The Quizbowl Resource Center

This is, by disclaimer, off of the top of my head and you should check the UMD website for special events, etc. before taking anything as gospel. That said, probably the best place to park will be Regent's Drive Parking Garage, which is helpfully right across the street from the Physics Building. Co...

The hotel listed on the NAQT site is literally right on campus, albeit on the other side of said campus from where the tournament is. As far as price goes the special rate that NAQT has negotiated is pretty good, though you might be able to do better in one of the hotels farther away from campus. Ac...

As explained at the tournament, NAQT policy prohibits us from settling a tie on paper, including by winning percentage. The argument that was made at the time as to why Princeton B should be declared the winner ("We lost one fewer game than everyone else") is very easily reversed on the pa...

Final Div I and Div II stats for the SCT East can be found at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhouston/quizbowl/2006%20SCT%20East%20at%20MD%20stats%20finals_standings.html for Div I and http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhouston/quizbowl/SCTPlayoffs_standings.html for Div II. Cheers, Brad, who apologizes for the shor...

The Div II stats are now complete and can be found at the above site. After a 4-way circle of death necessitated by NAQT's policy of not breaking ties on paper, JHU won a 2-game sudden-death playoff to win the D2 title. Thank you to all teams for coming out and participating. Div I results to follow...

Hi All, The Div II stats for the SCT at University of Maryland through round 4 can be found at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhouston/quizbowl/NAQTSCT2006_standings.html . I'm going to update these every 2 rounds or so for your edification. I don't know if Casey's going to put up Div I stats but I presume...

"Worst ever?" I think that's hyperbole. Certainly the editing had its flaws (most egregiously in the large number of repeats, which should be the easiest thing to fix in the editing process, as well as in the easy, EASY bonuses in many of the packets) but I thought that there were enough w...

The question as heard at the tournament was changed around a bit, focusing more on compositional clues at the beginning and putting the Largo closer to the middle of the question. By that point, some of the thematic elements had started to come up, and the Largo second movement of the symphony is ve...

Hi Dan, Thanks for responding to my concerns. I will attempt to address your responses in order: 1) The number of biography bowl questions was, in fact, relatively low, which I do appreciate, but some of the ones that remained seemed to me particularly egregious, such as the aforementioned Melville ...

The two examples you mention are fine. I am, indeed, suggesting that a book winning an award alone is not necessarily enough to make it worthy of its own tossup. I feel like a book that won the Booker in, say, 1999 is still too recent for us to really appraise it's long term literary value. (Which i...

Can you give some examples of this? I'm just curious to know whether this was a problem at PARFAIT or some earlier event, and what sort of information the questions included. The question that springs immediately to mind is the Herman Melville question from yesterday (I don't remember what round it...

It pains me to write this kind of post, but after yesterday's question set at Princeton I am compelled to do so by Categorical Imperative. Which is not to say that most of the questions at PARFAIT were anything other than fine; apart from a whole bunch of repeats and a few hoses that slipped by the ...

Let's try this again, shall we? http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhouston/quizbowl/TRASH%20Regionals%202005_standings.html now has final standings by playoff bracket, which I think more accurately represents the overall ranking I intended for teams 3-17. As predicted, it was fairly easy for me to go back and...

Yeah, there were a lot of issues with ranking, some of which were my fault (not resetting SQBS divisions to deal with rebracketing, the aforementioned counting of bye games which seemed like a good idea to me until about round 7, by which point it would have been more of a pain to take them out) and...

Full Results for Mid-Atlantic TRASH Regionals can be found at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhouston/quizbowl/TRASH%20Regionals%202005_standings.html . Death Cab for Cutie put on a commanding performance at today's events, running the table to take home the championship. Close behind was College Park Reti...

For those who care, results through round 5 of the Mid-Atlantic TRASH Regional are available at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhouston/quizbowl/TRASH%20Regionals%202005_standings.html .I think the field size is small enough that I can keep this reasonably current, but we shall see. Cheers, Brad P.S. I sho...

