BC Cup 2022 - Report

 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 13th edition of the BC Cup saw a return to the Boat Club steps after a brief online sojourn on account of the pandemic last year. 

The elims was an even affair and threw its fair share of surprises as long time BC Cup veteren and perennial favourite Ingit sir didn't qualify, and last years winner Deepanjan Deb (aka DD) just about scraped through with the cut off 12.5 points. Samrat Sengupta lived up to his moniker of Sabse Bada BC and topped the elims with a whopping 19 points. 

The Quarter Finals

The top 8 in the quarter finals were:

Anannya Deb, Gokul, Prithwish Datta, Suraj Menon, Sachin 'Talent' Deshpande, Deepanjan Deb (DD), Samrat Sengupta and Rohit Suresh (Rotti) 

The quarter finals were extremely even this year with the most of the 8 participants remaining in the fray till the last few questions. Talent and DD started strongly, but Rotti and Sammy sir soon caught up. Boss had a surprisingly off day and missed questions on his pet topics - cricket, india and olympics. Dada was trailing for the longest time but his range helped him get stuff nobody else knew and suddenly he was within a point of qualification. Suraj and Gokul started slowly but picked up momentum in the second half and clawed their way to the top. At one point we had Talent and Rotti comfortably through, with all other participants within a point of each other and fighting for the other two spots. DD had a few classic DD moments where he forgot the name of a TT player he is a megafan of and displayed his inner SIIMIA by missing all the India questions. In the end, Sammy sir, Suraj and Gokul were tied on 6 points with DD and Dada on 5 - all with a chance to enter the semi finals along with Rotti and Talent. Sammy sir duly swatted away a football question and booked his spot - leaving Suraj and Gokul to fight it out in a tiebreaker. The first tiebreaker round of 3 questions ended with both at 1 pt each, but in the next sudden death round, Suraj answered a chess question that Gokul missed and took the last spot in the semi-final. 

The Semi Finals: 

The top 4 were: Rotti, Suraj, Sammy sir and Talent 

The semi-final was one of the lowest scoring and (thus fastest run) semi in BC Cup history with all 4 players struggling to get off the mark for the longest time. Finally everyone got going but it was extremely even for the longest time. Everyone missed questions that would be called their strong points - with Sammy missing football questions, Rotti missing NBA questions and Suraj missing cricket questions all the way. Going into the last question we had Rotti and Sammy on 3 points each and Suraj and Talent on 4 points each. Talent answered his direct and entered the BC Cup final on his debut. 

The Finals:

Talent in his debut at the BC Cup went up against 3 time winner Suraj playing his 6th final. Talent won the toss and took an early lead answering a tough cricket question, but Suraj immediately brought back the pressure by answering the very next question to score a crucial away goal. The next set was all un-answered - and Talent will kick himself for missing questions on 3 of his pet topics - women's cricket, Italian football and the Tour de France. Needless to say the real winner was the audience who - operating in a pack and without the pressure or fatigue our finalists were dealing with answered most questions. Suraj followed up with 2 excellent answers on his home stretch including one particularly clutch pull on the third last question - a tough cricket name recall which Talent knew immediately. In the end Suraj won seemingly comfortably 3-1 but it must be said there were moments through the quarters and semis where Talent seemed like the strongest quizzer in the best form. Perhaps the atmosphere, the over-whelming home support and the sheer fatigue that one learns to manage thorugh experience helped Suraj pull out a memorable win in one off the most closely contested and competitive BC Cups in years. 

Many congratulations to Suraj for winning a scarcely believable 4th BC Cup! 

BC Cup Winner 2022: Suraj Menon 

Runner Up: Sachin 'Talent' Deshpande 

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 Datta

2015: Samrat Sengupta

2016: Shrirang Raddi

2017: Suraj Menon

2018: Suraj Menon

2019: Prithwish Datta

2020: No tournament

2021: Deepanjan Deb

2022: Suraj Menon

BCQC July Open Quiz Report: Test Match Special

 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.  

