World Quizzing Championships 2010

As my friends will know, I am a huge fan of all things trivia and quiz related, so one of the highlights of my year is the World Quizzing Championships. This year marked the second time that I officially took part in the competition - I had previously been a competitor in 2006 while studying in England, deciding to make the trip to Cardiff (where it was held) despite the fact that my final PPE exam was just two days later. That experience, as well as trying out the 2008 and 2009 sets of questions underlined that the World Quizzing Championships provides high quality but extremely challenging questions.

I had planned to take part in the quiz in Manila, and the Philippines itself has the strongest quizzing culture in Southeast Asia (though a distant second in Asia to the quiz mad Indians) but I ended up organizing a small leg of the competition in Singapore instead (Malaysia also has a tiny leg with around 2-3 competitors). In the end, we held the Singapore leg at The Yard, a small quiet British pub on River Valley Road (with claims to be the oldest British pub in Singapore). Joining me in this trivia madness was Jake, an American friend of mine who has partnered me in many quizzes in the past, and Kenneth, whom I met at the weekly quiz at Brewerkz and who hopes to take part in College Bowl quizzes in America, where he is headed to study.

A bit on the rules of the competition. Basically, there are eight categories - Culture, Lifestyle, Media, Entertainment, Sport and Games, World, History, and Science. They are divided at random into two parts of four categories each. There are 30 questions in each category for a total of 240 overall. The quiz is done individually, with no conferring, and competitors get an hour for each part. Their total score is tabulated by dropping their worst category and adding together the scores for the remaining seven, for a maximum total of 210 points. If scores are tied the person with the higher score in their worst category is ranked first.

What makes the quiz very tough is the quality and difficulty of the questions and the question of speed. Having 1 hour for 4 categories works out to 60 minutes for 120 questions or 30 seconds per question including reading the question itself, trying to recall the answer (or in some cases trying to work it out) and of course trying not to second guess yourself. The questions are often much tougher than your average pub quiz. All in all it makes for quite a challenge.

I set myself a number of goals for this year's quiz. First, I hoped to crack 100 points. Seemingly modest considering that the highest possible score was 210 (eight categories of 30 questions each, with the lowest scoring category disregarded), so surely scoring 50% or 105 should be a easy right? I knew from past experience that attaining even 15 in any category was a major challenge though I did hope to break 100 and if possible score 50%.

Besides that, I hoped to be the top scoring competitor in Southeast Asia. For that reason, I had hoped to fly over to the Philippines, where the best competitors are to take part there. It would also be a good opportunity to meet other quizzers which would have been nice.

In the end, I accomplished neither. I ended up with a respectable 98 points, good enough for a 127th in the world. A Filipino quizzer by the name of Leonard Gapol scored an even 100 to beat me by a mere 2 points. To break the top 100, a score of 105 was needed (which was coincidentally exactly half the marks). To put the result in perspective, there were over 1200 competitors taking part in this year's WQC, so my placing puts me just fractionally outside the top 10%. Not bad, even if I failed to accomplish my two other targets.

As for the questions, I was particularly proud because I didn't drop that many questions and managed to work out those that I knew I knew but took some time remembering. In my case it was the British fashion designer that committed suicide (Alexander McQueen), the French city where there was an alternative papacy (Avignon), the standard measurement of distance in Ancient China (the li) or the very young British diver who one of the youngest competitors at the Beijing Olypics (Tom Daley). In a quiz of this difficulty there is nothing more irksome that to have an answer at the tip of a brain which you can't quite pull out.

Of the ones that got away I should have gotten the clue to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris (mixed it up with the Luxembourg Gardens), and a music clip clue from the musical Hairspray, but there weren't that many dropped points for me in this particular quiz.

This turned out to be especially important this year as it was a fairly tough quiz compared to the ones in 2008 and 2009. I struggled on Sciences (which includes the Social Sciences), which was expected, but I didn't even manage a score of 10 in History, which is surprising, given it is a subject I am normally quite decent at. In the end I managed 19 in Media, 16 in Sport and Culture, 14 in Entertainment, 13 in Lifestyle, 11 in World, 9 in History and 8 in Science. Here's to more quizzing and a better score next year!