The Great Gambler - Business Quiz

"A quiz with a difference !" That was the objective with which we set out to conduct a quiz that would be different in presentation and different in the way it would challenge the participants. During our discussions leading to this concept, one of our main concern (which later became an objective) was that participants generally like to play safe and there is little opportunity for the participants who trail to win the game. Our primary objective then became "Reward those who take risk !"

At the same time when we were trying to put together a format based on the above objectives, I happened to watch an episode on the card counters (blackjack) in the Discovery channel. More than the card counters, what pulled my interest was the very game of blackjack and how it could be moulded into a different quiz format that would meet our objective. A few discussions with Jos and thus was born "The Great Gambler !"

Rules
The rules that had to be framed had to be derived from the game of blackjack and at the same time it should be simple enough so that I would have to spend as little time as possible on making the required tool. But first we had to know the actual rules of blackjack. Wikipedia helped us a lot in this (see blackjack). Based on the rules of the blackjack game we arrived at our own set of rules.

• The blackjack value was changed from 21 to 11. The participant could choose a maximum of 2 cards


• The value of Ace was fixed at 11

The game would proceed as follow.

• All 5 teams would place bets (they would bet on points). A minimum bet would be 10 points and maximum 50 points. The teams can only bet on points that are multiples of 10


• The first team then selects a random number from the board (see pic. below) and the card value is shown to the user





• One card was mandatory and this card is immediately shown to the participant. The participant would then decide whether he needs to pick the second card





• The number of questions asked is equal to the number of cards picked


• All questions have to be answered to get the points

Once questions are asked to all the teams, the points are distributed based on whether a blackjack has been obtained or based on the leader. We had to do lot of customizations here to keep the game simple ! :-)

Tools
The main challenge here was to make the card deck and the scoring sheet. Inspite of automating the sheet, Jos had a tough time with it which shows that the game was not that simple to track :-)

Finals
One of my main worry was whether the participants would understand the rules. To my surprise, there were very few questions when the rules were read out. However I am not sure if the audience understood most of the rules. After the quiz, I could still hear people discussing and trying to figure out why someone lost or gained some points. The best part of the event was that the crowd was also lively and tried to encourage teams to take maximum risk (and thereby see them loose points ;-) ). It was fun all the way and it gives some amount of satisfaction when I look back and see that the last three quizzes (Entertainment quiz[2003], Bali Trail[2004], The Great Gambler[2005])in which I was one of the quiz masters, were all great successes ! And now there is a talk of Bali Trail II :-)

Enjoy ...