BCQC August Open Quiz 2021 - In August Company - Report

Quiz: In August Company (General Quiz) 

Date & Time: 8 August 2021 at 1:30 pm

Venue: Zoom

QM: Anannya Deb 

Scores:

1st: Two Proctors and a Doctor (Dr. Navin Jayakumar, Abhinav Dasgupta, Avinash Mudaliar) - 170 pts

2nd: Peter Panchali Parajito (Debanjan Bose, Sachin Deshpande, Sourjo Sengupta) - 140 pts

3rd: Dream team (Arnabh Sengupta, Anirudh Anilkumar, Shaayak Chatterjee) - 133 pts

4th: Rana Protip (Venky Srinivasan, Kunal Sawardekar, Ranajeet Soman) - 127 pts

5th: East Bengal United (Shouvik Guha, Prithwish Datta, Deepanjan Deb) - 123 pts

6th: Narulkar, Nerulkar, Punekar (Sania Narulkar, Samrat Sengupta, Aditya Gadre) - 120 pts

7th: Remembrance of Things Fast (Navin Rajaram, Manu Sudhakar, Swaminathan Ganesh) - 107 pts

8th: Huey Dewey Louie (Akash Gupta, Arun TP, Zaman Khan) - 103 pts

9th: No Name (Krishnamurthy Ganesh, Rajagopal PS, Ajay Parasuraman) - 83 pts 

10th: Maris Troika (Thejasvi Udupa, Santosh Swaminathan, Ramkey V) - 72 pts 

Report:

Anannya Deb aka Dada has made it a habit of conducting super quizzes in his unique, nonchalant style - and this was no different. 

We started with a written elim which had sparsely worded, crisp questions on a wide range of topics - including topics that Dada unapologetically includes which feature in no other QM's quizzes. The elims were a mix of workoutable and TIL - which is a good way to eliminate in my opinion. Also Good Guy Dada was lenient and decided to take 10 teams into the finals because the bottom two teams were very close to the cut off. 

The finals had 2 written rounds. One on North Eastern Guitarists - one of those topics which no one else will put a question on in their quiz, let alone three. And the other on Olympic posters which teams did better at. 

There were two passing rounds had 18 questions each. The questions were clustered in loosely defined (whimsical) triads across a large variety of topics. Dada managed to make seemingly obscure stuff also interesting and most admirably - covered an insane geographic spread in his quiz - from Africa, to South Asia to South America. This is something that most QMs struggle with and tend to restrict to the US and UK. The quiz also very nicely operated in the intersections of topics - politics and sport, lifestyle and work, stories and history, fauna and folklore - and wasn't really focused on any one topic per se. In that sense the quiz felt truly 'general' and not like it had a preponderance of any pet topics. 

As for the results - the quiz was handsomely won by Team 3 - but at least 5 other teams were in contention for a podium finish till the last few questions. We had some cracking answers and on another positive note - people were on video and seemed to take part in the quiz in the right spirit. 

 

COVID Fundraiser Series | Report on the Football Quiz

Quiz: General Quiz on Football 

Date & Time: 6 June 2021 at 1:30 pm

Venue: Zoom

QM: Ranajeet Soman

Scores:

Jt 1st: Muddied Oafs (Rajiv Rai, Vinoo Sanjay, Brajendu Bhaskar) - 150 pts

Jt 1st: In the End, Cricket is the Winner (Prithwish Dutta, Deepanjan Deb, Sachin Deshpande) - 150 pts

Jt 1st: We believe in the cardboard (Aswath Venkataraman, Atulya Bharadwaj, Sandeep Narayan)  - 150 pts

4th: De Gea Dard (Abid Abdullah, Kunal, Shashwat Salgaoncar) - 140 pts

5th: Zulfiqar e Ingit (Anannya Deb, Venkatraghavan S, Venky Srinivasan) - 120 pts

6th: The Ball is Round - (Piyush Kedia, Kaniska Ghosh, Partha Ghatak) - 90 pts

6th: Remembrance of Things Fast (Srinath Bhashyam, Manu Sudhakar, Navin Rajaram) - 85 pts

8th: Boka Juniors (Jayashree Mohanka, Arnold D'Souza, Kinshuk Biswas) - 80 pts

Report: 

Ranajeet Soman is not only one of the best football quizzers in the country, but also one of the most rounded gen quizzers. Over the years, we have come to expect questions from him which are accessible and general even on specialist topics of his bent (football, ghazals, history and .....the band Travis) - and this one was no different. 

