Yesterday (Saturday December 5th), the IQO held the inaugural final of Brain of Dublin, a new individual quiz competition run in parallel with the Dublin Quiz League.
The tournament had actually kicked off in November 2019, with the intention of playing heats monthly until the final in April 2020…. but of course a global pandemic happened to get in our way, meaning the tournament was put on hold before we could play the semi-finals.
Everything remained on pause for over 8 months, until we decided to wait no longer and carry on the competition in late November, playing the remaining semi-finals and final online via Zoom instead.
There was more than bragging rights at stake, since we’d had enough entrants to fund a cash prize for our winner and runner-up (€100 and €50 respectively).
Karen Crofton of the IQO committee has kindly written an overview of the whole tournament, including the final, which follows below. Take it away Karen!
The Brain of Dublin rules and format are pretty much identical to the Brain of London (BoL) apart from in BoD your own question is worth 2 points instead of 1.
The amount of bonus attempts are calculated and it determines the order of subsequent passes of an incorrectly answered question onwards.
The seat assigned to each player is randomised, and the initial passing of unanswered questions is determined by this order until there is a passing order established.
The questions are largely the same level as BoL, but with an Irish/Dublin slant. Questions on Irish geography and Irish music, films and things scattered throughout but not solely Irish questions. A nice mix. Hoping to turn it into a Brain of Ireland if we have to continue online for the foreseeable…
In the first 2 heats we had half the amount of questions as in the semi finals and final. 8 topics became 16 topics (4 questions on each subject in each version) with players being asked pairs of questions.
In November 2019 we did a written qualifier quiz, with the top 32 qualifying to the heats. The top 2 players from each first heat (January) went through to the last 16, and the top 2 from each second heat went through to the last 8. The second heat was played in February but then unfortunately Covid-19 hit and we had to park it temporarily (ya know yourself!) eventually picking it up where we left off and playing the semi final last week. Here’s where the last woman standing (yours truly) said her goodbye to the competition…. ah I lasted as long as I could…. old Irish coins and science screwed me though.
Final players: Peter Lowney (scored 21 in his semi final), Kevin Jones (26), Patrick Carthy (34) and Eamonn O’Riordan (24).
Final results:
- Peter Lowney 21
- Kevin Jones 29
- Patrick Carthy 29
- Eamonn O’Riordan 14
Soooo….. that meant a tie-breaker! Dan had 4 questions ready for such an instance and a nearest the pin if that failed to separate the two.
Kevin went first, meaning that Patrick had to be put out into the waiting room and wait his turn. He couldn’t hear Kevin’s answers and Dan gave no indication as to whether Kevin was correct or not. Patrick returned and vice versa. When they were both back in the room the answers were revealed! 4/4 for each of them so that meant the nearest the pin had to happen.
… the eventual victor was Patrick!
HUGE Thanks to Dan for organising, he does an amazing job running the Dublin Quiz League so it was no surprise that the BoD was a huge success. Congratulations to Patrick and commiserations to Kevin, what an effort.