Torrential rain and bad weather greeted the General quiz which was held at the YMCA on 19th June. The rain didn't cause any problems for the ever enthusiastic quizzers as there were around 45 odd teams who turned up for the quiz. Quite a few teams were without members, and it seemed like a scramble for people at the venue as quite a lot of teams were formed on spot. A short delay later, the written prelims began, consisting of 34 questions with teams fighting for space to sit, stand or even squat on the floor to write the answers.
The prelims consisted of a nice blend of questions from the world of films, cricket, geography, food and culture.
After the checking of the preliminary sheets, Hammer and Tongs topped the preliminary round with a score of 20, closely followed by Quiz Lovers of Kolkata and Inmaniacs. The other teams which made their way to the stage were Last Action Heroes, Boye Geche, Four of a Kind, Lateral Thinkers and TNT Tears with the cutoff being a score of 14 and a couple of stars.
The format of the Finals consisted of 70 questions with a Long Visual Connect Theme round.
The Finals began with the first question being unanswered by the teams on stage and was answered by someone in the audience. But after that, most teams most teams opened their account with the lead changing hands from TNT Tears to Hammer and Tongs to Last Action Heroes. At the end of the first half though, Last Action Heroes and Hammer and Tongs were the front runners of the quiz with Inmaniacs, TNT Tears and Boye Geche close behind.
Before the second half of the quiz was the Theme Round where the quizmaster would show numerous visuals on the screen and the earlier the theme got answered, more the number of points would a team get.
The First visual was that of Michelle Obama and the second one was that of Jude Law. At this stage a correct answer would fetch 80 points while a wrong answer would mean negative 40. Nonetheless, TNT Tears went for the theme and got it right! Seeing this, Hammer and Tongs, Inmaniacs, Boye Geche and Last Action Heroes went for the theme as well on the 2nd slide and got it right as well! Four of a Kind and Lateral Thinkers cracked the theme a few slides later and settled for lower theme round scores. It was one of those days at the office for Quiz Lovers of Kolkata who failed to manage the theme at all. The other visuals of the theme round was the map of USSR, a Blackbird plane, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, A Walrus, Julia Roberts, the singer Madonna and Maxwell. Guesses anyone? The answer was - Songs by the Beatles.
Moving to the second half, the direction changed and so did the frequency of answers by Inmaniacs as they came close to the the leaders of the quiz, Hammer and Tongs. A late surge by the Last Action Heroes made the quiz very tight towards the end. As the last question was asked, all three of those teams were on 180 points and in a nail biting finish, Four of a Kind answered the last question correctly before Hammer and Tongs and made sure the quiz ended in a 3 way tie for first place with a score of 180 each for the three teams.
A couple of Sudden death Tie breaker questions later, Last Action Heroes had to settle for third place at the quiz as the other two teams cracked one answer which they failed to get right.
At the next question to settle for First place, Inmaniacs got the correct answer as Hammer and Tongs got the wrong answer and thus Hammer and Tongs had to settle for second place while Inmaniacs placed first.
After a really long time was a quiz so closely fought, with almost all the teams being very close to each other. Credit must be given to Dhruv Mookerji for such a well researched, nicely presented and a quiz where we had to put our thinking caps on to do well.
The top three teams were gifted Books from the sponsors - Crossword.
Also worth mentioning was that Sarath Rao shot the quiz in detail for a documentary on the quizzing culture in India.
Also credit must be given to Dhruv for ensuring that there was no entry fee for the teams, which did show with the number of teams turning up.
Final Standings :
1st - Inmaniacs (Gautam Ghosh, Abhijit Banerjee, Anirudh Chari and P. Srikant)
2nd - Hammer & Tongs (Jayshree Mohanka, Souvik Guha, Sanjay Mukherjee and Anil Vaswani)
3rd - Last Action Heroes (Partha S. Ghatak, Samrat Dutta, Sumantra Gupta and Anurag Sarkar)
Selected questions from the quiz :
Q : If Glaziers in Venice messed up while creating any glass product, rather than waste the glass by disposing of it, they would convert that product into a _____, whivh was the italian word for a common flask. This word is now commonly used in English. Which word?
A : Fiasco.
Q : Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, jack Haley and Terry were cast as 4 of the 5 in a group of characters in a film. Who was cast as the 5th member of this band of travellers?
A : Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz.
Q : A tetragrammatron means 'word with four letters'. However all 4 letter words are not tetragrammatrons. This term specifically refers to one thing - there is only 1 tetrgrammatron ( and it's used in a religion ) . What is it?
A : YHWH ( jehovah)
Q : Tagline for which film was -'A tale of murder, lust, greed, revenge and seafood' ?
A : A fish called Wanda.
Looking forward to another quiz by Dhruv da in the future!
11 comments:
Can you please change the template? White letters on a dark background are tough on the eyes, especially for senior citizens like me.
Black letters on white background would be much easier to read.
J.A.P.
Thanks for the feedback Mr. Prufrock. The template has been changed. Happy reading.
