The Quizbowl Resource Center

rhentzel

leftsaidfred wrote:Is this going to result in a change in distribution for IS sets, i.e. increase in Canada-related material?

No change in the distribution is currently under contemplation for this year's Invitational Series or at the High School National Championship Tournament.

rhentzel

While I appreciate the gesture, I'm not sure where the surge from 1 team to 5-10 will come from. Has NAQT done any publicity in Canada beyond what I (and Toronto) have done? I'm not on good terms with Reach, but NAQT may consider contacting Reach for the Top for sharing information (they have addre...

rhentzel

As of the upcoming 2009 Sectional Championship Tournaments, NAQT has revised its policy on automatic bids to give more bids to hosts that qualified multiple Division I teams in the previous year; this is intended to be an incentive to motivate those (larger, successful) teams to host Sectionals. The...

rhentzel

Starting with the 2009 High School National Championship Tournament, NAQT will award a Top Canadian School title after a final on Sunday if there are at least five Canadian schools in attendance. If there are at least ten in attendance, the title will be awarded after an ancillary playoff similar to...

rhentzel

Another possibility: suppose that, during a tossup on the character Huck Finn, a player buzzes in with "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" before it specifically asks for the character. The pronoun "he" rather than "it" has been used a few times. Would you count it co...

rhentzel

What constitutes an "unsporting manner" of giving an answer? Basically, attempting to delay the game. Ah, that's cool. I was a bit concerned that something like "Jane [expletive] Austen" was what the rule was targeting. I admittedly am a bit concerned that something like this wo...

rhentzel

What constitutes an "unsporting manner" of giving an answer? Basically, attempting to delay the game. Ah, that's cool. I was a bit concerned that something like "Jane [expletive] Austen" was what the rule was targeting. I admittedly am a bit concerned that something like this wo...

rhentzel

I have a question about J.6 ("I was correct when I buzzed"). Say a question about a Greek or Roman figure begins with a clue that applies to either canon, a player buzzes with the correct name from one tradition, but the name from the other tradition is on the paper and the question goes ...

rhentzel

If time expires during a tossup, that tossup will be read to completion and both teams given a chance to answer. If it is answered correctly, that team will earn a bonus. In other words, the clock can no longer "kill" a tossup at the end of a half. This is awesome. R may remind me, but wa...

rhentzel

NAQT is always looking for new writers; if you'd like to contribute to our packets and believe that you write better questions than we currently do, we'd love to have you. Send us a sample of ten new questions at naqt@naqt.com. I may actually consider this as an option in the future, but at the tim...

rhentzel

That said, this rule should be made effectively moot by good question writing and good playing. NAQT shouldn't write questions that "sound unique" (but aren't) and induce people to buzz; at the same time, players should have a good enough understanding of the subject matter that they don'...

rhentzel

theMoMA wrote:What constitutes an "unsporting manner" of giving an answer?

Basically, attempting to delay the game.

rhentzel

Actually, I do have a question due to the wording of J.6. What type of situation is this intended to cover? The basic idea is that if a question begins, "This trigonal pyramidal molecule . . .", one can't buzz and say "ammonia" planning to make the argument that whatever we say ...

rhentzel

NAQT has published a set of guidelines for using SQBS when reporting the results of a tournament to NAQT: http://www.naqt.com/stats/using-sqbs.html The idea is that following these will make it easier for NAQT to import results into its statistics database: http://www.naqt.com/stats/ without inducin...

rhentzel

NAQT has made some changes to its rules for the 2008-2009 competition year. Short descriptions of the changes may be found here: http://www.naqt.com/2008-rules-changes.html The full version of the new rules is here: http://www.naqt.com/rules.html The largest change, in terms of the movement of text,...

rhentzel

Short numbers: 192-team base field, 10 guaranteed rounds on Saturday, double-elimination playoffs, no overflow hotel required. Will this be the format used last year where you have to go 7-3 to be able to take two losses on Sunday? Also, is there any way to reduce the number of byes on Sunday? We b...

rhentzel

The Hyatt Regency O'Hare can offer us 34 real game rooms and 30 additional suites or parlors (large rooms without beds or dressers normally used for meetings), which will mean that no game will have to be played in a converted, regular hotel room. So if 64 games happen at once, and you need 1920/2 ...

