Let’s quiz: New league all set to be launched in July
CHENNAI: The league format, along the lines of the glitzy Indian Premier League (IPL), has worked wonders in popularising many sports in India in recent years. The Pro Kabaddi League is a pertinent example of how the right marketing and league structure can aid in boosting a sport’s visibility across the country. Now, quizzing which its proponents consider to be a mind sport is set to follow in that route with the introduction of the ProQuizzin League (PQL) from July onwards.
The inaugural edition of the event which features U-23 participants from the top colleges in the country will see six city-based teams, namely Chennai Erudits, Ahmedabad Intellects, Bengaluru Aces, Delhi Brainiacs, Kolkata Wizards and Mumbai Geeks. The teams will take part in 12 quizzes each and the top four at the end of the league stage will progress to the final. Each team consists of eight people, who were selected via an auction that was conducted virtually on Sunday.
The teams were given a pre-assigned purse of 30,000 points and had to make their picks accordingly. Joy Bhattacharjya, who has previously worked for Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL in addition to having vast experience in quizzing, conducted the auction process. “The auction was part of the organisers’ effort to create interest around quizzing. In every sport, people want to be recognised and it feels nice to have someone bid for your services. That is a part of what an auction does. It creates heroes, surprises and a little bit of interest around the format,” Bhattacharjya, who was responsible for the hugely popular ESPN school quiz in the mid-2000s, told this daily.
The co-founders of the league are avid quizzing enthusiasts and have been running the Kolkata Quiz Festival for the last decade. Aanton Mookherjee, who is one of the brains behind the league, hopes that the format can help quizzing attain popularity and convince young minds of its benefits. “We have been working and ideating on this league for the past couple of years. While doing the Kolkata Quiz Festival, we felt that a lot of people are addicted to quizzing. That motivated us to think about how we can make quizzing more exciting.
With a league format, we feel we can make quizzing that much more popular and make the young generation learn more,” Mookherjee said. While the inaugural edition will be streamed on YouTube, Mookherjee revealed that the plan is eventually to take the league to television and open it up for people of all age groups. In the inaugural auction, the participants were picked based on points allocated to each team to pick from. Going forward, money could exchange hands too.
“This edition is an online edition. In the future, we would like to take it to television and expand it so that anybody can participate,” he added. The IPL, of course, is the marquee sporting league in the country, but the men behind the quizzing endeavour are taking the Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) as an inspiration. The PKL is the second most-viewed league according to the TV ratings, taking what is perhaps a sport largely played in rural areas into the television homes of all the big cities “The Pro Kabaddi League is a good example of how the league format and appropriate marketing can popularise a sport. Quizzing is something all of us have done in our lives. We want to tap into that,” he said.