As it turns out I missed the three teams from Carnegie Mellon, due to my own incompetence and need to clean out my email inbox. In addition, I forgot to add Maryland's own house team, which means that now with 17 teams, Dan's solution from above is in fact what we're going to end up doing. The origi...

Hi all, As of 2:22 PM on October 31, I have the following teams registered for TRASH Regionals at the University of Maryland: We Ruin Your Show Every Week (Weiner et al.) Castegna et al. Team VD (Hu et al.) Fine et al. The Kimmie Meissner Effect (Keller et al.) Villanova A Villanova B Four Dans and ...

I guess I'd have less of a problem with this particular complaint if it were being made by the team that was impacted by NAQT's decision. Because really, they do have a legitimate gripe here, I think. I know I'd be annoyed if my team had the clearly superior record all day and managed not to win the...

It's Sports Analogy Time (TM), folks! In 2001, the Seattle Mariners won an astounding 116 times. The number of wins that team racked up exceeded the number of wins of the next-winningest team by a full 14 games, which (if I am doing my math correctly) is 5 games MORE than are necessary to make it to...

Hi all, My apologies again for not getting this out here until today. The Fee/Discount structure for the Tony Parker Open this Saturday will be as follows: Base Fee: $80 Buzzer: -$10 (limit 1 per team) Travel discount (>300 miles by Mapquest): -$10 Small team discount (1 or 2 players): -$10 Suitably...

Bien Sur! Monsieur Parker would approve of such a discount, I feel. Amount, as with all other discount amounts, to be announced later.

Upon further consultation, it has been determined that the base fee will in fact be $80. Of course, as noted there will be discounts for buzzers and the like. Basically, if the financial issue is a problem, email me and we can work something out.

Brad

My apologies for the short notice on this post. The Maryland Academic Quiz Team is pleased to announce the Tony Parker Open, a mirror of the Manu Ginobili Open (pending me hearing back from Ezequiel Berdichevsky), to be held March 26, 2005 in beautiful(?) College Park. As with the original Chicago-U...

Would like to add my voice to Joel's Class-of-2000-Alumni congratulations to Stevenson. Woohoo! It warms my heart to see SHS consistently doing well at the IHSA tournament (and, it seems, at the NAQT state championship as well). The Sectional for the North-Northwest Suburbs of Chicago has always sor...

That's fair. As noted, I didn't see the packets and wasn't keeping track of the exact breakdown, so my perception of an overabundance of science may be just that-- my anti-science bias and the questions which to me were incomprehensible probably made it seem like there were more questions than there...

I kind of have to disagree on Jerry's assessment of the science questions (admittedly, I am a humanities person so I have a bias on questions of this type). For one thing, even leaving the quality of questions out of it, there seemed like a LOT more math/science questions than the 5/5 per packet ask...

Anyone else think that baseball was an unusually large portion of the sports questions? I'm not complaining about that, but I imagine some people would. We were talking in my room about that very thing-- how baseball seemed to be the New Hockey (i.e. every packet must contain at least one, and poss...

Yeah... kinda less than impressed with the editing job done at this tournament. As much as I like Richard III (the man and the play) there was really no reason to have three tossups on the man (I believe there was a bonus on Bosworth Field as well). There were, admittedly, some decent packets inters...

Don't know how the arms race in Illinois Quizbowl has played out in the 21st century, but from a late-90s perspective (Ooh! Practically prehistoric! ;): Ben Ricca graduated the same year that I did, and there's no question in my mind that he's one of the best quizbowlers ever to grace the Illinois H...

About 3 months ago, actually. I'm working on a dual masters in History and Library Science at Maryland (and hopefully getting to read/play some quizbowl on the side). Hope things in Illinois are going well.

A thought, from someone who just came out of a young program: Packet-sub tournaments, not to put too fine a point on it, are TOUGH. This is not even referring to the difficulty level of the actual questions-- I've been to tournaments where I'm lucky to have HEARD of the clues in the bonuses, and I'v...