L'IIMB Open Quiz

We didn't qualify. Nine out of forty-two (clever) right on the qualifiers. Highest was twenty-eight, cut-off twenty one. No, I'm not disappointed, this was an Open Quiz, remember? My first quiz against the (excellent) Bangalore quizzing crowd (students, I-don't-wanna-sleep-on-my-Sunday-corporates, etc.) The quiz lasted for about five hours, including a one-hour delay (pretty much short for a quiz), a one-hour preliminary, and the rest consisting of a final that had "LVCs", "Writer's block", "Stage 2" and of course "Drys" on Infinite bounce. Also, the "Connects" and IITB's (?) "Give fundae" too. More on these later.

On the preliminary: it seems preliminaries here (in Bangalore) are conducted in a format that I hate. Basically you're given blank sheets, and shown the questions on screen. I dislike this format intensely, it doesn't allow me multiple passes and is harder on the late-comers.

On the L'Final: Some of the quiz-masters (there were 3) had been to France, and never ceased to remind us of the fact. Be it questions that were definitely Europe-influenced, or visuals which they had taken, they let us know they had been to France. Bit fun in the beginning, but very tiring very soon. To be fair to them, they did warn us about it in the title (also the title of my post).

The final did have some interesting "rounds". First was the LVC, which I guess to be Long Visual Connect, a large (8 and 13 here) number of visuals which have to be connected to a theme. The visuals are not the questions though. Bit difficult this. Then there was "Writer's Block", which had questions to be answered (on paper, yuck!), as well as a theme to be found. "Give fundae" has percolated here too, a sign of lazy (and unprofessional) quizmastering? "Stage 2" was never revealed, the quiz-masters scrapping that round due to lack of time.

It was a long quiz. Really long. And given that most of the questions were not answered, it was a tiring head-splitting quiz. Not really much fun. Maybe the Quizmasters' had anticipated a higher quality of quizzer. Or not many of us are interested in France. I like long quizzes. Really long ones, but quizzes which are "gettable". Oh, and there were no audience goodies. Hmm ... wonder where that budget for the whole event went? No free t-shirts even. Sad. Maybe purists abound here. But full points to the guy who thought of seating 32 people (8 teams) on the stage on mattresses!

On IIMB: Well, what can I say? On fauna, doesn't even come close to the Institute. Too dry and brown. They have one very large stone building that contains all the classes, offices, auditorium, etc. and which is "fully connected" in the graph theory sense. Very lovely pergola though. But surprisingly for an institute that charges that much for fees, large parts of the building are "unfinished". Maybe it's a style, maybe they just convinced themselves it was done. Whatever.

But I've got an intro to the quiz circuit, which is good. There was the Mulky Memorial Quiz (founder of the Karnataka Quiz Association) just after the IIMB quiz (I didn't go), and coming 23, 24, and 25 of this month there's the Under The Peepul Tree quizzes by RV Quiz Corp. Muchos like what I wanted for the DBQ, but sadly that never came to be. Sigh. And of course, there's Tata Crucible on 25th (so tells my bro). Maybe this time lucky?

And of course, muchos gracias to my two partners, who got up at 5:30 in the morning, and sacrificed their Sundays for one mad quizzer!

And no, I haven't been to Spain.

[Found a lovely Crimson Rose which, sadly, had died for no apparent reason. Forgot it in restaurant on way home to hostel.]