Sunday, May 10, 2015

BC Cup 2015 - 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 28 question Finals played over two legs (home and away) to determine the winner. We ditched the college finals due to lack of turnout.

Report: 
The quiz started with a 30 qn elims set which turned out to be quite tough with all contestants claiming they wont qualify at the end! Venkatraghavan (ie Ingit Sir) topped with a phenomenal 16.5 pts and Shrirang too put in a strong performance with 13.5 pts. The others were bunched up around 10 points, with Rohit Suresh just making the cut above Suraj with 9 points. A lot of good quizzers were on 8 or 8.5 points - Suraj, Kaushik, Atul, Samridh and Parijat (who also won the College section) which shows how strong the field was this year.

The Quarter Finals:

The Quarter finalists were :
Shrirang Raddi, Prithwish Datta, Samrat Sengupta, Ingit Sir, Rohit Suresh, Anannya Deb, Arnold D'Souza and Shubhankar Gokhale.

The Quarters were very even till the first half with all 8 people on 2-3 points. Anannya put in a stellar performance to top the elims consistently scoring in all sports. The QF ended up being very close with all 8 people having a chance to qualify with 3 questions to go. It ended with Anannya comfortably winning with 9 points and Samrat and Arnold also qualifying with 6 points. Ingit got a NBA question right and forced a three way tiebreaker against Shubhankar and Rohit for the 4th Semi final spot. A lengthy tie breaker later, Rohit won on sudden death to take the final spot.

The Semi-Final
Anannya continued his form from the Quarters and steadily built a lead which was enough for him to win. For most of the quiz, Samrat seemed to be comfortably taking the other final spot, by Arnold pulled off a brilliant comeback to answer two of the last four to tie scores on the last question of the semis. Another tie-breaker ensued - and Samrat won to cement his place in the finals.

(Side note: Q19 of the Semis was the 1000th question asked in the BC Cup - many thanks to all participants for continued support. We hope to go on for a 1000 more)

The Finals 
Samrat won the toss and went first. In his first home half he scored 1 goal and almost got a second. Anannya failed to score in his first home half. Things were getting interesting as Anannya got an away goal in Samrat's second home half, but Samrat rallied to get two answers in quick succession to take the score to 3-1. Anannya needed to just tie to win the match in his second home half, but he remembered the name of a Soviet gymnast and an Indian athlete just after giving the wrong answer. Anannya thus lost a successive BC Cup final and continued his tremendously consistent run at the Cup while Samrat won his first BC Cup in style.

BC Cup Champion 2015 : Samrat Sengupta
Runner Up : Anannya Deb 

College Champion: Parijat Chaudhary

As for the review of the quiz, I request those who attended to share their feedback in the comments section.