The football quiz in it's third edition - this one was the most gen of the lot and also the one that went through the most turmoil in terms of actually taking place - with the pandemic screwing up plans for a proper Infest this year. 

The elims were light and breezy, the questions crisply and pithily framed. One didn't need much football knowledge to answer most of the questions, but most importantly all the questions were nicely clued and were entirely workoutable. In the end, we had a few sports gawds, but mostly general quizzers qualifying for the finals - a testament to how well made the elims was. 

The finals, carried on from there the elims took off. We had 28 questions on Infinite Rebounds (+ Pounce) and 6 questions through 2 written rounds (one on music and one on social causes in football). The finals took us on a tour of history, geography, films, entertainment, politics and many other topics - all with football at its background. The only negatives for me were that some of the questions in the final were too easy which became a bit of a free for all. Overall the quiz was run quite quickly as well - with the finals ending at a reasonable time of 5:30pm - which is a rarity in quizzes these days. 

On to the results, the quiz was very close with at least 3-4 teams constantly exchanging the lead. We ended with an amazing 3 way tie on the last question - which was an exciting end to an excellent quiz.  

Unfortunately Rana has taken the wrong kind of inspiration from Suraj Menon - and told us this was his last football quiz, but we hope he will, like Suraj, come back and do several more quizzes over the years. 

Report - The Visuals Quiz at Infest 2021

Quiz : The Visuals Quiz  

Day, Date, Time : Sunday, 10th January 2021, 2pm

Venue : The quiz was conducted over Zoom

Format : Elims (35 questions) + Finals (40 IR + 6 written)

QMs : Aditya Gadre, Omkar Dhakephalkar, Ranajeet Soman, Kunal Sawardekar and Pranav Pawar

Scores :

1. Sumant Srivathsan, Yash Tamaskar, Navin Sharma (We Are Googling) - 345 points

2. Rajiv Rai, Vinoo Sanjay, Srinath Bhashyam (WIMWI Manram) - 290 points

3. Aryapriya Ganguly, Rahul Kottalgi, Amrit Pritam Chetia (Aardvarks) - 265 points

4. Jayashree Mohanka, Sania Narulkar, Prithwish Dutta (Is There A Bigger Picture) - 250 points

5. Ritoban, Amlan, Arijit (Khela Hobe Na) - 245 points

6. Varun Rajiv, Bhargava EM, Santosh Swaminathan (Metaquizziks) - 230 points

6. Samanth Subramaniam, Ravi Mundoli, Ashwin Kumar (Aila Jacta Est) - 230 points

8. Chandrakant Nair, Hrishikesh Verma, Jinson (CIDs From Kerala) - 220 points

Report :

The BCQC, much like Simone de Beauvoir, had to adapt to the Force of Circumstance and move the annual Infest to the realms of online quizzing over Zoom and contend with the many perils it entails. Every year the quiz festival has themed quizzes to go along with the much sought-after InFestYouUs. This year, the Theme was kept general but the Medium was changed to visuals to lessen keywords that lead one down the path of Temptation.

We had 75 participants taking part in a closely fought elimination round. The elims were topped by WIMWI Manram with a whopping 32.5 out of 35. The cut-off was 26.5 and it came down to star-marked questions to eliminate the 9th team. 

The finals, which had Infinite Pounce facilitated through the auspices of Whatsapp, were conducted with 2 rounds of 20 questions on Infinite Rebound along with 2 written rounds. The audaciously named We Are Googling comprising of Sumant, Yash and Navin led pretty much from the first question and never looked like being overtaken at any point in the quiz. 

