The Quizbowl Resource Center

TylerV

The IHSSBCA will be hosting Team Illinois Tryouts on February 11th, the Sunday after NAQT state, in Urbana, IL. If you are interested in attending these tryouts, please fill out the following form: https://goo.gl/forms/S3F3yKUQ2YdXekUe2 It is important to note that with the continuing uncertainty re...

TylerV

Hello everyone, The 2018 iteration of the Illinois NAQT State Championships, hosted on February 10th at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is currently seeking staff. We need both moderators as well as scorekeepers. Qualified moderators, who are capable of reading at least 20 toss ups with...

TylerV

Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, IL will be mirroring the Ohio Trash 2017 questions on Saturday, January 6th. The tournament will start at 9a, and expect to end around 4p. Entry fee is $15 a player, teams of maximum of 5 players, and can register individually and be placed on a team if ...

TylerV

Little Lion Man – Mumford and Suns vs. Can’t Get You Out of My Head – Kylie Minogue I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor – Arctic Monkeys vs. Since U Been Gone – Kelly Clarkson 1234 – Feist vs. Not Ready to Make Nice – Dixie Chicks Not even a top 3 Dixie Chicks song but I'm not a big fan of 1234. M...

TylerV

I only managed to hear a few of the packets but it was clear this was a much much better effort than last year. The questions were engaging and worked even for lower-level high school teams. My only real issue, and this is a nit-picky single question concern, is the Berlin Airlift tossup, which I ha...

TylerV

Generally, I don't have a problem with schools not conforming to the standard A (strongest) to Z (weakest) as long as they make it known ahead of time and back it up with full rosters. This guarentees that the only real issue I have with it, messing up the seeds, doesn't happen. That being said I wo...

TylerV

If you have a half price books outlet near you, consider yourself spoiled. I am under the impression that their normal stores have fantastic deals as well but have never actually been to one.

TylerV

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553382403/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1 A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918. I absolutely adore this book. It is easy to read, engaging, and throws a ton of fun and useful information at you. While its limited to World War I i...

TylerV

Can two people working on the same tournament/division on different devices merge their files into one? In principle, yes, but it's somewhat error-prone. It's better to divide tournaments and scoresheets such that there will be no need to merge except perhaps at a rebracket. If you have to merge, h...

TylerV

Where can this sample be found? I've been looking to potentially send my team to a mirror. As of now, it is still uncompiled. The sample packet, after we finish our distribution related discussions, will be posted in this thread. There is no current timetable for when this sample packet will be com...

TylerV

I'll preface this post by stating that my role in this project is only feedback based. I am not receiving, nor seeking, financial compensation for my work and as a result am not directly writing or editing any tossups but rather providing guidance to the writers and editors and keeping the answerlin...

TylerV

Here are some D2 teams to watch out for, based on what/who I know. Teams are in no particular order. Returning D2 eligible : 1. Illinois (Cole Timmerwilke, Mike Etzkorn) - Give him a couple years, and Mike will become one of the best literature/FA players in the game. You heard it (publicly declare...

TylerV

is there a private forum set up now? It doesn't look like it, at least from my end. You can check if it is set up, and eventually join it, by clicking on "User Control Panel", located near the top left of your screen, then clicking on "Usergroups", before finally scrolling down ...

TylerV

With regards to the Athens tossup, that was mea culpa and I ill this as a moment to discuss my regionals writing philosophy has a whole, how I failed in this specific instance, and other issues with the question. The Athens tossup was originally written with the idea of it being slotted in Round 0, ...

TylerV

JakobeanEra wrote:
nsb2 wrote:I didn't expect anything particularly great from the set, but some of the questions looked like they were taken straight from Wikipedia, like IHSA questions have been in the past.
ftfy

For what it's worth, the Mass Effect clue in the radians tossup comes directly from Simple Wikipedia.

TylerV

Here is the tossup in question. Large statues of overweight men on the shoulders of naked servants have been found at the archaeological site of Barriles in this country. Soldier and conman Gregor McGregor tricked hundreds of people into investing in bonds for the fictional country of Poyais, suppos...

TylerV

Regionals was definitely a step down from the Prince-led effort of last year but i was surprisingly unrepulsed by many of the questions. I wrote a decent number of the history questions, as well as the film, and, save a few that were the victim of sub-optimal packetizing, they seem to have went well...

TylerV

Please post any comments regarding specific questions, including errata, here.

TylerV

Since Fregeau isn't often active on the forums I am going to go ahead and make the necessary threads for discussion. Please give your general thoughts and opinions about FRENCH in this thread.

TylerV

I had a great time seeing this set evolve from a few questions Fregeau wrote and we played at UIUC practices to a final product. This was a great first writing effort and, based what I heard in the hallway, people had a blast playing it. EDIT: I also hope final stats are up soon! :) I've already tal...

TylerV

Hi everyone, What, and on which clue, did people neg Mount Ida with? What, and on which clue, did people neg introduction of fire to humanity with? What, and on which clue, did people neg snake (in Chinese mythology) with? I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to this one, but I'd like to confi...

TylerV

So just now hearing the Div II set, since it was played at Illinois State, I have some problems with the Tale of Genji tossup. The lead-in gives the literal translation of mono no aware, the "pathos of things", and then gives some slight background information about the Kokugaku. My proble...

