Quiz Report - 'Q' ILS State Level Quiz 2016

'Q' at ILS Law College- 3/9/16
QM(s): Sruthi and Shravya Darbhamulla

Post-quiz discussion.

SCENE: A dimly lit room. Like the BJ auditorium (the backdrop for further SCENES). Pizza slices and empty pizza boxes lying around. A mobile screen with cheesy Thumbprints open on an incomplete review oN Zomato.

Pranav 'Floyd' Joshi (hereinafter referred to as 'Floyd' for the purpose of brevity and convenience): "I felt it was a good quiz. Good fundae." He takes a pause. An ominous pause. "However. . . framing needs a lot of help. Sravya / sruthi lost control of the proceeding." Unpausing and ceaseless, he continued ". . . and a quizmaster should never let that happen." However, an optimist at his cholesterol filled heart, he says in the same laboured breath, "With more experience of hosting they should get better at this. I enjoyed."   

ENTER: A dashing young gentleman, hurriedly closing the door behind his cohorts of female fans. White teeth gleaming in the flittering TV screen. Spectacles shining.                      

 COEP Aman: Not to mince his words he says "Personally felt that quiz was more history biased. Very few ent questions in finals." Adjusts the cable wire. Floyd has yet get a DTH connection. Despite this annoyance, he agrees with Floyd."Need serious help with framing."                         

 BCQC Floyd: Awakens from his recurring Cheese Coma. "Oh yeah. Extreme history / polity bias. Law even"

APPEARS: A mouse-like brainiac till now hidden inside the layers of leather of the sofa.                           

 COEP Divij Ghose: His meek voice, filled with authority speaks out. As usual, words of wisdom fall out in his deadpan tone, "Since I was in the audience, I'd also like to bring up the point of an absolute lack of audience engagement"                        

BCQC SPDP: (Suraj Prabhudesai, referred to as 'BCQC SPDP' for the purpose of brevity, convenience, acronynymity and crispy delicious taste. Also, where did he come from? He was always there) "Yeah, the answers to the written rounds should have been asked to the audience before revealing the answers. By the end of the quiz there were like 6 people in the audience"                         

 AFMC Anmol Dhawan: (Oh he was also always there) Licks his lips. Giving a quiz review: one of his favourite past times. Dishes out two even before breakfast. For this one, he is already ready. Opens his cigarette case. Takes out a thin white cylinder of parchment. Smells it lengthwise. Slowly unrolls it. The ink is still fresh. Everyone stops breathing, as he reads it out, "Good fundas. Topics could have been more representative. Like Pranav said," of course he already knew what Pranav would say, "history-politics was more dominant. One thing where they could have improved was execution and  confidence. They frequently seemed confused and proceeded to consult each other - where they'd discuss whether to give part points or full points etc. They could have definitely been more confident in that regard. All in all, a pretty enjoyable quiz, though. Prelims were really good, in my opinion, though we missed a ton of sitters." Always ready to accept his mistakes, his words carried extra weight. "The quality of questions themselves was good. The topics could have been more representative, like I said before. If they were to host another quiz next month, I would definitely go for it."                         

 COEP Aman: The discussion was its apex. "Extending on the framing point, I felt they were unclear on what they wanted from the question. As in what qualified as bouncing for better answer and what was enough to give points."                         

 AFMC Anmol Dhawan: "I agree."

Fade out. Black out.

END OF SCENE.

Results:      

1st: NJZ (Nikhil Joseph Zacharias)+1 (SLS):  240 (appox.)

2nd: Aman Shaikh and DJ (Dhananjay Jagtap) (COEP): 190

3rd: Anurag+1 (AFMC): 187.5

4th: Pranav 'Floyd' Joshi and Charles Matthews (Modern+PICT): 180

5th+6th: Two AFMC Teams, one being Anmol Dhawan's

This script was adapted from a Whatsapp conversation by Omkar Dhakephalkar for purposes of general awareness and education. It the author's purpose, belief and hope that it be used by future quizmasters/setters and quizzers for improving their quizzes, learning from opinions and enshrine the glory of Mankind by hearkening a new Golden Age of Pune Quizzing.