rhentzel

The biggest question that we got asked last year was why we changed hotels away from the Crowne Plaza to the Wyndham, so I wanted to address the analogous question here. The basic answer is that, even at the Wyndham, our increasing field size made it necessary to play a lot of games in converted hot...

rhentzel

NAQT typically makes its announcements with "pleasure," but, in this case, it's really nothing but embarrassment. I wanted to take this opportunity to apologize to PACE and the high school quiz bowl community at large for the confusion with dates that surrounded the initial announcement an...

rhentzel

NAQT is pleased to formally announce that the 2009 High School National Championship Tournament will take place the weekend of May 29-31 at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare in Chicago. More information is available here: http://www.naqt.com/hsnct/2009/details.html This has already been repeatedly noted, but...

rhentzel

One problem with these stats is that sometimes they aren't correct at all. Neither Dorman A or Dorman B played at the Spartanburg Viking Tournament, yet they have stats from those tournaments. "Dorman B" lost twice at that tournament to teams that would score less than 50 points to the re...

rhentzel

The cost of the ICT would probably increase to approximately $300/team How does this compare with how much ICT has been in previous years? I can't remember what we paid last time, but I thought it was much less than $300. I can't speak for anyone else, but the hotel option is not terribly appealing...

rhentzel

This is really cool, except the Elo Rankings kinda suck, especially when you get out of the top 15. I might not go so far as to say that they "suck," at least in a public forum, but I agree that there is more work to be done in making the ratings accurate. We welcome suggestions from stat...

rhentzel

I'm pleased to announce that a beta version of NAQT's high school statistics database is now available. This is our attempt to record the results of every match that is ever played on our questions (though, as of yet, it is woefully incomplete). The home page for the site is here: http://www.naqt.co...

rhentzel

As the head editor of ACF Regionals 2009, I would very much like to work with NAQT to ensure that teams have the option of attending both the community college championship and ACF Regionals; my email address is jsmagin at yahoo dot com. Also, I don't understand why community college teams couldn't...

rhentzel

NAQT put quite a bit of thought into our choice of dates; so far as I can tell, no community colleges attended Penn Bowl in 2008. OK, the magic of the Internet might have showed you that half the field at the FSU site was CC teams: http://www.geocities.com/fsucollegebowl/Penn-Bowl/PennBowl_standing...

rhentzel

argh now I have to make choices between fake championships and hard questions. I am generally displeased with this idea. *I* would much rather play Penn Bowl and Regionals, however I have a feeling that playing either of those tournaments solo would be a bad idea, and just became exponentially less...

rhentzel

As quiz bowl evolves and community colleges become more active in either tournament, we'll certainly work with their organizers to avoid forcing teams to make a choice. How can they become more active in either Penn Bowl or ACF Regionals if they don't attend them because of the scheduling of the CC...

rhentzel

It seems that everything NAQT announces lately is on the date of another tournament. There are plenty of open dates in the spring so I'm not sure how much thought was really put into this. The date you picked is literally the only weekend in February or March where something besides NAQT SCT has al...

rhentzel

I'm not in communication with the Northwestern team and, obviously, I wouldn't want to prod them into doing anything, but man, it would be wonderful if the ICT were at Northwestern. NAQT had extensive negotiations with Northwestern in 2007 (and much shorter talks in 2008) about the possibility of t...

rhentzel

Stepping on Penn Bowl AND ACF Regionals all at once? Mighty efficient. NAQT put quite a bit of thought into our choice of dates; so far as I can tell, no community colleges attended Penn Bowl in 2008. I couldn't find the 2008 ACF Regionals results on the ACF website, but I don't think there were a ...

rhentzel

On a related note, NAQT has received a viable bid from a Chicago hotel to host the 2009 Intercollegiate Championship Tournament. Broadly speaking, the positive aspects of the bid are: 1. It is in Chicago 2. It near O'Hare airport 3. It has a free airport shuttle (no rental cars) 4. It has good acces...

rhentzel

As of August 20, 2008, NAQT has not received any viable bids from colleges or universities to host the 2009 Intercollegiate Championship Tournament. As a result, we are still interested in receiving bids from schools. Information about bidding and the host requirements may be found here: http://www....

rhentzel

NAQT is now seeking bids from colleges and universities to host its 2009 four-year Sectional Championship Tournaments. The bidding process may be found here: http://www.naqt.com/sct/2009/call-for-hosts.html and the host requirements may be found here: http://www.naqt.com/sct/2009/host-requirements.h...

