2024 British Student Quiz Championships

2024 British Student Quiz Championships
Champion	Cambridge A
Runner-up	Imperial A
Third	tie: Durham A, Edinburgh A
High scorer	Ben Russell Jones
Site	Imperial
Field	24
Stats	[1]

The 2024 British Student Quiz Championships were held at Imperial College London on the 2nd of March 2024. The tournament was run on a Briticised version of that year's NAQT Division I SCT. 13 different universities were represented, with Manchester and Southampton returning after being absent in the previous year, and the LSE making their first appearance at a BSQC since 2014.

Qualification

As with recent years, the field was capped at 24 teams. Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Imperial and Oxford all automatically qualified one team each, from having placed fourth or higher in the 2023 BSQC. 15 further teams were selected via a dedicated qualifying round, in which they were read 60 sets of bonus questions (the same questions used to qualify teams for the IQBT Undergraduate Championship). The final four teams were selected as wildcards.

Tournament summary

The field was split into four prelim brackets and three playoff brackets. Oxford A (Jacob Robertson, Omer Keskin, Oliver Hargrave, Paige Crawley), Durham A (Michael Kohn, Kai Madgwick, Sam Moore, Isaiah Silvers), and Cambridge A (Agnijo Banerjee, Oscar Despard, Sam Foo, Harrison Whitaker) all topped their prelim brackets without a defeat, while Imperial A (Adam Jones, Justin Lee, Michael Mays, Enoch Yuen) led their bracket on points per game after having taken one loss to Oxford B.

The middle bracket was won by both Imperial B and Edinburgh B, with LSE topping the lower bracket, having narrowly missed out on the middle bracket on PPG. In a first for BSQC, four teams were tied on win-loss record by the end of the playoffs: Cambridge A, Durham A, Edinburgh A and Imperial A. Therefore a semifinal round was played, in which Imperial A defeated Durham A and Cambridge A defeated Edinburgh A, setting up a one-game final between Cambridge A and Imperial A. Imperial A pulled ahead quickly in the final, leading 225-70 by halfway. However, Cambridge A mounted an impressive comeback, with Imperial holding a 15-point lead going into the final tossup. Biochemistry student Oscar Despard answered the final tossup for Cambridge, who then scored 10 on the bonuses to win by the narrowest of margins, at 270-265.

A recording of the final was uploaded to the UK Quizbowl YouTube channel.

Participating universities

• University of Birmingham (1 team)
• University of Bristol (2 teams)
• University of Cambridge (4 teams)
• Durham University (2 teams)
• University of Edinburgh (2 teams)
• Imperial College London (3 teams)
• King's College London (1 team)
• London School of Economics (1 team)
• University of Manchester (1 team)
• University of Oxford (3 teams)
• University of Sheffield (1 team)
• University of Southampton (1 team)
• University of Warwick (2 teams)

Trivia

• This is the only time that Oxford has not appeared in the top three teams of BSQC.
• This is the only BSQC in which all eight finalists from the previous year's BSQC returned.
• Cambridge A were only in contention for the final after a resolved protest and converting the replacement tossup gave them the victory over Cambridge B.
• Moments after winning the BSQC trophy, Cambridge broke it. The fixed version's label states that it was engraved in Haverfordwest.