TylerV · Re: Huskie Bowl @ NIU (January 28, 2017) Prelim stats can be found here

Prelim stats can be found here

TylerV

Assassinating JFK - "This struck me as kinda hard" What is hard? The answer line, or the clues, or...? I thought the clues were hard compared to standard Assassinating JFK tossups. However, I think the clues used were important and that it was a good question. Colin Kaepernick - "thi...

TylerV

Accidental Double Post

TylerV

So I'll preface this by saying that I am obviously not the intended target for this set and as such will avoid making any comments about specific questions being too easy, instead aiming to make broad comments about the set itself and commenting where answerlines were too hard. The first thing I am ...

TylerV

http://neg5.org/t/NkxRTTl1Zz/stats/team?phase=1

TylerV

I haven't spent much time thinking about packet submission in general but I think an ACF Fall with packet submission remains better than an ACF Fall without. However, since it seems there are far more packets than there are rounds, I think it would make sense to allow schools to collaborate on with ...

TylerV

I get that a lot of cool people came out of France, but should we really be tossing it up (at least) three times? I'll probably have more to say once the set is posted. There was at least four, with one being film, one social science, one philosophy, and one history. I also believe |France| was an ...

TylerV

Would posting questions I intend to use for a high school tournament be kosher? Given how strict the community seems to be about leaking questions I'm hesitant. If a question is going to be used a tournament do not post it in an open forum. There is no way to control who would see it and you would ...

TylerV

This tournament has recently been made Gold Certified meaning that the top 2 teams will qualify for PACE NSC in the Spring. Additionally, I am announcing a field cap of 16 teams and asking that anybody that is interested in the tournament, but has not yet reached out to me, to register as soon as po...

TylerV

After receiving feedback from several people within the community I had decided that, as with past iterations, Earlybird will be a regular difficulty tournament. This, however, comes at a price. The tournament will be using NAQT's IS-156, a set which was created and played in the last academic year....

TylerV

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Academic Buzzer Team is happy to announce The Earlybird Tournament. The tournament will be held on the campus the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Saturday, October 1st, 2016. I, Tyler Vaughan, will serve as the tournament director. The tourna...

TylerV

For editing the Ancient History Bee—130 questions in total—I will be paid less than a dollar per tossup I edited. This is particularly little considering the quality of submissions I had to edit. As someone who served in a very similar position that you did, I don't see where this sentiment is comi...

TylerV

This topic has grown far broader than I am qualified to talk about but I will give a brief summary of what my time in NHBB was like. In the past year, I was key in the production of three major events; IHO 2015, NHBB Nationals 2016, and IHO 2016. In the course of working on those events, I wrote the...

TylerV

1.5/1.5 Math (1/1 Computation; 0.5/0.5 Math) Can you elaborate on your decision to include comp math into the set? The only other place I have seen comp math in recent memory is certain NAQT sets and even then most of the tournaments I've staffed have instructed us to just skip them and go onto the...

TylerV

Collin has informed me that this set is being postponed until next year.

Apologies to those were anticipating it this summer.

TylerV

Is there any chance of sample questions being posted or provided to respective hosts? My experience with the first SMART was poor with both the players and some staffers at the tournament I staffed having numerous complaints.

TylerV

In Round 5 of the US History Bee, the James Madison tossup mentions that "Paul Jennings purchased his freedom from this man". Daniel Webster was the one who bought Jennings' freedom (and Jennings worked for Webster to pay him off), so this clue doesn't really make any sense (I buzzed at t...

TylerV

Although I did not personally work on the USGO Tests, I understand that the people that wrote them worked extremely hard. Please share any feedback here.

TylerV

Factual errors are the worst kind of mistake we can make as a writing team, as such I wish that any mistakes you noticed be brought up specifically in this thread so they are sure to be noticed. This is also the place to discuss incomplete answerlines.

TylerV

Please discuss the buzzer portion of the United States Geography Olympiad here.

TylerV

Please discuss the National History Bowl here.

Reminder: We are aware of the repeats the set had, if possible this thread is meant to focus on the question content/answerlines.

TylerV

Please discuss the National History Bee here.

Reminder: We are aware of the repeats the set had, if possible this thread is meant to focus on the question content/answerlines.

TylerV

Please discuss the United States History Bee here.

Reminder: We are aware of the repeats the set had, if possible this thread is meant to focus on the question content/answerlines.

TylerV

Uh, I have heard some very disturbing things that were announced this weekend: -the possibility of 3 teams playing at once if the buzzer system permitted -teams (potentially just the top seed) being able to LITERALLY choose who they play -a number of during-tournament rule changes that weren't anno...

TylerV

why not instead use a clue from one of the other songs mentioned in the tossup, like Panzerlied or Horstwessellied? I don't think you understand what is being said here. The reason the writer didn't use a different clues, and as a result a different lead-in, is because they weren't aware the other ...

TylerV

This set will be done by March, although I most likely will run it personally at HSNCT or during the downtime during one of the college nationals. As it turns out, this was a little ambitious. It looks like the updated timetable is that the set will, likely, be finished around the time of VCU Open.

TylerV

To further assure concerns people may have after Ryan Leaf, I, due to my utter lack of baseball knowledge, will be focusing exclusively on packetizing and editing. This means a much more coherent set overall and a distinct lack of five stadium toss ups in row. As an additional benefit, this means th...

TylerV

Yeah, we'll move the "Flight of the Valkyrie" clue deeper into the Vietnam TU. But is the Dickens TU really hard? I tried to make it tough with Martin Chuzzlewit and Pickwick Papers clues early, but then it eases up just before the FTP and certainly after. FWIW the Chicago Bears TU went d...

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