Imperial Quiz clear the field at ACF Regionals

The Imperial A team have won the UK edition of the 2023 Academic Competition Federation (ACF) Regionals quiz tournament with a clean sheet of ten wins and zero losses. ACF Regionals is a challenging buzzer quiz tournament where student teams attempt to qualify for the annual ACF Nationals tournament, due to be held at MIT in April.

This year’s Regionals tournament, hosted by Imperial on January 28th, saw twelve teams from a total of eight different universities compete in the City & Guilds building. The winning Imperial team consisted of undergraduates Adam Jones (Computing) and Justin Lee (Chemistry), as well as PhD students Michael Mays (Aeronautics) and Enoch Yuen (Molecular Biosciences). They bested tournament favourites Oxford A in their sixth match, who finished the day with eight wins and two losses, meaning that a final was not needed to determine the winner. This is the first time ever that a non-Oxbridge team has come first at ACF Regionals in the UK, since it was first hosted in 2016.

Imperial is now looking likely to be represented in the notoriously difficult ACF Nationals tournament for the second year running. Justin Lee, also Chair of the Quiz Society, remarked on the team’s recent success in tournaments:

“I’m very glad we’ve won a second tournament in 14 days - there were a couple of close games, but we made it unbeaten without having to play an additional final. We are playing some of the best quizzers in the entire country, which didn’t make it easy, but our repeated training sessions helped offset our initial defects in both knowledge and confidence.”

A second Imperial team - ‘Imperial B’ - also competed in Regionals, consisting of PhD students Rahim Dina and Owen Iredale and undergraduates Jonah McDonald and Mattia Elkouby. They had a rather more tumultuous record of four wins and six losses, including two close defeats to the teams from Sheffield and Bristol. Nonetheless, given the standard of this year’s field at ACF Regionals, this is nothing to sneeze at.

The Quiz Society meets every Monday from 6pm to 8 p.m. in the City & Guilds Building, Room 651 for buzzer quiz practice. People of all levels of quiz experience – including none – are welcome to join