Down by 60 points in the final, tie-breaking round of the intercollegiate quiz bowl, UCLA answered four questions in a row on Saturday to rally for the win in a narrow 170-160 victory over Arizona State University.
The UCLA quiz bowl team’s win brought the end of a 15-round tournament that had lasted for nearly 11 hours, said Ravi Menghani, a medical student at UCLA who helped to direct the event.
The four undergraduate students on UCLA’s quiz bowl team answered hundreds of trivia questions to beat 10 other teams from colleges across the western United States including USC and Stanford University, Menghani said.
Teams competed head-to-head in a Jeopardy-style tournament that consisted of toss-up questions worth 10 points for a correct answer or negative five points for an incorrect answer.
Quiz topics ranged from academic subjects like history and medicine to general trivia and pop culture, Menghani said.
“We really did not expect to win,” said Tirth Patel, a second-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student who led the UCLA team.
In fact, the tournament could not have begun any worse for UCLA, Patel said.
“Our first game of the morning was just horrible,” he said. “We lost against Cal Tech, the final score being something like 395-40 points.”
The team recovered to dominate over the rest of the tournament, finishing the day with a 13-2 record.
The quiz bowl, which was held in Bunche Hall, is the first stage in an annual contest organized by National Academic Quiz Tournaments, Menghani said.
UCLA will go on to compete at the national level against 31 undergraduate teams in the Intercollegiate Championship held April 3-4 in Dallas, Texas.
“We fought very hard for this, and a lot of the games were really close. At the end it was like an unexpected but pleasant surprise to get first place,” Patel said.
The UCLA team consists of Patel, third-year biochemistry student Jeffrey Buenaflor, first-year mathematics student Ian Drayer and second-year biochemistry student Chris Ngoon.
All are members of the UCLA College Bowl Club, which meets twice a week for two hours at a time to prepare for upcoming events, Patel said.
On top of this, Patel said he intends to spend added time working with his team to train for the national tournament, which he said will be “on a whole different level” from any event his team has participated in so far.
Despite the time commitment involved, Patel said college bowl is easily worth doing.
“Being a science major, I usually don’t get to take that many literature or art classes, so College Bowl allows me to learn about subjects that I otherwise would not have studied,” he said.
“I also get to meet people from around the country with different majors and different backgrounds but who all have an interest in college bowl.”
Menghani, who helped found the UCLA College Bowl Club in 1999 as an undergraduate student, said he agreed.
“This is a great way to have fun with your friends and to learn about trivia in a non-stressful setting,” he said.
He added, “And you don’t have to worry about getting a bad grade.”