AsKQAnce 2014 Report

AsKQAnce

AsKQAnce is the annual quiz fest of the Karnataka Quiz Association. It is generally done on two weekends, the first being a series of Open Quizzes, and the second being a series of quizzes for students from middle school, all the way till college.

Open Quiz Report

The AsKQAnce 2014 Open Quizzes were held between June 27 - 29, 2014. While June 27 & 29 were unsuccessful days, June 28, 2014 (ironically a century after June 28, 1914, the date that changed history), was the day where I enjoyed a 100% qualification at AsKQAnce. In the Sports Quiz, I qualified along with Sachin Deshpande and a couple of other people who were looking for teammates (while I was looking for a team and Sachin came in later), and in the Movie Quiz, I qualified along with Atul Mathew, Rajagpoal P.S. and the anchor of our team in the finals, Arun Ramanathan. However, while the highs were there, they failed to predict the lows that were to soon follow.

School and College Quiz Report

While I could obviously not participate in the school quiz, I decided to watch them in preparation for the college quiz to follow. Before going into details I would like to say that my old high school, St. Joseph's Boys' High School came in for AsKQAnce missing one of their best quizzers (namely Hayden D'Souza of Class VIII). In the High School prelims, I equalled a pair of students from Class VIII (Ritwik Saldanha and Kaustubh Roy), and beat the other team from SJBHS (Hari Kartik and Amrit Sodhi) by just 1 point. While that should have sounded warning bells, it did not prepare me for what followed after.

Hari Kartik, teamed up with Ritwik and Kaustubh and qualified for the finals of the Junior College Quiz (for students of Class XI and XII), despite the fact that their team had one student from Class X and two students of Class VIII (neither of whom was Hayden D'Souza). They outscored me by more than 3 points, and finished tied first due to the silly concept of civilized limited pounce employed by the quiz master and also lack of experience to close out the quiz at a couple of critical junctures. They ended the quiz second, while I failed to qualify (even for the college quiz).

So, while I may be upset that it was the first time I lost to juniors from my school in a quiz while they were still in school, I am also proud that, at least for now, the SJBHS quizzers that I scouted and trained between June 2010 and December 2011 will be competitors, not clowns.