The making of "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - 2

First apologies to all those who have been asking for a copy of the questions. I'm having some serious trouble with my PC right now that renders me hapless when dealing with MS Office. It'll be out soon.

In Part 1, I explained how I went about collecting the content for my quiz. Hopefully, those who were there were pleasantly surprised by the chosen format. Here's how I went about it:

Format
Most quizzes don't allow for any tactical decisions. An Infinite Rebounds based quiz is uniform, which is kind to the serious quizzer who is fed up of artificial ways to inject drama into quizzes. "Showy" quizzes have disruptive rounds such as buzzers, rounds with very uneven scoring, which may be fun for the audience, but painful for the good teams on stage. But IR can be a tad boring and monotonous. All teams need to do is to focus on the next question, and not worry about any kind of tactics, except for in the odd long connect. It's a classical format, but one for the purists.

Worse, a theme quiz can aggravate these problems further because not everyone is keen on the subject of the quiz. Round-and-round-the-mulberry bush can put you off to zzz-land.

I wanted the format to:

1. Have equal weightage for all three topics
2. Force teams to make a few tactical decisions throughout the quiz
3. Not overly penalise teams who aren't good at any one topic; conversely, don't make it possible for teams who are good at only one theme to get lucky (say, by somehow getting all the questions on one theme in a mixed set)

I chose three separate "sets", one per topic. To normalise performance across sets, teams would get points in a range, depending on their performance in that set. Initially, I thought of assigning scores from 1 to 6 based on position. But that would be unfair if a team completely swept the round - the others still wouldn't be too far away. We have been experimenting with different scoring methods in our BC theme quizzes, so I chose to go for the relative method. The winner of a set gets 5 points; the rest get a score from 0 to 5, relative to the winner's score. So if the winner had 100, they get 5. If the next team gets 80, they end with a relative score of (80/100)*5 = 4. A team gets 65? - a score of 3.25.

The winner would be the team that gets the maximum aggregate across all three sets. This sounded fine, until I realised the flaw.

What if the same team single-handedly won the first two sets? They would have 10, and no one else could catch them. The race for top spot would be over 2/3rds of the way! So I put in a final-within-a-final concept. The teams with the top two scores after the three sets would make it to this last round (as it turned out, I put 3 teams in the finals as 2nd and 3rd were closely clustered). That way, I could ensure interest would remain alive till the end of the three sets. Also, this gave trailing teams a chance to catch up, especially if they could dominate the last round and push the others back.

I designed each set to be identical - after playing around with ideas, I settled on starting with 4 common qns of 5 pts each (10 pts each could allow teams to get a huge lead), followed by IR for 10 qns (initially, I wanted at least 12 so that all 6 teams would be assured of at least 2 qns each, but changed my mind since I had so many common qns).

The last 2 qns (10 pts each) would be for one individual per team. Each person on a team had to take part in a set of their choice. This was one of the tactical questions in the quiz.

I wanted to try this because I think it gives each person a chance to shine, as well as makes it hard for teams to hide a weak member. We have a system where the top 6 teams after the prelims qualify outright, while the next 3 teams are split up and each member added to these 6. In this case, I allowed the teams (in ascending order of scores) to pick a member. Normally, teams would have picked the best possible person (hence, went from lowest to highest, to have somewhat balanced teams), but in this case, they would also have to weigh in the need to have three people with complementary skills.

The other tactical questions:

1. Each team got 1 attempt to go for an answer "out of turn" i.e. you can whisper the answer to the QM without waiting for your chance in IR. I usually keep this to prevent inadvertent sitters which can penalise other teams. The top 2 teams got an additional chance (to compensate for their late chances to pick their 'drafts'). Since teams had only 1 or 2 "out of turn"-ers in the entire quiz, they had to decide when to use it and when to guess that teams ahead of them would be unable to answer.
2. The final round for the top teams had 6 questions, 2 in each topic. Ordinarily, they would get 10 for a correct answer. They could choose to double if confident, with a penalty of -5.

It was interesting to watch teams apply these at various points. I think the rules weren't as confusing as initially feared!

I must confess that the last round could be a little unfair to a team that swept all three sets only to lose in the small last round. My hope was that I would choose questions of equal weight that would reflect the finals and not distort the final standings (not entirely successful in reality). That said, I was prepared to tolerate some unfairness (it was easy as I wasn't participating :-)). I also realised that it is very easy to engineer a close finish if you have very few questions - a common trick employed by most of the 'show pony' quizzes.

Finally, a mention that the 4 starter qns were set around the old game of 'Name, Place, Animal, Thing' and that even the prelims had three sets of 8 qns each. And despite the ineptness of my local photocopy guy, it is probably the first ever horizontal prelims sheet!

The making of "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - 1

It may be a tad conceited to write about the making of a quiz, but since this was the hardest quiz that I have ever set, I thought it would be interesting to write about the lessons learnt and decisions taken along the way.