rhentzel

NAQT is pleased to announce that, starting in 2009, it will have a separate Community College Championship Tournament (CCCT): http://www.naqt.com/cc/ccct.html Teams will qualify for the CCCT at Community College Sectionals, which will be held the weekend of January 24, 2009 (two weeks earlier than i...

rhentzel

I don't know what the actual high school distribution is, but I swear I see more doses of pop culture / sports then less then 10%, it might be what hogwash they actually let fly was literature...but I'm quite sure they have a higher pop culture and sports distibution then this. If anyone has the ac...

rhentzel

So that's where the architecture tossups have been going. Mabye they try to distribute evenly in the dead zone(so no one subject has more than a 1-2 in the dead zone) and art history/fine arts is hit harder because there are fewer to begin with. Did you see if there were any other patterns in the d...

rhentzel

So I'm quite sure NAQT tries to make their tournament distribution balance somewhat every round... You'd be surprised. NAQT goes to fairly significant lengths to ensure that its tournaments and packets are balanced; assuming that I'm interpreting your comment correctly as saying that we don't go fa...

rhentzel

Unless architecture isn't fine arts, (which I'm quite sure it is) there is definitely a disproportionately high amount of the usually one fine arts tossup per a round to land in the Dead Zone. I might do a statistical test later on just to make sure I'm not making a gut Type 1 error, but this bugs ...

rhentzel

Suggestion: Keep the current CC qualification system for ICT. Rather than invite the top X teams to ICT, just invite the CC teams that would qualify for an at-large bid to ICT per their S-value. The remaining top X teams could be invited to a separate CC championship. This has two significant negat...

rhentzel

Both of these are excellent proposals, though in my mind the first is clearly better. The D2 SCT set would have a difficulty level that would challenge all the CC teams but allow the strongest ones to have few dropped TUs and good bonus conversion. Most important, eight of our teams would still get...

rhentzel

As for "not doing its job of distinguishing which team knows more", I would say that the case of an overeager neg (a neg where Team A negs and Team B doesn't even know the answer but Team A would have known it later) shouldn't count against the question. In fact, that means that the quest...

rhentzel

NAQT is considering separating its Community College Championship into a separate event, possibly as early as next year (2008-2009), and we are interested in community feedback on two proposals (and, really, any other aspect of NAQT's CC programs). Our principal goal is to allow more community colle...

rhentzel

I obviously was not there, but I'm assuming this incident was Toronto's DII forfeit. They likely thought that a game could start and a team could join in progress. We have done this in some independent Canadian events, but only when McGill is late in the early rounds because they haven't arrived ye...

rhentzel

Yeah, I was about to suggest exactly this (looking at what rooms had a neg and a then no answer as opposed to just no answer). It's probably also instructive to look at whether the question was during a prelim or a playoff round, since in the playoff round, I'd quite expect the very bottom bracket ...

rhentzel

Well, I'd be careful about using conversion percentage; Maryland negged the Bragi tossup, so it went unanswered, but we would have answered it had we not negged; presumably, that happened in some other rooms as well. Additionally, although I am not very good at mythology (and it's in my self-intere...

rhentzel

As long as it passes the Turing test for RMP being its own distribution, I don't really care. I was under the impression, however, that there is no sub-distribution within packets (so if you keep Mythology as part of lit, then four or five lit in one packet could, in theory with bad luck, be mythol...

rhentzel

That's not quite how ACF works, though. Since ACF is packet submission, it is the case that every submitted packet will have 1/1 Mythology, 1/1 Philosophy, 1/1 Religion. However, since ACF is not timed and instead stops at question 20, the questions after 20 will not be read. Thus, in, for instance...

rhentzel

grapesmoker wrote:Hey NAQT people, on a totally unrelated note, can we have a question in the survey about whether the 2-day ICT should be shortened to one day? Personally, I find the Friday play hugely inconvenient and I can't be the only one.

As in past years, this will appear on our policy survey.

rhentzel

As a moderator, I met some teams (not usually represented here) that had concerns about the current wording of the forfeit rule. Their train of thought: Would you prefer that in a situation where a team fails to arrive within five minutes of a stated game time that the first half begin at that time...

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