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University Challenge 2019/20

Started by Twit 2, July 16, 2019, 11:57:26 PM

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Twit 2

Wang's lot correctly got pre-bollocked by Paxo for their previous pontificating and then just carried on loudly dithering throughout this one, as well. Great team though, outrageous how much stuff they know with such a low average age.

touchingcloth

Brandon stormed that one! What a character. I can't decide if my favourite bit was hula just shrugging and pointing to the mathmo when a maths question came up, or the question which the rest of the team thought he would know about before he said "I wasn't listening".

Twit 2

#92
He's smug but he's insanely knowledgable. I reckon Wang will have him. Gonna be a stonkarse final.

Norton Canes

He's good, obviously, but he does hog the limelight while soliciting answers from his teammates. Hoping Imperial beat Wang's lot in the final but I'm not confident. Thinking Corpus Christi's endless deliberating will stultify Imperial in the same way Peter Ebdon did Ronnie O'Sullivan with his tiresome gamesmanship.

Norton Canes

Spoiler alert
Or maybe not. Brandon's tiny!
[close]

Twit 2

Small man syndrome. They deserve their win, though. CC had basically lost in the 1st minute, game over.

honeychile

Found Brandon irritating in the first couple of rounds, but warmed to him as the series progressed and was cheering him on in the final. Is it the first time a University challenge contestant has done a brazilian-footballer-style first name terms on the buzzer? I even wondered if his name was Brandon Brandon at one point, but no. Pleasingly irreverent.

Good looking boy too.

Accessory to war crimes in the 2032 Buttigieg cabinet no doubt.

Twit 2

I like how he said he was "out of" -  not from - Queens. "Straight out of Queens, yo, crazy motherfucker called Brandon..."

kalowski

This is the first episode of UC I've seen this series, and enjoyed both Wang (his dismissive wave of his hand when a colleague got something wrong) and Brandon (his small point to the guy next to him: "This guy's gonna answer"). Rich was on fire.
Loved this moment:
https://twitter.com/BazFlashmans/status/1252326299948941313

Twit 2

Anyone else think the questions were pretty easy for a UC final? Perhaps that's what allowed Imperial to walk it, as they're much quicker on the buzzer and confer less in bonuses. I think some more brutal questions would have levelled the playing field more, given CC a chance to get their foot in the door, for a Imperial to get some stuff wrong.

kalowski

Quote from: Twit 2 on April 21, 2020, 09:38:42 AM
Anyone else think the questions were pretty easy for a UC final? Perhaps that's what allowed Imperial to walk it, as they're much quicker on the buzzer and confer less in bonuses. I think some more brutal questions would have levelled the playing field more, given CC a chance to get their foot in the door, for a Imperial to get some stuff wrong.
Not as easy as the episode of Mastermind before it. Fucking hell they were easy.

Norton Canes

Turns out Brandon's a serial quiz show contestant in the U.S. and has pocketed a tidy sum in cash prizes. Ah well, it's not as if it's the first time the show's been hijacked by the pros...

"The Open University (OU) won the 1999 series with a team whose age averaged 46. Three of the four team members were former Brain of Britain and Mastermind finalists or otherwise professional quiz show contestants who had joined the OU specifically in order to appear on the show"

Twit 2

It's a competition, I have no problem with ringers entering.

touchingcloth

Quote from: Norton Canes on April 21, 2020, 11:49:24 AM
Turns out Brandon's a serial quiz show contestant in the U.S. and has pocketed a tidy sum in cash prizes. Ah well, it's not as if it's the first time the show's been hijacked by the pros...

"The Open University (OU) won the 1999 series with a team whose age averaged 46. Three of the four team members were former Brain of Britain and Mastermind finalists or otherwise professional quiz show contestants who had joined the OU specifically in order to appear on the show"

If this - https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/apr/22/university-challenge-brandon-blackwell-us-star-team-would-have-killed-it-without-me - is to be believed, then his hijacking of the quiz was quite the undertaking:

Quote
Brandon Blackwell, from Queens in New York, had never left his home country when he decided he wanted to win a British quiz show. An enthusiastic quizzer since he was a child, he knew Britain had "the greatest quiz infrastructure in the world", but had only heard of one programme: Mastermind.

On trying to apply, however, he realised that he would need to be a UK resident, and since he was planning to study for a master's anyway, he decided to look for courses in Britain. "But it turns out, if you Google [quizzes] and university, a show called University Challenge comes up. So I watched a couple of episodes on YouTube and thought: oh, this is way easier to prepare for."

...

What does he love about quizzing? "I mean, it's just what I spend most of my time doing. I guess I like the challenge of it. I'm just very competitive, period."

Blackwell is a TV quiz veteran in the US, where he first appeared on Teen Jeopardy at the age of 14. Appearances on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and The Million Second Quiz mean he has earned more than $460,000 (£370,000) on TV alone. "I always joke that the US is good money, bad questions, and the UK is good questions, bad money," he says. University Challenge, of course, has no monetary prize.

He would love to complete Britain's "big four", he says – listing Only Connect, Mastermind and Brain of Britain as his other fantasy targets – but for now he is focusing on "training" himself – "continuing to play some quizzes, winning some, mostly losing some, but most of all getting closer and closer to those top players".

I still find it surprising that there are quizzers out there who properly train themselves in general knowledge. I think the first time I became properly aware of that being a thing was Paul Sinha's first RHLSTP appearance where he talked about being at a pub by himself with his book of trivia, and clocked one of the Egg Heads doing the same thing at a different table. My assumption is still that the majority of contestants just rock up unprepared and rely on the general knowledge that they've picked up by osmosis even though that clearly isn't the case.