City of Intelligence

A resident of Nizhny Tagil and a player in “What? Where? When?" Anatoly Chikvin challenged the existing image of the “city of tanks”

Head of the Nizhny Tagil club “What? Where? When?" Anatoly Chikvin told TJ about the movement of many thousands of people named after the popular TV game, operating throughout Russia and beyond, and also about why small towns in the regions are not only “men with beer.”

For a long time, traveling to different cities of Russia from Murmansk to Vladivostok, I was embarrassed to tell the locals that I came from Nizhny Tagil. And the point here is not even that this small provincial town can be ashamed, but rather the glory that mass culture and the blogosphere have created for it in recent years.

As soon as Petrosyan’s jokes about the latch factory were forgotten, they were replaced by “Our Russia,” in the releases of which Svetlakov screamed “Tagiiiiiiil.” In the city itself, by the way, they started shouting like that much later than throughout the country.

Then there was Kholmanskikh on a tank , Balyberdin at a rally to say on the federal channel ... In general, the image of Nizhny Tagil was finally formed in such a way that even Ivan Urgant allowed himself that if a Tagil resident had gone to prison, he would have felt at home.

However, believe me, I am a Crimean myself, the daughter of an officer, and here everything is not so simple.

No matter what company I find myself in, talking about Nizhny Tagil, I always come across surprised looks when I answer the question “What do you do there in your free time?”

And I, imagine, playing “What? Where? When?". It is difficult to explain to people who know the most about the city that there are tanks driving through the streets here that Tagil residents are not only men with beer.

Not everyone even knows what it is to play “What? Where? When?". Well, that is, everyone is hearing a TV game in which, as they like to joke on Twitter, “six men in expensive suits try to win five hundred rubles from a pensioner from Ivanovo.” Fewer people know that the movement itself of fans of this intellectual game has long stepped beyond the television screen and today numbers thousands of people and hundreds of clubs in dozens of cities. Yes, and even in Nizhny Tagil.

True, the mass version, or, as the participants themselves also call it, the “sports” version of the most important intellectual game, has a number of significant differences from the television version. In a nutshell, all these people do this: all teams play at the same time in a common room, and the host asks one question for everyone. Each team has exactly one minute to find the correct answer, after which the captain submits the answer to the jury - always in writing. The second question sounds, the third and so on. The judges evaluate the correctness of the teams' answers and give them points. The team with the most correct answers wins the tournament.

The tournament distance can be short - in school leagues, as a rule, there are 24 questions - or it can be extremely long. A kind of entertainment for the most enthusiastic intellectuals is the so-called “marathon”, when questions are asked without a break for 24 hours or more.

The sporting significance of tournaments also varies from local festivals of intellectual games to Russian and world championships. What does Nizhny Tagil have to do with it? One of the stages of the Russian Cup for “What?” is held here. Where? When?", for example - " Uralvagonzavod Cup ". And the tradition of the city club is already quite big: not so long ago they celebrated 20 years.

The ChGK Nizhny Tagil club has one characteristic feature that sharply distinguishes it from almost all other cities. Almost all of those schoolchildren who actively play, take places in Russian and international tournaments, and after graduation leave to study in other cities. In urban universities there remains a vanishingly small number of them.

So over time, I fell in love with traveling around the country, meeting our former players in Ufa and St. Petersburg, Sochi and Moscow, Samara and Chelyabinsk. Wherever we meet, we are all united by Tagil, as we remember it - not with bolt factories and Svetlakov’s “Tagiil”, but as we made it for each other - a city of intellect.

How to write about Nizhny Tagil and “What? Where? When?" in one sentence and not die,
Anatoly Chikvin,
Especially for TJ

#Article #Nizhny_Tagil #What_Where_When