BSQC Preview 2026

In sporting terms, the British Student Quiz Championships (BSQC) are the Super Bowls of the UK’s student quizbowl circuit, seeing 24 teams of the country’s best student quizzers compete to be crowned the best team in the UK. First held in 1998, Saturday sees the tournament return for a twenty-second time, when it will be hosted at Imperial College London for the fifth year running.

As mentioned in the Spring tournaments announcement earlier this year, five teams pre-qualified for this year’s BSQC:

• Cambridge A (Brendan Bethlehem, Oscar Despard, Agnijo Banerjee and Andrei Hui)
• Oxford A (Delia Cropper, Elliot Cosnett, Eveline Ong and Arthur Bellamy)
• LSE A (Shlok Dev, Henry Jameson, Albert Nyang and David Worley)
• Imperial A (Charlie Lowman, Oscar O’Flanagan, Dennis Reppen and Eugenia Tong)
• Cambridge B (Jacob Price, Ben LaFond, Antara Bhattacharya and Arvin Boraghi)

An additional fifteen teams will be joining them following the qualifiers last month. The top scoring team was Edinburgh A (Omer Keskin, Ali Hamzeh, Rayhana Amjad and Frances Hadley) on 1350 points, followed by last year’s champions Cambridge A and Manchester A (Kai Madgwick, Nathan Easow, Rachel Bentham and Oliver Heald), all of whom could easily find themselves among the frontrunners for this year’s title.

Teams like Durham A (Aisling Skeet, Hamish Campbell and Eoghan Herriot), Birmingham A (Mikey Brown, Teddy Fogel, Dan Millington and Zhangir Satzhanov), Sheffield A (Isobel Dobbie, Abdelrahman Elsisi, Stephen Donoghue and Elliot Earley) contain mixtures of experienced and newer players, who will undoubtedly bring their own skills to the table on Saturday, as will more established teams like Southampton A (Benedykt Chodźko-Zajko, Florrie, Zosia Mikołajczuk and Michael Wu) and Imperial B (Joseph Collins, Nathan Long, Gus Redding and Eloise Wood).

One university to have seen a resurgence in quizbowl in recent years is Bristol, who fresh from winning their first tournament last season at TRASH IN THE ATTIC now automatically qualify both an A team (Francesca O’Connor, Jake Wingfield, Ted Warner and James Byrne) and a B team (Paritosh Purohit, Artem Borisov, Freddie Burns and Jacob Taylor) to the tournament, having competed in the UK circuit since the 2015-2016 season.

Cambridge, Imperial and Warwick also secured places for their C teams this year, but this is the first time since 2023 that no D teams will attend BSQC. UCL is represented on Saturday only by their B team (Imran Abdul Rahman, Richard Pollard, Sena Clarke and Manny Campion-Dye) due to a last-minute scheduling change, sadly preventing the first BSQC (and indeed, first tournament) since 2017 with two teams from the London institution.

The final four teams for BSQC are decided by wildcard application, and we are delighted to announce that Durham B (Rufus Gladwell, Adam Iqbal, Atticus Teter and Jack Disbury), Oxford B (Elouise Finch, Matt Sheldon, Mia Clark-Webb and Zoë McGuire), Edinburgh B (Lovel Hearn, Daniel Bloom, Letian Li and James Headon) and Southampton B (James Carrick-Lawson, Ros Daffin, Joel Dicker and Christian Sherrington) are our four successful wildcard teams, featuring a large collection of players who have impressed at various tournaments over this season and many before, with Southampton B’s Christian Sherrington attending his third BSQC tournament exactly 6 years to the day after his first in 2020.

While Oxford has held the BSQC title the highest number of times, with 14 wins, the defending champions are Cambridge A, who have won the tournament for the last two years. Omens suggest they may win a third, the last time Cambridge didn’t win on an even-numbered year was 2016, where Oxford A took the crown. This year’s Cambridge team consists of the winners of the UK mirror of ACF Regionals, with Brendan Bethlehem, Oscar Despard and Agnijo Banerjee also having played on last year’s winning BSQC team , the latter and Andrei Hui also emerging victorious at this year’s ACF Winter with B team stalwarts Ben LaFond and Jacob Price. The 2026 Cambridge A team looks like a team to beat, consisting of experienced players with an excellent knowledge base between them.

However, they were not the top scoring team in the qualifiers, a title which instead goes to Edinburgh A. As a university, Edinburgh’s record in the 2020s has seen wins at HARI 2021, CREEK+ 2023, ACF Winter 2023 and ACF Fall in 2024 and 2025, and they have form at BSQC, having been runners-up in 2022 under the leadership of Ben Russell Jones (attending on Saturday as a moderator and key figure in writing the tournament). Lit specialist Omer Keskin was the top scoring player at last Saturday’s ARCADIA V, while Rayhana Amjad brings strong pop culture knowledge to the team, which with 1/1 pop culture in the set could make or break the game.

There are two other institutions with a BSQC win under their belt; Manchester (2002) and Imperial (2023). Both institutions are fielding an entirely different team to their previously winning one (perhaps obviously in Manchester’s case). The Imperial A team have experience playing together, having fielded this configuration of players at both ACF Regionals and ACF Winter, the latter of which they found themselves runners-up during a final where Charlie Lowman managed to first-line a tossup in 9 words. They are a team with good knowledge of science, literature and pop culture. When I discussed BSQC with the rest of the UKQB committee, Oscar himself said at least once a tournament, he attempts a first-line buzz that does not pay off - it remains to be seen whether BSQC will follow that trend.

The BSQC Manchester team also has experience playing as a four, having shared a win with Edinburgh at ARCADIA V last Saturday, seeing just a single loss against Edinburgh B across the day. The team has a good coverage of the sciences, with two PhD physicists in Kai Madgwick and Rachel Bentham, backed further with the biology expertise of medic Nathan Easow. Politics student Oliver Heald completes the team, covering social sciences and literature, as demonstrated by his buzzes at ARCADIA V on Saturday. The team as a whole is also good at pop culture, with a configuration of Manchester players, including Kai, winning WaShBowl II in 2025.

Meanwhile Warwick A (Lucas Johns, Antoni Kluzowski, Alex Hayes and Chris Levesley) got another high qualifying score as they seek to avenge their unexpected bottom-bracket finish last year, having boosted their literature knowledge with the addition of Antoni Kluzowski, and a good overall coverage between their players. Similarly, Oxford A players Elliot Cosnett and Arthur Bellamy cover literature and history well together, while Delia Cropper and Eveline Ong are excellent science players, giving their team a good balance of some of the biggest parts of the BSQC distro.

Saturday, as always, looks set to be an exciting competition, with teams from all over the UK heading to London to compete to be crowned the British Student Quiz Champions of 2026. Stay tuned to find out whether Cambridge A will defend their title for the third year running, or if a new champion will emerge…