The big guns fire at the BQC

S Balakrishnan conducted a quiz yesterday at the Pinstorm office that was like a pot belly: it separated the men from the boys. The big guns of the BQC fired at last, as last year's league champion, AP Alagarsamy, romped to victory in a team that included BQC heavyweights like Rishi Iyengar, Sumant Srivathsan and Kartik Srivatsa. All of them had been either absent or under-performing in the last few weeks, though Rishi had signalled an eldritch drive to being eaten first by winning the last quiz.

Meanwhile, the biggest gun of them all, Rajiv Rai, ended up second, which was sufficient to take him to the top of the BQC League table. Mahesh Murthy's team, which contained notables Pradeep Ramarathnam, Govind Grewal and Ajith Prabhakar, came third.

The results are below, with the league standings below that.

1st with 39 points
AP Alagarsamy
Rishi Iyengar
Sumant Srivathsan
Kartik Srivatsa
Gaurav Singh

2nd with 33 points
Rajiv Rai
Amit Varma
Nandan Krishnaswamy
Kedar Shastry

3rd with 26 points
Mahesh Murthy
Pradeep Ramarathnam
Govind Grewal
Ajith Prabhakar

4th with 25 points
Dhananjay Shettigar
Amit Pandeya
Sarat Rao
Sushant Raut
Nrupal Choudhari

5th with 20 points
Arvind Krishnaswamy
Vibhendu Tiwari
Sauvik Basu
Niraj

6th with 16 points
Sireesh Rao
Sarayu Natarajan
Hanisha Vaswani
Arjun Sinha
Mehar Sridhar

7th with 15 points
Anand Sivasankar
Prasann Potdar
Devang Ghia
Prateek Chaturvedi

And now for the standings. A quick note, in case you missed it earlier: This season, all finalists do not get points. The team-members of the winning team get 10 points each, there are seven for second place and four for third. If there is an open quiz in which we have elims etc, then finalists get two points each.

BQC Season Two Standings (as of July 15, 2007)

34 points
Rajiv Rai (from 4 quizzes)

31 points
Ashwan Lewis(4)

24 points
Mahesh Murthy (4)
Rishi Iyengar (4)

21 points
Amit Varma (4)

20 points
AP Alagarsamy (5)
Kartik Srivatsa (2)

17 points
Anand Sivasankar (5)
Prasann Potdar (4)
Kedar Shastry (3)

15 points
Vibhendu Tiwari (5)
Pradeep Ramarathnam (5)

14 points
Ameya Samant (4)
Amit Pandeya (6)
Ajith Prabhakar (4)
Sumant Srivathsan (3)

12 points
Govind Grewal (5)

11 points
Ajay Ravindran (2)
Dhananjay Shettigar (5)

10 points
Aravinda Talluri (1)
Avinash Mudaliar (3)
Nilesh Jain (1)
S Balakrishnan (4)
Tanmay Sharma (2)
Gaurav Singh (1)

8 points
Hanisha Vaswani (5)

7 points
Akshay Mahajan (1)
Meghashyam Shirodkar (1)
Nandan Krishnaswamy (3)

4 points
Devang Ghia (4)
Francis Rodrigues (3)
Padma Sinha (2)
Pranav Kukreja (1)
Samrat Sengupta (2)
Sushant Raut (5)

The next quiz will be conducted by Salil Bijur and Dhananjay Shettigar at 3pm on July 29, at Pinstorm.

A final word: We were all disappointed to learn that Ashwan Lewis has been rather ill, and missed this quiz because he was hospitalised a day earlier. Everyone at the BQC hopes that he recovers soon and gets back into action. The leaderboard needs him!