As a first offering of this kind from the quizmaster, a commendable effort. We all had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. A large part of the crowd stayed back to watch till the end. There were nuggets we could take home from the quiz. The quiz covered a large gamut of subjects and had a world-wide span. The questions were short in length (true Calcutta style), well-framed and, generally, well-researched. The quizmaster had a pleasant approach, and connected well with the quizzers. Look forward to more such long general quizzes from this quizmaster.
Now, for the drawbacks.
The first attempt at the LVC could get you 80 points and set back another team by 40 points. The quiz would be essentially decided on this question, no matter how the teams fared on the other 70 questions. This kind of thing should be avoided. In fact, LVCs and other gimmmicks demean the serious nature of quizzes and do not have a place outside of fun quizzes.
Possibly because Dhruv has not been a regular participant in quizzes in the past, he was unable to discern how tough each question would be for the quizzers. As a result, a few hackneyed, over-used chestnuts found their way into the body of questions which were otherwise of consistent line and length. E.g.: Melba, Nuncio, Pandemonium.
this is the problem with quizzing and quizzers in cal. they are so unwelcoming and resistant to change (no wonder they took 35 yrs to change a govt). innovative rounds like lvc ,theme rounds,cross words all add greatly to the value of the quiz without taking away anything of the seriousness. just because these rounds are new- and have not been faced by certain quizzers -does not mean we have to carry on quizzing as it was in the 80s. times have changes- multimedia can so easily be incorporated into quizzes nowadays-i think its just laziness and a rigid mindset of not trying out anything new that is preventing some quizzers from enjoying and embracing these new rounds. one liner dry question filled quizzes are so boring. and i don't think it is a crime to make quizzes interesting (as well as you are not demeaning its value -which lvc certainly don't).
but the number of marks in the lvc have to be carefully calibrated so that it does not become the sole determinant in the quiz.
Mr Anonymous you seem to have not been to too many recent Kolkata Quizzes. Or maybe you have not qualified in any of finals and not stayed back to really watch the quiz. These days nearly all Kolkata quizzes are being done on powerpoint and have a lot of multimedia content. And people like you must require a mile long question with 15 clues to figure out vtyhe answer. Try to attend some international quizzes where they don't have long questions. Anyway the point raised was 80 points for the LVC in a quiz where the winning score was 180. A LVC or any special round should not give more than 20 points. Then you will find people who will only crack the LVC and win. You sound very bitter. You must be one of those people who knbowledge is limited to the blogs and wikipedia.
Yes, Calcuttans are a bit traditionalist. The traditional Kolkata quiz is - fun out of knowledge, not fun out of gimmickry. That's the way it is. And, it happens to be the accepted international style in quizzing as well. Refer all quizzes under the aegis of the IQA (International Quizzing Association) - WQC, etc. Also Transatlantic Quiz, Norway Quiz, etc. Even Brain of Britain, Mastermind, University Challenge, Weakest LInk, Jeopardy ... We will all have to conform to the international format for the future. Having said that, we should definitely have quizzes with gimmickry as a separate genre, as a lot of people do like that kind of thing. Afficianados of this second type of quizzing need not attend the first type which can be left to the serious guys. Live and let live!
If you find one-liner dry quiz questions boring, you are in the wrong sport. Try bungee jumping instead. Serious quizzing is not for everyone. It is a niche sport - for the well-read and the well-informed. Everybody is not a nerd or an intellectual, I accept.
In fact, Calcutta quizzing had been reduced to a lot of gimmickry without substance, until the revival since last year of serious quizzing, thanks mainly to efforts by Abhuda, KIngshukda and some others. Jayashreedi did a couple of nice half quizzes. All these quizzes had quality but no gimmickry.
i feel it is wrong to give too much weightage to the lvc. it should have equal weightage . what i try to do when i set questions is this - i think in an infinite bounce round of around 20-25 questions ,the top scoring team will get around 6-7 answers right and the average will be 3-4. so the theme round ,lvc or any other special round should have around 40 points. that maintains parity in my opinion. in dhruv's quiz - before the lvc- hammer and tongs, inmaniacs and us (lah) were on the same score.thankfully all of us got the the theme at the same slide but i had got a bit scared when i saw the amount of points on offer. i agree that cracking a theme at one go deserves a lot of extra credit but i still would recommend dhruv to reconsider the total points in theme rounds in future. have said that -i dont think themes and lvc s are gimmicks. who says u dont need knowledge or information to solve themes? they can be made as lateral or as difficult as the qm wants -and might need several levels of information on different topics to crack.
i think the biggest gimmick in quizzing today is the buzzer system and how big shot qms like giri and their followers want to conduct the entire quiz on buzzers almost. it might save them the trouble of preparing more questions ( i attended a quiz this yr hosted by a heeep beeeg name where the finals had all of 21 questions) but it turns a game of knowledge into a game of chance.
but who bothers- they r the ones hosting the big quizzes on tv and in big events elsewhere.
let us not decry any type of question outright. questions are a qm's prerogative and all i ask for is a situation where the best performing team wins.
i cant end without thanking dhruv for a wonderful quiz. a overwhelming majority of questions were fantastic, and the few that were "old chestnuts" were there probably due to the reason that abu da pointed out.hoping for lots more great quizzes from u.
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