Hans Woyda Knockout Round 2 vs Queen Elizabeth's School

With the first knockout match against Latymer barely a week old we were extremely quick off the mark organising our quarter final round against Queen Elizabeth’s School (QE). Normally I’d prefer a bit more breathing room between matches to build anticipation, but with a packed schedule of Linguistics Olympiads, Chemistry competitions, Chess tournaments and an entire week at the Romanian Master of Mathematics to navigate our options were severely limited. Luckily both sides so we managed to slot in the fixture well ahead of the half term deadline. We had an earlier start this time with a 3pm kick-off, and once I’d collected the QE team from reception and they’d taken their seats opposite Yidong (4^th), Shyamak (6^th), Adavya (L8^th) and Eason (U8^th) the second knockout round got underway.

It was an auspicious start for the SPS side with a clean sweep on the first four starter questions, and a miscalculation on an arithmetic series from the QE Year 13 gave us an early lead. Some confusing queues got the best of half our team in the next four questions, but their confusion was matched by the other side so we maintained our slight lead going into the geometry section. Here, Yidong and Shyamak managed to spot a typo on the first question (a pi had mysteriously disappeared!), but unfortunately this led them away from the correct answer, which their opposite numbers managed to find. However, Adavya and Eason correctly identified the largest of the possible equilateral triangles and brought us back ahead, and since both teams dealt equally well with the remaining geometry problems we managed to keep hold of our slim lead for another section. Up next was the mental arithmetic round, with some large prime factorisations to wrestle with. The Year 9s and Year 11s from both sides kept up a clean sweep of the questions, but a miscalculation from Adavya gave QE the opportunity to take the lead. Fortunately their Year 12 missed off a 0 from their answer, and Adavya made up for his mistake by stealing the points for the next question. Eason then stormed through his problems with some deftly identified squares and cubes, taking our overall lead from 2 points to 6.

 

As they started work on the team question (faced with the daunting task of identifying all of the Smith numbers below 400) I felt myself relax; the team had found their groove and a three question lead at this stage was a promising sign. Both sides only managed to find four of the seventeen possible Smith numbers within the five minutes, but a mistake in one of the QE entries and some generous bonus points from the mark scheme meant that St Paul’s came away with 4 points while Queen Elizabeth’s only ended up with 1. After a quick snack break (during which we gained some audience members in the form of Adrian Hemery and Andy Ashworth-Jones) the teams reconvened for the calculator questions, and some deftly applied logarithms allowed the SPS side to further extend their lead. The algebra and calculus questions for this round were a real mixture of styles, and once again the Year 9s and Year 11s were flawless, but although Adavya stole another point from QE with a clever application of Vieta’s formulae a couple of calculus slips from Eason stopped the gap from widening significantly.

 The margin between the two teams was now quite significant, but a comeback was still theoretically possible as we entered the race section. Regardless, any reduced tension was more than made up for by a contribution from the Queen Elizabeth’s coach in the form of two physical buzzers for the teams to use (in place of the rather less exciting option of getting them to raise their hand in the air as soon as they’ve answered the question). SPS got the purple buzzer, which made a “Honk! Honk!” noise reminiscent of the motorcar from The Wind in the Willows, while QE got the green buzzer, which sounded like the sort of loud bell you would find on one of the trolleys in Meet Me in St. Louis, two references which I am sure will land perfectly with the youth of today. With a suitably solemn atmosphere thereby established we kicked off the first four race questions, all of which concerned a rather unusual clock. The Year 9s were up first, and after a few seconds of frantic writing a loud honking alerted me to the fact that Yidong had stormed to the correct answer. The Year 11s were next, and another honk gave Shyamak the win. Soon thereafter a third honk led me to believe that we were on the way to an impressive streak, but in fact a miscalculation from Adavya gave his opposite number the remainder of the time to find the correct answer; unfortunately the bell didn’t yield the answer we were looking for either so that question was lost to both sides. At this point the High Master entered to spectate the end of the match, and another ring of the bell gave QE their first points for this section. 

The last four questions of the match all concerned fraction calculations, and while Yidong honked his way to victory, their Year 11 beat Shyamak to the punch, and some hasty honking by Adavya and Eason (who took several attempts to even find the buzzer on the desk) allowed QE to claw back some points and narrow the gap before the end of the match. However, the SPS lead by that point was insurmountable, and as such we are through to the next round with a very impressive score of 49 – 36.

 Please do congratulate the boys when you see them, and look forward to the semi-final match report after remedy! We will either be up against SPGS for another instalment of the St Paul’s derby or we will be facing Haberdashers’ Boys’ School for the exact round in which they knocked us out last year. As such, whatever happens it’s sure to be a thrilling match! Fingers crossed I will have managed to source our own set of buzzers by then as well…