The Govind Grewal Rampage

Govind Grewal lurked in 10th place in the BQC league at the start of the latest BQC quiz, but served up a warning to all the so-called big guns with a resounding win. Partnering Shambhu Shankar and John Mascerenhas, he led from start to finish, winning by a handsome margin. Five other teams spent time in second place, and if the quiz was a few questions shorter or longer, the 2nd to 6th placings might have been completely different.

Arvind Krishnaswamy's quiz was exceptional, with many topical questions that were workoutable by non-quizzers. Indeed, there were no chestnuts at all, and no recycling of standard quizzing fundas that give old-timer quizzers an advantage over relative newbies. Purists could have objected to the handful of lexical connects that snuck in -- 'Velvet' being a connect in a question with images of Lou Reed, Vaclac Havel and National Velvet -- but at least they were fun, not arcane and far out.

The results:

1st with 29 points
Govind Grewal
Shambhu Shankar
John Mascarenhas

Joint 2nd-3rd with 23.5 points each
Rishi Iyengar
Vibhendu Tiwari
Ameya Samant

AP Alagarsamy
Devang Ghia
Souvik Basu

4th with 21.5 points
Amit Varma
Sarat Rao

Joint 5th-6th with 19 points each
Rajiv Rai
Udatta Duarah
Mukund Krishnan

Sumant Srivathsan
Samrat Sengupta
Anand Sivasankar

7th with 8 points
Pradeep Ramarathnam
Shiju Thomas

8th with 6 points
Ajith Prabhakar
Richa Bhargava

And now for the standings:

BQC Season Two Standings (from 15 quizzes, as of November 18, 2007)

79.5 points
Rajiv Rai (from 11 quizzes)

62 points
Amit Varma (12)
Prasann Potdar (10)

53 points
Rishi Iyengar (12)

48 points
Ashwan Lewis (8)

41 points
Sumant Srivathsan (11)

40 points
Govind Grewal (12)

35 points
S Balakrishnan (10)

37.5 points
AP Alagarsamy (11)

34.5 points
Vibhendu Tiwari (13)

32 points
Ajith Prabhakar (13)

29 points
Pradeep Ramarathnam (10)

28 points
Mahesh Murthy (6)
Kedar Shastry (9)

26.5 points
Mukund Krishnan (7)

26 points
Ameya Samant (12)

24 points
Amit Pandeya (9)
Anand Sivasankar (12)
Kartik Srivatsa (5)

20.5 points
Devang Ghia (13)

18 points
Kartik R (?)
Sarat Rao (?)

17 points
Ravi Venkatesh (6)

16.5 points
Dhananjay Shettigar (10)

14 points
Samrat Sengupta (5)
Udatta Duarah (5)

11 points
Ajay Ravindran (4)
Meghashyam Shirodkar (3)
Nandan Krishnaswamy (6)
Avinash Mudaliar (7)

10 points
Aravinda Talluri (1)
Neeraj (1)
Nilesh Jain (1)
Tanmay Sharma (2)
Gaurav Singh (1)
Raghu (?)
Sritanu Chakravarty (1)
Sowmya Ramaswamy (1)
Hansraj Singh (1)
John Mascarenhas (1)
Shambhu Shankar (?)

8 points
Hanisha Vaswani (5)
Francis Rodrigues (9)

7 points
Akshay Mahajan (1)
Rahul Bhaskar (3)
Saurav (?)
Nrupal Choudhari (?)

6.5 point
Souvik Basu (?)

4 points
Padma Sinha (3)
Pranav Kukreja (1)
Sireesh Talluri Rao (5)
Sushant Raut (5)
Chitra Raghunath (1)
Arvind Krishnaswamy (5)

The next quiz will take place at 3pm on Sunday, December 2. More details will follow on this blog, and on our email list.