The genesis of this quiz was in a bad cricket quiz that I participated in with Harish and others earlier this year. I hadn't been to a good cricket quiz in a long time and felt it was a pity this was such a bad quiz that taught me nothing new or interesting. I had the idea of a "Religions of India" quiz, about cricket, films, and politics. I had never participated in a formal quiz about Indian politics. The closest was a lovely BC quiz by Ganesh Hegde (always the quizzer, never the dancer). I pitched the idea to Harish, but soon, I had begun to form some strange ideas about the format. I requested him to let me go ahead with this alone.

I was wary of doing it alone because I did not (still don't) know a lot about Indian cricket. I had a reasonable interest in politics, but only of the last two decades. Hindi films was much easier (or so I thought). In the end, I estimate it took me about 100 days worth of reading, thinking, and setting to come up with the quiz. I have always been over-enthusiastic about setting quizzes, perhaps to the point of obsession. I spent a great deal of time coming up with my last BC open quiz last November. I guess I like the creative elements of the setting: the anxieties of not having quiz-worthy content, poring over formats and presentations, composing the written parts of the question to be both devious and subtle, and so on.

This time, I had decided not to simply dip my toes into subjects (as sometimes happens in general quiz-settings). Rather, I would try and dive deep by reading as many original sources as possible in the three topics. Setting general quizzes is easier because I collect little nuggets of possibilities each day, from just keeping my eyes and ears open. Come general quiz time, I always have something to begin from. In this case, I was starting with the tank on empty.

My last BC open quiz was hugely complicated - each of the 42 questions seemed to be made up of 2-3 sub-questions. In addition, my experiments with the elims format, a semi-final for the draft picks, elims scoring etc. seemed to make matters worse. I labeled it the "No Smoking" quiz, in reference to the then released Anurag Kashyap film of seemingly equal complexity! I had not intended it to be so much of an indulgent trip, and it provoked some soul-searching. Using the feedback from that quiz and other experiences, I decided the following:

1. Content: keep it as simple as possible, especially since the themes are off-beat. Will stick to post-Independence India.
2. Format: continue to experiment

Content
As a quizzer, each year, I'm astonished at how much we don't know. As a quiz-setter, I'm astonished to discover newer quiz-worthy things to ask. If we ever feel that we've run out of questions, then we're just not looking hard enough. I hoped to convey this very feeling to anyone who came to this quiz wondering what could be asked in these three topics.

I did not want to refer to any specialist quiz books for inspiration. The only option was to read and to do so in copious amounts. I had about three-four months left for my quiz, so I began with the topic I was most ignorant of: Politics.

Long before I planned my quiz, I had bought Ramchandra Guha's India after Gandhi. It is a bit of a tome, but it told me a lot about post-Independence India. Definitely recommended for everyone, especially since we have very few books about 1947 and later. I also read a book about Kashmir Frontline Kashmir by a former BBC correspondent and Cutouts, Caste, and Cine-Stars (by Vasanthi), which is about TN politics. I re-read parts of Vaibhav Purandare's book about the Shiv Sena. Using some hooks from these books, I read a lot of articles online. I had a little bit of a 'quota system' in order to represent both different eras as well as regions, so based on what I already knew, I looked up articles about specific people and groups.

I've come to realise that even the good cricket quizzers don't seem to know a great deal about Indian cricket. Admittedly, it is a very niche topic and potentially, a dry one. Hence, I chose to primarily go for interesting anecdotes rather than stats. A failing of sports quizzes is that they become too personality or stat-oriented. I tried to avoid these. Despite that, 7 of the 8 elims questions on cricket were answered by cricketer's names! I let that be because most of these questions were largely about anecdotes.

BTW, I also did some reading about cricket. Some sources for these: Spin and Other Turns (R. Guha once again), Sandeep Bamzai's book on Bombay cricket, books by Sunil Gavaskar, Tendulkar's biography (Purandare again), Indian cricket controversies - a bitchy book that I found via Google Books, and of course, the dependable Cricinfo archives.

Thankfully, teams on stage could grapple with questions on both politics and cricket.

Hindi films, something that I'm interested in, turned out to be very slippery at the end. I had left it for late, since I thought I had enough resources and jottings to see me through. I was mistaken. I wanted to ask mainstream Bollywood, so few or no questions on parallel cinema (which has been an easier quizzing fount). I looked at some of the books I owned on this topic, looked at my notes from the Encylopaedia of Indian Cinema, foraged around online, and in the end, just thought of films I owned or had seen. I wanted to have a fairly high percentage of A/V (a first for me, since I am never confident that the supporting audio/visual technology at the quizzing venue will hold up). In the end, I just about made the minimum cut.

This is already a big post, so jottings on the format in a following article.

Quizzing 101

This is college quizzing season. Which means a lot of people will be setting quizzes for their college fests. It also means that a lot of people will be setting and QMing their first quizzes. This is by far one of the most important experiences for quizzers.

However, it takes experience to grasp the nuances of setting, organising and making questions for a successful quiz. It's not difficult or anything, its just that you need to fall and fail to realise what went wrong.

The good thing is, a few stalwarts at the BCQC have already done some excellent writing on the issue of a) making good quiz questions and b)organising a quiz event.

You can find these essays here on our website. This Quizmaster's Checklist is a must-read especially if you are organising a quiz event.

(cross-posted on my personal blog)