For the other podium positions, however, it was as unsure as the plot of A Suitable Boy, where the teams' standings could be likened to the suitors' fortunes in the race for Lata's affections - constantly changing. There were some contentious moments, where conceptual clarity was evinced by the teams but they sadly could not provide the Proper Noun which would have earned them the points. Overall, the quiz was conducted in an atmosphere of good humour and appreciative sounds with a healthy audience of 50 sticking around till the end.

Just like Cristiano Ronaldo knew that Manchester United had been great but he would have to move to Real Madrid to achieve greater things, the BCQC knows that although the online nature of the quiz enabled pan-India participation and greater outreach, the better experience will be gathering in person in the balmy January mornings of Pune for a weekend of competition, banter, lazy lunches and the pursuit of Happiness.

We hope to see you there. 

BC Cup 2019 - Report

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 11th edition of the BC Cup saw about as strong a field as last year. The elims turned out to be bit on the tougher side and Anannya Deb topped with 15.5 points. All other qualifiers were bunched together and the cut off was 10.5 with 2.5 stars. Rajiv Rai just missed out qualification on stars. 

The Quarter Finals

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

Suraj, Prithwish and Anannya were a different league and led from start to finish to very comfortably take the top three spots in the quarter finals. All other qualifiers were in the hunt till the very end, with us going into the last question of the quarters with a three-way tie between Samrat, Deepanjan and Ingit Sir. Samrat got knocked out in the tie breaker - but we needed 4 sudden death questions to finally resolve the tie between Deepanjan and Ingit sir. Ingit sir prevailed with a good cricket answer and ensured the semis were a repeat of last year's line up.  

The Semi Finals: 

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

Ingit sir started well - but Suraj took his game to another level and won the Semis very comfortably. Anannya and Prithwish were tied at 4 points a piece going into the last 2 questions of the quarters. Anannya missed a question on Indian football and Prithwish answered corrected to narrowly go ahead. The last question went unanswered and Prithwish took up the second spot in the finals - another repeat of last year's final . 

The Finals:

Prithwish and Suraj faced off in the BC Cup final for the third year running  - they have been the dominant performers at this quiz - and this final was one for the ages. Prithwish won the toss and went first - he scored on the first question itself to put pressure on Suraj. Suraj too answered his first home question and leveled things. No one scored in the second home leg for Prithwish and we went into the last 7 questions tied and potentially heading to another penalty shootout (like 2017). Prithwish pulled out an outrageous cricket answer to score an away goal meaning Suraj had to score both his last questions to win. Suraj answered the penultimate question to tie the scores on aggregate - but he needed another one to win. The last question went un-answered to give Prithwish the win that has eluded him for the last two years. 

BC Cup Winner 2019: Prithwish Datta 
Runner Up: Suraj Menon 

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 Datta
2015: Samrat Sengupta
2016: Shrirang Raddi
2017: Suraj Menon
2018: Suraj Menon
2019: Prithwish Datta

The Lone Wolf Quiz at InFest 2019

Akela, A Kela - The Solo Quiz 
Set and conducted by Omkar Dhakephalkar

Format: Written elims followed by a very complicated finals for top 8 (details below)

Results:
1st: Kunal Sawardekar
2nd: Aditya Gadre
3rd: Samrat Sengupta
4th: Pranav Pawar

Other finalists: Sandeep Shankar, Omkar Joshi, Arnold D'Souza and Gokul Panigrahi

Report: 
Omkar set this year's edition as the reigning Solo quiz champ from 2018. The quiz started with a nice elims set (a bit on the tougher side) which did a good job of separating the top 8 from the rest. The quiz saw a huge turnout - almost packed room with several benches needing to be double loaded.

In the finals, Omkar unleashed a super fun, crazy format for the quiz. There would be a series of written "BLED" rounds featuring questions on Businessmen, Lawyers, Engineers and Doctors (or as Omkar put it "the only four meaningful professions in the world"). Each correct answer in these rounds would earn you a card with certain special powers. The Businessman card let you double the points on a question, the Lawyer card let you give multiple answers for a question, the Engineer card let you attempt only a part of the question for points, and the Doctor card allowed you to pounce without a negative. These were on randomised coloured cards. And one could use only the cards available for the colour that was indicated on the question.

