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
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.