Quiz Team’s 2nd Place Victory at the Shanghai Invitational

On October 21, the AISG A Quiz Team participated in the 2017 Shanghai Invitational at SAS Puxi and won second place, qualifying for the High School National Championship Tournament of 2018.

For this invitational, AISG sent two teams, AISG A and AISG B. The A team is made up of Caroline Mao, Stanley Wang, Ben Lu, and I. The B team is formed by Jennifer Yang, Chrisee Zhu and Terry Ming. The teams are led by the quiz team coaches Mr. Andrew Sinclair and Mr. Chris Baier.

As soon as we arrived to SAS Puxi, we gathered in their auditorium. We were handed a schedule for the day and were greeted by an AISG friend, Mr. Menton. In that auditorium, the host coaches briefly went over the rules and the round robin format of the tournament. Then, we were quickly sent off to start.

For the A team, the tournament began great with the A team winning all three rounds. Stanley Wang, the history player of the A team said, “We started off quite well. Even though we lost some stupid points, we were still able to get those points back and defeat them.” However, in the next two rounds, the A team faced off against Puxi A and Singapore B and lost to both teams. It was during those two rounds that we really started to get an idea of how powerful our opponents were. Stanley commented, “The others, especially Chansol Park, the captain of Puxi A, was insanely good. They beat me to the buzzer on almost all of the history toss ups. It was quite frustrating, losing the points because someone else buzzed just a bit faster than me. The loss to the two teams really damaged our team spirit. We started making more stupid mistakes and I started doubting myself more.”

After the round robin, we took a lunch break and went to a restaurant nearby. I could feel that everyone was feeling a bit frustrated. So, to alleviate the frustration, we started sharing some of our funny mistakes that we’ve made, especially Stanley. I remember I mentioned how we all had some pretty embarrassing moments in the tournament, from Stanley screaming Japan the moment he heard whales to getting McDonalds and ESPN mixed up. After lunch, the stress and the frustration just slowly went away.

When the break ended, we found out that we did better than we thought. We had made it to the next round. In that round, we faced off against the Puxi B team. With our confidence back, we defeated Puxi B. That victory boosted our team spirit, which came in handy given that we made it to the semifinals and were playing against Singapore A, one of the best teams in Asia and last year’s champion.

When we played against the Singapore A, we tried our best and to our surprise, we won. We were shocked. Caroline Mao said, “I was not expecting this. We were doing okay so far, but this round we did amazingly well. I think this is partly due to their lack of a history player and the packet.” Stanley also commented saying that, “This is the best we’ve ever played. We all got powers and we doubled Singapore A’s scores! For a year now we’ve come to think of the Singapore A as gods, but now, we’ve beaten them. I’ve never been more excited in my life.” It was indeed unbelievable.

 

The victory of that round qualified us for the HSNCT and for the finals. In the finals, we were playing against the Puxi A team again. Filled with confidence, we were ready for them. There were some incredibly funny moments from that round. Stanley said that “I will never forget how Jacky buzzed and said goose when the answer was ghost. He heard Call of Duty and said goose. That was the single greatest and funniest mistake I have ever heard.” Caroline Mao also commented on how when calculus questions came up in the bonus round, we were so shocked since we just took a calculus test two days prior the competition.

In the end, we lost to Puxi A by about 30 points, which means if we had gotten one more question, we could have won. Nonetheless, we were incredibly happy in the A team’s placement in the invitational.

As for the B team, even though they had low placement on the team rankings, they were very high up in the individual rankings. This was quite outstanding considering how two of them had just started Quiz Bowl less than a month ago. Their individual rankings were even higher than members of the A teams in some cases.

Overall, the tournament was not only a great success for the Quiz Bowl teams, but it was also a great trip. Jennifer said, “The experience overall was pretty enjoyable. The week before the tournament I had spent extra time after doing homework to study for quiz bowl, because I knew that I had to cram an entire topic. It was nice knowing that my efforts had paid off. All of us were exhausted, but we had a lot of fun. It was definitely worth the eight hour train ride to and back from Shanghai. And plus, if we hadn’t come to this tournament, how could we possibly hear Jacky’s goose buzzz?”

With the tournament behind us, the quiz team is now starting to prepare for their next goal, winning the Singapore Invitational in March next year.