While originally skeptical, once we got the hang of it, the finalists had a great time in strategising and using their cards wisely or at least comically.

The bottom two finalists would get eliminated after the 24th and the 32nd question. This led to some interesting permutations especially with the usage of the cards.

The content of the quiz was interesting and wide ranging. And as a good solo quiz should be, was quite extensive and long.

As for the results, Kunal topped the elims and led for the whole quiz. Once or twice there was some hope for Pranav and Aditya but everytime, Kunal pulled away to an unassailable lead. All in all, a very fun quiz by Omkar and congrats to Psaw, Pune's most dominant solo quizzer, for a second win in three years.

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.

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

BC Cup 2017 - 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 24 question Finals played over two legs (home and away) to determine the winner. 

Report: 
The 2017 edition of the BC Cup was amongst the toughest we've ever seen both in terms of the field as well as the close-ness of the results. The elims itself produced two huge shocks with two time BC Cup winner Anannya Deb and pre-quiz favourite Shouvik Guha both missing out on qualifying. Rahul Kottalgi, Kaushik Koley and Deepanjan Deb narrowly missed out by 1 point. The elims seemed to favour the younger lot with the most of the experienced folk losing out. 

The Quarter Finals:
The Quarter finalists were Shrirang Raddi, Venkatraghavan S (aka Ingit Sir), Gokul S, Shubhankar  Gokhale, Suraj Menon, Pratyush Jha, Prithwish Dutta and Samrat Sengupta 

Gokul performed brilliantly right from the get go and led from start to finish - ending the quarters with a phenomenal 11 points. All results were possible at the end of the first half of the elims, but Suraj, Prithwish and Samrat kept chugging along to finish joint second to make it to the quarters. 

The Semi Finals
The Semi finalists were: Gokul, Prithwish, Suraj and Samrat

The semis were remarkable low scoring with all participants at 1 point at the end of the first half. We saw some excitement towards the end - when in the last 10 odd  questions, all participants scored, and Gokul answered the last question correctly to force aa four way tie! A first in the BC Cup. Suraj and Prithwish won the 3 question tie-breaker and went through to the finals. 

The Finals 
The finals picked up where the semis left off - with both finalists struggling to score. In the last leg, Prithwish came perilously close with two answers off by just a syllable. Sadly this was equivalent of hitting the post, and not good enough for points - especially in the final. In another first at the BC Cup, the finas ended in a tie and we had the first ever penalty shootout. Suraj took the lead on the second kick, and held on for the next three questions to win the 2017 edition of the BC Cup. 

BC Cup Champion 2017 : Suraj Menon
Runner Up : Prithwish Dutta

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

The BC Cup 2017 - Annoucement

The BC Cup is the BCQC's annual bigly, YUUUUGE open solo quiz to crown the Best Sports Quizzer. This is the 9th edition of the quiz

QMs: Yash Marathe, Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre
Theme: Sports
Teams: Individual
Restrictions: (or the lack of one) Open quiz. Everyone is welcome
Time: 12:45 pm, Saturday, 6th May, 2017
Venue: The Boat Club, College of Engineering Pune

Prizes: Cash prizes totalling INR 9000 (up almost 40% this year!)
1st place: INR 3000
2nd place: INR 1500
3rd and 4th place: INR 1000 each
5th to 8th place: INR 500 each 
Best U-22 participant (who doesn't qualify for the quarters): INR 500

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. The top two then go to the Final where they face off one-on one for a 24 question final.

