Times of India Big Quiz

North Goa preliminary: 1.30 pm, 1st December 2010, Don Bosco High School, Panaji
South Goa preliminary: 1.30 pm, 2nd December 2010, Mahila Nutan English High School, Margao
South Goa semifinals: 9.00 am, 7th December 2010, Ravindra Bhavan, Margao
North Goa semifinals: 9.00 am, 9th December 2010, Hotel Fidalgo, Panaji
Finals: 9.00 am, 13th December 2010, Ravindra Bhavan, Margao.
QM: Rajiv D'Silva
Flavour: General
Participation: For students upto Class X, in teams of two. Contact 9881075752, 9764594928 or 9764011180 for details.

SEQC December Quiz

Date: 5th December 2010
Time: 5 pm
QM: Harshvardhan Bhatkuly
Flavour: General
Venue: CCP Hall, 2nd Floor, CCP Building, Opp. Cafe Central, Panaji
Participation: Open

MegaWhats 2010

The second edition of Mega-Whats, the Karnataka Quizzing Association's National Open Quizzing Championship will be held on the 12th of December.
The quiz will be held across nine cities simultaneously - Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Goa, Thrissur, Mumbai, Pune, New Delhi and Kolkata.

The venue in Goa will be the International Centre - Goa at Dona Paula.

The details:

Date: Sunday, 12 December 2010

QMs: Kiran Vijayakumar and Arul Mani
   1. General quiz, open to all.
   2. Teams of FOUR members (or less).
   3. Prior registration is essential.
   4. To register, please email Mahaquizzer@gmail.com with Mega-Whats 2010 and the city you are competing from in the subject-header.
   5. Please provide the names of the four people who comprise your team in the email–also indicate whether you are taking part in the school, college  or open categories
   6. Email registrations will close on Tuesday 7th December 2010.  Centre coordinators will allow entries after the cut-off date at their discretion.
   7. The school category is open only to teams comprising students from Std. VIII-X .
  8. Please report by 1430hrs at the venue. Since we need to ensure a coordinated start nationwide, the quiz will start at 1500hrs sharp. The doors will be closed five minutes before we begin.
  9. Contesting teams will answer in writing a quiz of six sections and about sixty questions, inclusive of audios, videos and visuals.
  10. Answers and scores will be announced immediately after the event–prizes will be given out for Best School Team, Best College Team, and Best Open Team.
  11. The prizes aren't small--they are insignificant.
  12. KQA will rank the top 100 teams across the country–this list will go up by the 25th of December.
  13. The rankings will be announced after adjudication. The decision of the quiz-masters will be final and binding on all participants.
14. The city-winners will face off in June 2011 as part of the KQA 28th Anniversary.

Twenty Paces gets buzzing

Twenty Paces, SEQC's solo knock-out quiz, promised by its very format to be an exciting competition. The first round match-ups, half of which were held on November 21, certainly lived up to that promise.

Several of the shoot-outs went into sudden death, and at least a couple of them resulted in upsets, including one huge one, as schoolboy Anurag Panicker knocked Harsh Bhatkuly out of the reckoning in a tie-break battle. The buzzer format, and tension of the one-on-one format, takes its toll even on the best quizzers.

Adish Talwadker was perhaps the only ranked quizzer who made it through with complete ease, winning his face-off against Soham Gaunekar 8-0. Some others who are usually among the SEQC seeds, picked up negatives along the way to falter, or come close to faltering.

Earlier that evening, eight participants who couldn't take the regular prelims tried out for the five Wild Card places that were up for grabs. A couple more huge shocks there -- Ajachi Chakrabarti and Rajesh Panicker failing to make it through as Wild Cards.

Lucano Alvares got 9 of the 10 Wild Card questions correct to qualify top of the pack, only to be knocked out by Leroy Veloso in the last match of the evening, evidently unnerved by a few early negatives.

Full marks to Sheriff Rajiv D'Silva, who conceptualised the format, and conducted the event with the ruthlessness and panache that Gene Hackman brought to the shoot-outs in 'The Quick and the Dead'.

The full scores are detailed in an earlier post.

