Cambridge

Overview

The Cambridge Quiz Society is the official quiz bowl team for the University of Cambridge, located in sunny Cambridge in England. Though the facebook membership numbers in the 100s, only about 20 people come to practice consistently. The official twitter account can be found here.

History

UK University quizzing sprang up, or at least gently emerged from its cave, in the mid-1990s when the return of BBC quiz show University Challenge in 1994 began to reanimate those competitive instincts among the new generation of trivia-hungry students. In 1998 Chris Harrison, one of the Imperial team who had won the 1996 TV series, organised the first British Student Quiz Championships, and several Cambridge colleges sent teams. A year later Oxford plucked up the courage to challenge Cambridge to the first Varsity quiz match, and though the result was eventually decided by a scoring error it at least started an august annual tradition of hard-fought rivalry. It was clearly time to back up the brave teams with a proper university society and so in June 1999 Sean Blanchflower and Robin Bhattacharyya of Trinity's 1995 winning University Challenge team founded the Cambridge University Quiz Society.

Although Oxford has largely had a strangehold over the British Quizbowl scene, Cambridge has emerged as a strong challenger over the past few years. In 2014, University Challenge winner Alex Guttenplan inspired Cambridge to its first ever victory in the Varsity match, a feat which was repeated in 2016, with strong performances from Samuel Cook and Elysia Warner.

Performances

A strong core of "novice" players contributed to success at the 2016 VCU Novice tournament in london.

Cambridge teams additionally performed very well at MTU with all 4 Cambridge temas handily defeating a strong Oxford A and an upset with Cambridge B defeating Cambridge A.

At 2016 ACF Fall's UK site, Cambridge A cleared the field taking both a strong Oxford A and a strong Oxford B to pound town. Notable negs included Elysia Warner buzzing with beethoven after only hearing "this composer". A new Cambridge A composition revealed to other teams that it is, in fact, big boy season.

Hosted Tournaments

• Penn Bowl 2016

• MUT 2016

• Cambridge Open 2017

Notable Players

• Ewan MacAuley, a strong physics and chemistry player whose skills were sharpened by playing at Oxford as an undergraduate, and dulled by playing at Cambridge as a PhD student.

• Sam Cook, a geography specialist

• Florence Chen, since graduated, a harvard undergraduate who played while getting a master's degree. Played at VCU Novice despite not being a novice.

• Tomas Kesek, since graduated, a strong player who despite being a physician by training failed to get biology questions

• Oliver Sweetenham, a top tier literature and history player specializing in the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

• Elysia Warner † a strong linguist cut down in her prime in a dispute over time limits during a practice session. Specialized in creoles and the musical Hamilton. A fan of the transcendentalist works of William Cullen Bryant

• Matthew Nixon, a musical and mathematical savant

• Daniel Chiverton, a specialist in mathematics, religion, and westerosi politics

• Ephraim Jacob-Jacobus Levinson, a fiesty competitor who studies the works of Steven Wallace

• Tom Hill, a disciple of the famous quizzer Bobby Seagull who has a lockdown on Sicilian religious persecution from 1120-1129, but needs to work on other things

• Bobby Seagull, whose twitter can be found here

• Theo Howe, a trash and east asia specialist

• Vitalijs Brejevs, a musical scholar studying the works of Stravinsky

• Julian Sutcliffe, a fan of Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill

• Sarah Binney, a physicist turned philosopher and one of the pub quiz managers