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Gareth Kingston welcomes us to the individual quiz.

Day 1 of the 2015 Celtic Nations kicked off at 10am and, from then until after 9pm, was full of quizzing.  Personally, it also contained some major disappointments, along with minor triumphs for yours truly.

The day began with the first set of international matches.  These featured the hosts taking on the defending champions Scotland.  As I mentioned yesterday, the way the event works is that for each of the international matches the nation not taking part is in charge of the questions.  Myself and Lorcan Duff wrote this first set of questions (I’ll upload them later, if you’d like to give them a go).  I took charge of the A match, featuring the like of Anne Hegarty (from The Chase) and 2014 Brain of Britain champion Mark Grant, whilst some of my team mates hosted the B, C and even an informal ‘D’ match. I’m glad to say the feedback on our questions was very positive (even the ones which were deemed “a bit hard” for this august group!).  In the A room, Wales got off to a terrible start and never could catch up; Scotland ended up winning by 10 points.

Straight after this match everyone was in action in the weekend’s individual event.  This saw us all taking on a 100-question paper over 75 minutes.  The questions were good, hard, as one would experience at the EQC itself.  To be honest though, I felt the 75 minutes was a tad long.  You know what you know.  At the end, Mark Grant successfully defended his title, comfortably so, as his 79 points total was nine ahead of Scotland’s Rob Hannah.  Ireland’s Mark Henry has been in great form in the Hot 100 lately and he carried this in to the individual quiz, emerging at the top Irish player on 67, which was good enough for fourth overall.  Our new player Hugh Brady had a terrific debut: his score of 62 saw him finish in ninth, just two points behind Dave McBryan and one behind Lorcan.  The top eight players from each nation contibuted points to the overal competition, based on where they finished.  My own 52 points was only good for 21st in the room but it did see me contributing some points to this table.

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