Korean Quizbowl

jadepearla · Mon, 13 Aug 2001 11:53:00 -0700

I was rained in while in Seoul when this caught
my eye on national TV:

Korean high school
quizbowl. Combining traditional quizbowl, tic-tac-dough and
a singles round. It was even more interesting for
being done completely in English.

Two high
school teams face off with 4 members and individual
buzzers there is tossup and bonus. The tic-tac-toe board
has general subject headings in each box, such as,
humanities. The toss-up will get you a placement of 'X' or
'O' while the bonus will get you bonus points. The
toss-ups seemed to have variable point value and I was not
sure if the points varied due to overall question
difficulty or if you got more points answering earlier in
the question.

There were penalties for
interrupt similiar to western quizbowl with minus points
and the offending team not being allowed to answer a
second time. No penalty for the other team missing the
question. 

Winning the board is factored with
having a large score. If a school wins the board they
get points but if the other school killed their boni
but missed the last placement to win the board they
still can be ahead in total points. Which makes the
last part, the singles round crucial in some
instances. 

The singles round is carried out where
the losing captain of a team chooses a general
subject among those offered by the moderators and then
chooses the single player to duel with the other team's
chosen player.

The singles round is dedicated to
a particular subject. Each question is worth a set
amount of points and there is a set amount of time for
this singles match to last. There is no limited amount
of questions that can be asked during the round so
you could have many points accrued based on the skill
of the players. Similiar to the lightning round
concept.

In all question situations the player is allowed to
interrupt and does not have to wait for the moderator.
Question style is not pyramidal but maybe a long sentence
with no give-way at the end.

Team scores were
recorded but there were no individual stats. 

It
was kind of cool to see the auditorium packed. The
supporters of the teams were seated behind the team while
the camera faced the players. High schools competed
against each other with only one game televised per day.
It seemed that it was different schools each day. I
am not sure if there was an overall rankings of high
schools with win loss records though it seemed during
conversation there was something that might be intimated of
its existence.

If anyone has more info that
would be neat. I admit that I was distracted with other
things so hopefully I have most of the details right.