BPHC's Enigma Quiz - Report

Host: BITS Hyderabad

Proctor: Omkar Dhakephalkar

Results:

1st Place

Finals Score: 122.5

Institution: College of Engineering, Pune 

Divij Ghose

Dhanajay Jagtap

2nd Place

Finals Score: 117.5

Institution: Brihan Maharashtra College of Commerce

Shantanu G

Shantanou P

3rd - Charles and Pranav: (95) (Modern+PICT)

4th - Anirudh Anil Kumar Arnabh Sengupta: (90) (AFMC)
5th - Omkar Joshi and Hithvik Jha: (65) (AFMC+COEP)

6th - Akshay Parale and Omkar Borate: (32.5) (COEP)

7th - Suraj Prabhudesai and Shubhankar Panse: (27.5) (PVG+PICT) 

8th - Pranav Rao and Ashwin Subramanian: (20)

Report - Written by Divij Ghose, CoEP

Tl;dr : A MELA Quiz disguised as a General Quiz. Some great fundaes, some poorly framed questions but all in all an enjoyable quiz and a great effort by the BPHC Quiz Club.

The Quiz: Pune regional qualifier of BPHC’s Enigma Quiz. Pune was not one of the cities in which the quiz was originally supposed to be conducted, but due to some persuasion and effort by the COEP Quiz Club, it was conducted in Pune with one day’s notice.

Prelims: 30 questions. MELA heavy. 4-5 great fundaes. A couple of poorly framed questions (like the question on one rupee notes). A couple of sitters and a couple of questions which I would call trick questions. The tribute question on COEP was appreciated. Considering it was a 30 question set, highest score (16) and cut-off (7.5) were low. Top 8 teams qualified for the finals.

Finals: Largely a MELA quiz, with a considerable amount of military questions and a few general questions here and there. Decent questions in the IR rounds, with a few sitters in each IR round. The AFMC team dominated the first IR, but lost their lead in the second one. Most questions were on things we’ve heard of. I can’t say the same about the themed written round on “Illusions and Paradoxes”, but I can’t complain either (got to know about things like the Ship of Theseus paradox). Themed written rounds are not easy to set, and since they were going for a theme related to Enigma, I’d say they did a good job, even if it was a low scoring round (with the BMCC team being an exception). What I can complain about is the LVC : it single handedly brought down the level of the quiz. The connect was prizes named after people, but I don’t think anyone present in that room knew what John Charles Fields or Joseph Pulitzer look like. A couple of brave teams did go for the connect, but were promptly awarded negative points. While Charles and Floyd made up for it in the next attempt, the AFMC team of Arnabh and Co. were awarded another -5, which made them slide to 4th place. The BMCC team did well throughout, but slid to second place because of an incorrect pounce.

BITS quizzes have always been enjoyable, and this wasn’t an exception. This quiz was described as a “Pretty OK” quiz, but I’m not being too harsh on them because I can only imagine how hard it must be to organize a national quiz with qualifiers which suit each city’s quizzing style.

Note : This quiz was conducted after Chakravyuh, and all of us (at least the COEP guys) were visibly exhausted. This was a very long quiz, but Omkar Dhakephalkar conducted it smoothly enough for us to not complain about how long the quiz is. Props to him for that.

Mindspark '16 Quizzes - Report

The Technical festival College Of Engineering Pune hosted a set of three mega quizzes from 23^rd –25^th September. The quizzes each year draw a variety of audience with a taste of everything for everyone.

Torquest - The Sci-Tech Quiz

QM- Divij Ghose

Set By- Ipshita Paul & Divij Ghose

Winners- Shantanu G. and Shantanu P. (BMCC)

              Known for its status quo of hi-tech fundas and you-know-it-or-you-don’t questions, Torquest ’16 had been an interesting affair. The 21 question Prelims with 4 two part questions seemed tough, the quiz had high-school familiar scientists fundas and relatively easy tech questions, with the very first question bearing the answer ‘Torque’! The two-part questions and long framing added to the difficulty of the Elims and the teams were seen tickling their brains.  The quiz had a participation of more than 85 teams which jam packed the Mini Auditorium. Finals went smooth at a slow pace with the same question pattern as that of the Elims, the rounds in finals were interestingly named after Coldplay songs. As the quiz progressed a close fight was worth a watch then eventually BMCC proving to be victorious.

QM’s word- “The teams performed as expected but missed out a few simple questions despite enough clues overall a high scoring finals was an indicative of their immense knowledge”

Qonnoisseur - The MELA Quiz

QM- Rohan Tikoo

Set By- Dhananjay Jagtap & Rohan Tikoo

Winners- Pranjal Gupta & Rishabh Mehta (AFMC)

                The MELA Quiz on Day 2 of the fest began with a fresh Saturday but had a low turnout despite the love of Pop Culture among students. The prelims were an easy set of straight-forward 25 questions. The quiz was lighted by the goodness gracious presence of the then Quiz Club head Chinmay Tadwalkar. The finals had an engaging confluence of Western and Indian fundas which were workoutable with many oh-damn-I-knew-that moments. Some historical questions like the one asking about the artwork around the Preamble of India kept the interest going. The quiz ended with two first positions by Pranav & Charles and Pranjal & Rishabh (AFMC) but just for the sake of winner trophies and documentation the AFMC team got the (third) tie-breaker correct about Indian Spiderman Pavitra Prabhakar. Pranav & Charles had the funda but couldn’t name the character. The quiz was set on the lines of known fundas which needed to be cracked from the clues in the questions.

