British Quiz Championships

On something of a whim, I decided to enter the British Quizzing Championships at the weekend. Back when I was doing the Quiz GP circuit on a more regular basis, I had entered the British Quiz Championships in 2013 and secured what I rank as my best ever quizzing performance, landing 28th position. Given that was 7 years ago, and the lack of GP practice etc, I would be foolish to aim that high this time around but had a realistic goal of ending in the Top 50-60. In the age of Covid, this was a British Quiz Championships like no other with several live venue's running and a Zoom room for players not able to make a venue. Given that my decision to enter was very last minute, it was Zoom for me, and after going through the set up rules I was ready to play at 11am on Saturday with around 70 others in the zoom and over 100 at live venues. The BQC, as I now shall refer to it as, involves 6 sets of 40 questions on Sport, Entertainment, Art and Culture, Lifestyle, History and Civilisation and Physical World. Anyone who has played a Grand Prix Quizzing event will also know that only your top 5 scores count, meaning one of your papers is dropped. I do not necessarily agree with this rule, as I think a quiz is a quiz and you shouldn’t be able to just drop a subject. I understand why they do it, but….. ….it does tend to help me. As it means 60% of the quiz is contested on my three favourite subjects. Sport, Entertainment and Lifestyle – meaning I can get away with having a poor Physical World paper (or in fact not even giving it much time as I did this weekend). Hardly seems, fair and my place would drop considerably had all 6 been included. But the rules are the rules. As it happened, I was able to land a solid 60th place out of 167 players which I am happy with including a joint 7th finish in the Sport genre. Again, I was solid throughout the three papers I consider my strongest, so if entering again next year my focus has to be on improving the History/Civ and Art and Culture scores to the same level. It was a fun paper, set by Andrew Frazer of QLL, and I left only about 5-6 points “on the table” but probably balanced that out with some lucky guessing. Lowlights being not being able to name Elvis First US No. 1 (even though we were told it had an alliterative title) and fluffing a gimmie on Passport colours by not being able to grasp the question but all in all it was a fun quiz and it was good to be back competing in a GP event. Roll on next year….