University of Idaho students competed in a battle of the mind last week in the annual College Bowl competition.
The winning team, Harahel, went undefeated in four rounds of trivia competition.
Benjamin Sloniker, a member of the winning team, said it felt good to come away with the win.
“We actually didn’t really practice — we met once or twice,” Sloniker said. “I think someone encouraged us to look at some Wikipedia articles, but we really didn’t prepare at all.”
The team’s name, Harahel, refers to the Angel of Knowledge. The group said it thought the name would be appropriate and hoped it would bring good luck in the final rounds of competition.
College Bowl is a question-and-answer game played by two teams of four undergraduate students. There are two nine-minute halves in each round.
Nineteen teams participated in this year’s College Bowl, co-hosted by the Idaho Commons, Student Union Building and Intramural Sports. Each member of the three final teams received a gift certificate to the VandalStore.
Denise Carl, ASUI student engagement coordinator, said the number of teams participating was slightly higher than in previous years.
“Because we had a few more teams, we did a modified round robin style tournament and single elimination for the top six teams on Friday night,” Carl said.
The final six teams included Party Smants, Theta Chi, AKL, Beta1, SAE and Harahel.
“I don’t really remember the final question,” Sloniker said. “We were up by a lot so it didn’t really matter. But for one of the semi-finals we basically had to get the final question correct or we’d be out. It was about Chronicles of Narnia, and we’re all Catholic so of course we knew it.”
Scoring is based on the number of questions a team gets right and the amount of time it takes to answer those questions.
“There’s two types of questions,” Carl said. “There’s toss-up questions that can be answered by either team, and then bonus questions for the team that gets the toss-up correct.”
Teams can earn up to 45 points in one round by correctly answering the toss-up within the time-frame allotted for the question for 15 points, and answering the three 10-point bonus questions correctly.
Sloniker said the most exciting moment of College Bowl came in the semi-finals against Theta Chi when his team came back from a 130-point deficit.
“They were really good,” Sloniker said. “We had to do some serious adjustments. Somehow we came back from 130 points down and won the game. That was pretty exciting.”
The winning team included Sloniker, Peter Brown, Jacob Sevigny, Mitch Hornsby and Brooke Baker.
In second place, SAE was comprised of Nathan Armonn, Michael Cullan and TJ Billinger.
The score of the final game round was 425-270.
Third place was determined by the highest score between the four teams playing for the last game. AKL came in third.
“The questions were pretty easy, except the literature ones were harder than I expected,” Sloniker said.