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by John Nolan

Mistakes on a plane?

November 11, 2012 in EQC, Quizzes

Let’s hope not.  I’m writing to you now from about 20,000 feet, or whatever height Ryanair cruise at.  Alas, due to flight schedules, the three of us who departed Dublin at 6am on Friday, Padraic, Derek and myself, are now homeward-bound on Sunday morning.  Only David and Lorcan remain in Tartu to wear the green jersey in the Pairs event.

Day 2 in Tartu (assonance?) was a very busy one for the Irish competitors.  It began at 10am with the Individual Quiz, in the main hall.

You could say each round in that quiz is general knowledge.  You’d be more accurate though if you said each round is completely specific knowledge.  There’s very little general knowledge here.  For example, a question in round 6, asking for the name of the religious depictions of Jesus and the holy family in the Eastern Orthodox Church, stood out like a sore thumb.  It was a bit easy.*

Anyway, I outlined how we got on in yesterday’s post so let’s move on to the afternoon’s exciting event: Ireland’s first foray into knockout quizzing.

After the qualifier round of the Nations Cup, the top eight teams play out semi-finals (as in, 1-4 go for the main title and 5-8 try to get to the Plate final).  Similarly, the top eight teams in the Aspirational Cup (B teams etc and ad-hoc teams) have semi-finals and I actually got to MC one of these on Friday night.

This is a bit of an anomaly but the teams who finished 9th and 10th in the Nations Cup qualifier also get to have a knockout quiz.  This year, these teams were Germany and Ireland. Read the rest of this entry →

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by John Nolan

Questions from Tartu

November 10, 2012 in EQC, Quizzes

Individual quiz tablemates: Me, Kay, David and Jakob.

Righto. After my snafu earlier with the backspace key, I feel I owe you all some questions.

First, I need to report on how we did in this morning’s Individual Quiz. This event sees us all taking part on our own (the name would imply that, wouldn’t it?!) in eight rounds, the first seven each having 12 questions and the last round featuring 16. There are no themes or category rounds. Each one is mixed-bag/general knowledge/whatever you want to call it.

Table places are assigned based on the number we each have in the bottom-right corner of our name tags. Funnily enough, I ended up at the same table (11) as my colleague on the Irish team, David Fay. There we were joined by Kay from Norway and Jakob from Denmark.

At the end of each round, you simply swap your answer sheet with the person across the table from you, Jakob in my case, and the answers are then called out from the stage. We were all of roughly the same standard which was nice as it meant we did a lot of sympathising with each other after certain rounds. On one occasion, I “top-scored” with 2/12, whilst the others all got 1. Sufficed to say, we had a bit of fun with the whole thing.
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by John Nolan

Day 1: To Tartu we go

November 10, 2012 in EQC, Quizzes

The Irish team: Padraic Fanning, John Nolan, Derek Cray, David Fay and Lorcan Duff.

This year’s European Quizzing Championshipsare taking place in Tartu, Estonia. Ireland are respresented at this quiz festival by a team of five people: myself, Drek Cray, Lorcan Duff, Padraic Fanning and David Fay.

Getting to Tartu is a challenge in itself. It’s Estonia’s second city but Estonia isn’t that big a place. Thus, while Tartu does have an airport, it is only serviced by flights from two destinations – Tallinn and Helsinki. I didn’t see the point of flying to Tallinn and then on to Tartu, when Tallinn is all of two hours away by road and, unfortunately, there is no easy way to get from Ireland to Helsinki. Well, certainly no way at times that suited us.

Two of the team arrived in Estonia on Thursday night, staying in Tallinn before making their way to Tartu yesterday morning. Myself, Padraic and Derek were even more efficient. We left Dublin at 6.45am and flew to Riga, the captial of Latvia. Air travel can be a bit mysterious at times. Why does it take practically an hour to fly Dublin-London and it took us just 2 hours and 35 minutes to fly from Dublin to Riga?
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