Twenty Paces - Round 1 results

Wild Card Round:
1. Lucano Alvares - 9
2. Sunil Sardessai - 5
3. Akash Kulkarni - 4
4. Ramrao Wagh - 3
5. Atharv Joshi - 3
6. Rajesh Panicker - 2
7. Ajachi Chakrabarti - 1
8. Nitish Fatarpekar - 0

The top 5 finishers from the Wild Card Round qualified for the main draw.

Round 1 results:
1. Anjali Sen Gupta bt Jatan Rodrigues 4-3
2. Anant Lawande bt Joshua Fernandes 4-3
3. Valmiki Naik bt Atharv Joshi 5-2
4. Adish Talwadker bt Soham Gaunekar 8-0
5. Anurag Panicker bt Harshvardhan Bhatkuly 4-3 (Sudden Death tie-break)
6. Sunil Sardessai bt Wilson Vaz 5-4 (SD tie-break)
7. Kunal Naik bt Ramrao Wagh 4-3 (SD tie-break)
8. Leroy Veloso bt Lucano Alvares 6-2

Here is the updated draw. Round 1 matches will resume on the 19th of December.

Twenty Paces - Round 1

Round 1 matches kick off this Sunday with the following quizzers facing-off against each other (not necessarily in this order, though):
1. Valmiki Naik vs Wild Card 5
2. Leroy Veloso vs Wild Card 1
3. Anant Lawande vs Joshua Fernandes
4. Adish Talwadker vs Soham Gaunekar
5. Harshvardhan Bhatkuly vs Anurag Panicker
6. Wilson Vaz vs Wild Card 2
7. Anjali Sengupta vs Jatan Rodrigues
8. Kunal Naik vs Wild Card 4

Date: 21st November 2010
Time: The Wild Card round will begin at 4.15 pm, Round 1 matches will begin at 5 pm.
QM: Rajiv D'Silva
Flavour: General
Venue: The International Centre - Goa, Dona Paula.

Twenty Paces - Prelims Results

Here are the results and scores of the Twenty Paces prelims held on the 7th November. (The number in the last column indicates the question number it took to break a tie by sudden death.)
Based on the rankings, here are the match-ups for Round 1.
Update: Click here to find the draw.

SEQC November Quiz - Results

QM: Paul Gatward

1st: Aniruddha Sen Gupta, Anjali Sen Gupta, Avinash Mandora, Kunal Naik, M. S. Raghunandan, Paresh Mandora, Pushkar Shirodkar, Saheel Wagh, Shubham Tiwari, Vinitta Panicker - 97
2nd: Ameya Mardolkar, Anmol Naik, As'ad Shah, Kiran Desai, Prajeet Madkaikar, Tallulah D'Silva, Rajiv D'Silva, Raj Kunkolienkar, Taran Mukherjee, Valmiki Naik, V. R. Muralidharan - 93
3rd: Aniruddha Borkar, Anurag Panicker, Jatan Rodrigues, Jayant Karn, Joseph De Souza, Mahesh Prabhu, Omkar Borkar, Ramrao Wagh, Sachin Chatte, Shraddha Moye, Shweta Moye, Suyash Kamat, - 84
4th: Abhijeet Virgincar, Akshay Rege, Ashwin Mysore, Blessie James, Harshvardhan Bhatkuly, Kiril Vaz, Paola Mambro, Prajakt Kamat, Shaila De Souza, Soham Gaunekar - 75
5th: Cynthia Latimer, Fred Latimer, Kanchan Gatward, Malcolm Rocha, Nalini Rocha, P. D. Mukherjee, Sanchita Rodrigues, Savitri Rane, Simon Charlesworth - 71
6th: Akshay Thatte, Amit Shet, Anagha Panicker, Joshua Fernandes, Leroy Veloso, Nitish Fatarpekar, Rovan Vaz, Shaswat Salgaonkar - 67

The next monthly quiz will be held on the 5th of December, to be hosted by Harshvardhan Bhatkuly.

The Empire Strikes Back

Paul Gatward's oft-repeated complaint about our quizzes is that there's too much "Indian stuff" that he has no chance of answering, so will it be payback time now? Turn up to find out.

SEQC November Quiz

Date: 7th November 2010
Time: 5 pm
QM: Paul Gatward
Flavour: General
Venue: CCP Hall, 2nd Floor, CCP Building, Opp. Cafe Central, Panaji
Participation: Open