BC InFest 2017 Reports | Solo Open Quiz

Set and Conducted by Aditya Gadre
Scorer: Pranav Joshi

Final Results 

1st: Kunal Sawardekar - 395 pts
2nd: Rahul Kottalgi (RSK) - 330 pts
3rd: J Krishnamurthi (JK) - 295 pts
4th: Aniket Khasgiwale - 250 pts

Other Semi Finalists:

Omkar Dhakephalkar - 175 pts
Vibhendu Tiwari - 165 pts
Pranav Pawar - 165 pts
Shubhankar Gokhale - 150 pts

Other Quarter-finalists:

Kunal Thakar - 101 pts
Ajai Ragde - 94 pts
Charles Matthew - 82 pts
Divij Ghose - 77 pts
Ashwini Natu - 69 pts
Mayank Mazumdar - 67 pts
Gokul Panigrahi - 64 pts
Omkar Yarguddi - 39 pts


The quiz started with a 40 question prelim where the top 16 qualified. JK topped the elims with 23 points and Kunal and Khasgi came second with 20 points. The other 13 participants were clustered in a range of 7 points. The cut off was 13 with 3 stars (Ranajeet Soman just missed out on stars). All participants started with a score of (elims score * 3). This was followed by a a 40 question quarterfinal for the top 16. Rahul, JK and Kunal S started strongly and held their performance throughout to comfortably finish as the top 3. Rahul was leading at the end of quarters. Shubhankar and Vibhendu just scraped in with a few good answers towards the end while Kunal Thakar, making his return to Pune quizzing after years, just missed out by 10 points.

RSK, JK and Kunal continued their form from the Quarters. The semis brought slightly tougher questions - Aniket had a good run and comfortably pulled away to cement fourth place and qualification to the next round. There was quite a big gap between the top four and the next four. Kunal S really ramped up and overhauled Rahul's lead to go into the final in first place with a cushion of 25 points over Rahul. JK slipped away a bit finishing  15 points behind Rahul.

the final wsa quite one-sided (or rather one-personed) - with Kunal growing even stronger and pulling away considerably to win the quiz with 5 questions to spare. Rahul successfully held off JK to finish second quite comfortably.

BC Cup 2016 - 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 24 question Finals played over two legs (home and away) to determine the winner. 

Report: 
The elims were slightly easier than the previous year with more participants making double digits. Shrirang topped the elims with 14 points. The cut off was 8.5 with two stars. The field was quite strong and the youngsters Snehasis Panda and Rishwin Jackson put in a great performance to qualify for the Quarter finals. Seasoned sports quizzers Anand Sivashankar, Harish Kumar, Kaushik Koley, Sameer Deshpande and Deepanjan Deb all narrowly missed out on qualification. 

The Quarter Finals:
The Quarter finalists were Shrirang Raddi, Venkatraghavan S (aka Ingit Sir), Snehasis Panda, Shubhankar  Gokhale, Anurag Danda, Arnold D'Souza, Rishwin Jackson and Anannya Deb (Dada)

Rishwin started strongly and was leading for a while but as time went on he seemed to run out of steam. Shrirang and Ingit kept giving good answers and comfortably finished the quarters on 7 and 8 points respectively to book their place in the Semi finals. Dada kept missing questions he would normally have got and we ended the quarter with Dada, Arnold and Snehasis tied on 6 points. Dada easily won the regular tie breaker. After a lengthy sudden death tie breaker - Arnold finally prevailed over Snehasis to take the last slot in the Semis.  

The Semi Finals
The Semi finalists were: Shrirang, Ingit, Arnold and Anannya

Ingit continued his sublime form from the quarters to win the semi final and book his place in the final. Shrirang, Anannya and Arnold were locked in a back and forth battle for the second slot - finally Shrirang won with 4 points to Anannya and Arnold's 3. 

The Finals 
Shrirang and Ingit in the final meant we would definitely have a new BC Cup Champion. Shrirang won the toss and went first. The final turned out to be extremely tough with both contestants struggling to score points. Ingit came close with a half answer twice but couldn't strong together enough to score a goal. Just as it looked like we were heading to a penalty shootout for the title, Shrirang answered the second last question of the quiz on Ingit's home leg to seal a very hard fought victory. 

BC Cup Champion 2016 : Shrirang Raddi 
Runner Up : Venkatraghavan S 

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

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

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. 

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).