cricket Quiz

The BCQC is organising two open quizzes in July. Details:

Date: 27 July 2014 (Sunday)
Venue: Academic Complex., COEP, Pune (next to the BC). Given the venue, we have to declare a dress code: no shorts, as COEP has become finicky about not allowing people wearing shorts in the Complex.

Quiz 1: College Quiz

Set & hosted by: Vibhav Bhave

When: 10:30 am to 1:00 pm 

Theme: General

Format: written prelims, followed by finals

Registration: free, open to college students (cross-college teams allowed)

Teams: teams of two members each

Certificates for all the finalists

Quiz 2: The July Open

Set & hosted by: Arnold D'Souza

When: 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm 

Theme: Cricket

Format: written prelims, followed by finals

Registration: free, open to all

Teams: teams of two members each 

Certificates for college finalists, top college team

Join the FB event page here.