QM’s word – “There were a lot of questions to which people thought the answers were obvious eg. Grauman’s Egyptian Museum, Que Sera Sera, Peter Sellers. Top 3 teams were fierce as there was an extended tie-breaker round”

Chakravyuh - Pune’s largest Open General Quiz

QM- Aman Shaikh

Set By- Omkar Borate & Aman Shaikh

Winners- Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre

                 Most of the Quizzing janta showed up for the quiz which made the Chakra this year massive. The Elims had a mixed-bag of questions a lot of which were not meant for the commoners but for the stalwarts. The finals were a small set of two rounds of 16 questions each (total 32 questions) that included everything under the sky and beyond. A strong set of finalists made the finals intriguing with current affairs, sports and major general questions. The quiz was set keeping in mind the standards of the legacy of Chakravyuh and its importance in the quizzing scene. Special mention to team 6 led by Maitreyi Gupta and Anannya Deb who were at zero after round one of finals because of many positive and negatives but finished runner-ups also the AFMC team who missed getting into the top 6 by only one star marked question led by Pranjal Gupta and Rishabh Mehta. The winners are Alumni and great quizzers Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre.

QM’s word- “Setting and open Quiz had been quite a challenge considering the standard one needs to maintain as participants are the ones quizzing as the same age as we are right now. The teams performed well which was as expected, we tried to keep the quiz safe without ambiguity which explains the short finals. It was a good experience as a whole and we have improved a lot in the categories in which we were weak.”

Overall the quizzes were having a low scoring prelims than expected by the quiz setters with teams cracking questions in the finals. The event was a success, special mention to Akshay, Soumaditya, Ipshita, Karan for the event management, scoring and logistics. Accolades to Rohan Jr and Omkar Jr for their help.

Right after Chakravyuh, ENIGMA – The National Quiz by BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus was conducted which saw a participation of 10 teams with 8 advancing into the finals. Omkar Dhakephalkar being the enthusiastic QM, the quiz was a high scoring one which Divij and Dhananjay won.

We would like to thank all the participants in the quizzes it could not happen without you.

We will soon have the quizzes on Slideshare.

by Vrushabh Gudade

http://coepbcqc.blogspot.in/2016/09/the-mindspark-16-quizzes.html?m=1

Qonnoisseur 2016 - Report

Report- Qonnoisseur 2016, CoEP MELA college Quiz
Report written by Pranjal Gupta, AFMC.

Set by: Dhananjay Jagtap and Rohan Tickoo
Conducted by : Rohan Tickoo
Date: 24th September 2016

RESULTS
1st - Pranjal Gupta and Rishabh Mehta(AFMC)
2nd - Pranav Joshi(Modern College) and Charles(PICT)
3rd - Arnabh Sengupta and Anirudh Anilkumar(AFMC)

PRELIMS-  Thanks to the previous day's events, it was a relief that the Prelims started on time. (Quiz was delayed by 3 and a half hours the previous day) Only 20 questions though, with some nice questions on Moulin Rouge, Kahlil Gibran, Greta Garbo mixed with easy ones like Feluda and a few from the Marathi category.
But some of the  weirdly framed questions on 'Take Me To Church' and the Grauman's Egyptian Theatre(yup, not the Chinese!) combined with no part points on offer reduced the cut off to 6.

FINALS

The finals began with a written round on Simpson movie references, and teams generally scored well with two teams getting all correct.
This was followed by 2 infinite rebounds with a LVC in between.
The LVC was about artworks with Vladimir Putin performing the Labours of Hercules. Two teams got it on the second slide itself scoring a 50. But the SLS team waited too long and had to play catch-up throughout the remaining quiz. I felt the nature of the connect deserved not more than 30 points.
The remaining quiz was actually quite good, with some stand out questions being about Peter Sellers playing an Indian, Japonism, Yayati complex etc. But it was really surprising to see a total lack of questions on post 2000 TV shows and movies in a college MELA quiz.
As expected, it was tightly contested with Rishabh & I tied with Pranav & Charles for the top spot with 175 points, closely followed by Arnab & Anirudh at 170.
A tie breaker gave us the technical 'first position'.
Thoroughly enjoyed it and kudos to the organisers!

BJ Medical Quizzasm - Report

Report is written by Anmol Dhawan from AFMC.

Quizzasm, General Quiz  at BJ Govt Medical College, Pune
Date: 11th September 2016

QM - Omkar Dhakephalkar

RESULTS
1st - Anmol Dhawan & Pranjal Gupta (AFMC)
2nd - Anirudh Anilkumar & Hritvik Jha (AFMC)
3rd - Omkar Borate & his partner (COEP)

Other qualifiers - Sruthi & Sravya Darbhamulla (ILS Law College), and one team each from BJMC & SKNMC.


REVIEW
- Anmol Dhawan & Pranjal Gupta

Prelims - generally easy workable questions. Omkar had obviously toned it down from his usual quizzes at ILS/BCQC allowing for easier guessing. Questions were good, well framed and fundas were nice too.

Finals - again a great set. We felt there were some sitters in the finals which probably could have been asked in the prelims instead (new iPhone not having headphone jacks, Canonisation of Mother Teresa, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory etc). Could have been more representative - there weren't many questions from literature or sports.

The questions themselves were interesting, and considerably more workable than Omkar's usual quizzes, which was great and thoroughly enjoyable. A lot of great fundas too. The quiz also saw a bunch of first time quizzers work out questions, pounce and get them right, which we think is excellent.

The QM was also confident, explained the rounds clearly and crisply, and was fairly certain regarding what exactly he needed in the answer.

All in all, great quiz. Really enjoyed it.

Chakravyuuh 2016 - Report

Set by Omkar Borate and Aman Shaikh
Conducted by Aman Shaikh

Format: 25 question elims followed by a 32 question final on IR

Attended by ~ 100 teams

Results:
1st: Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre : 85 pts
2nd: Anannya Deb and Maitreyi Gupta: 75 pts
3rd: Vibhendu Tewari and Avaneendra Bhargav : 70 pts
4th: Abhinav Dasgupta and Shubhankar Gokhale: 65 pts
5th: Venkat Srinivasan and Samrat Sengupta: 60 pts
6th: Omkar Dhakephalkar and Pranav Pawar: 40 pts

The quiz started with a 25 question elim. The questions were a bit long and while workable, they could have been crisper. Some questions in the elims were totally know it or you don't. Overall the set was competent. The highest score was 19 while the cut off was 13.5 with one star

The finals had 32 questions on Infinite rebounds with half passing clockwise and the other half anti clockwise. The questions themselves were good and one notable point that the QMs should be proud of is that there were almost no Gawd awful peters. One major issue for me was that the quiz had only 32 questions in the final. Would have been nice if a couple of written rounds would have been added.

The finals had a good balance of questions (by topic) and were of a good difficulty level that didn't leave much to be desired. However, a general theme in the finals was that the fundas uncovered were great but the QMs tended to ask for the wrong thing - choosing to not ask a nice workoutable funda in favour of asking a tough know-it-or-you-dont . Also several cases of wildly varying difficult levels. Perhaps a function of inexperience more than anything else.

Another issue which may not have been in the QM control is the logistics.The projector died at least 7 times during the quiz requiring a replacement. Perhaps the organizers should have pushed for M13 which is significantly more reliable as a venue than SH2.

Overall the quiz was good - good questions, good time management (elims started *only* 15 minutes late and finished in exactly 45 minutes!) and fairly good questions. Aman conducted the quiz well and save for a few questions where I felt that part points policy (while clear) was arbit and unfair, the quiz was well designed.

Kudos to the QMs for keeping up the standard by not succumbing to pressure to include questions for the heck of it and ensuring only quality, standard questions made the quiz.

As for the performance in the quiz - all teams led the quiz at least at one point in the quiz. Abhinav and Shubhankar started well and built a good lead by the end of the first half. Samrat and Vcat and Dhake and PP too started well but ran out of steam. Anannya and Maitreyi started with multiple negatives but had a stellar a second half to finish second just 10 points behind the winners. Aditya and Aniket started slowly but chugged on and finished strongly to win the quiz for the second consecutive year.

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 
2016: Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre 

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

The BC Cup 2016 - Announcement

The BC Cup is the BCQC's annual solo, open, loooooooong quiz to crown the Best Sports Quizzer in Pune, perhaps Maharshtra (probably India). This is the eight edition. 

Format:   

First, a 30 question prelim 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. 

The top college finisher (UG only, we may ask for ID cards) will get a prize in addition to all the top eight open finishers

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, 7th May, 2016
Where? The Boat Club, College of Engineering Pune

Prizes: The top 8 in the Open category and the top two College participant get cash prizes. The total prize money will be INR 6500

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).