The Quizbowl Resource Center

aestheteboy

Did this tournament feature the normal 20/20 format with no powers? Looking at the scores, I'm guessing that there were bounceback bonuses and no negs, but even so, there are some very impressive combined scores.

aestheteboy

Ian, how many packets total do you guys have? And did you decide what tournament format to use?

By the way, is Gonzaga sending their A team to this event?

aestheteboy

How wonderfully exciting it is to play high school quizbowl this year. I'm glad I was born late enough to be able to enjoy these opportunities.

aestheteboy

I'm going to describe a phenomenon which I notice in most high school sets. The problem, at least for me, is much less practical than aesthetic. In other words, it's a trivial issue, and most of what I say should be taken with light-heartedness. Fluctuation in bonus difficulty is one of the most dif...

aestheteboy

This tournament was pretty fun. Thanks to UVA and friends for a solid quizbowl tournament today. I have to say I was some what disappointed with this HSAPQ set, although it's probably because I had such a high expectation after the success of ACF #1. It really looked like the set was finished hastil...

aestheteboy

I'm assuming that the question set indicated on the original announcement is not correct - which set was used?

aestheteboy

In response to Matt: I don't think there's anything wrong if A-set questions didn't have enough clues to be playable for the top teams. I guess you could criticize R's marketing strategy, but I really don't see why there can't be novice-level tournaments at HS level; I don't think that the players i...

aestheteboy

Format The tournament format will depend on the number of teams attending, but the planned format will be described here. The field will be divided into preliminary brackets of 6, and a round-robin will be played within each bracket. Teams will be then be rebracked based on win-loss record into new...

aestheteboy

I'm going to also send you an e-mail, but WJ would like to register with one team.

aestheteboy

Hey can I have a field update before I register? I am pretty sure we'll make it, but I have to first convince my coach.

aestheteboy

I think Dwight brings up a relevant point. My main criticism against NAQT is not the difficulty because I understand that they serve the entire nation with the same set (aside from the fact that buzzer races are pretty fun). Although they've all been mentioned at one point or another, I guess I can ...

aestheteboy

How about the radical 5 games of swiss-paired prelims (you may want to make this bracketed) and 7 games on bracketed playoff methods used at Harvard last year? Breaking ties would be a pain, though. 7 rounds of non-swiss pair prelim games would have been tedious if it had been on longer questions, b...

aestheteboy

(Personally, I do advocate that NAQT should relax its restrictions to allow for longer, more clue-dense questions.) Are you in the minority among the editors, or are there others that share this view? I would vote for adding one sentence to tossups and extending halves to 10 minutes. And while we'r...

aestheteboy

I guess I can contribute to this too. I'm sure there are more worthy teams, but I only ranked teams I've seen recently. Charter right now is probably the only team that excels at everything from lit, history, science, other humanities, and trash. Henry is an excellent generalist player and also has ...

aestheteboy

Sir Thopas wrote:I am disappointed.

Really? I wasn't all that disappointed with IS set today because I knew exactly what I should expect. Learned helplessness!

aestheteboy

Regarding the tournament: I guess we were done with 13 round by 6:00 or so, and TJ folks were obviously working hard, so I really don't want to criticize, but I have to say that the tournament logistics was below average. The readers we had in the prelims were finishing 15 tossups on average, and th...

aestheteboy

Hey, I think late-fees serve ceremonial (so-to-speak) rather than any practical purpose, but I mean, it's not like there aren't nasty things that one could do in order to collect them. What exactly I have in mind, I'll leave up to your imagination.

aestheteboy

It probably wouldn't be too unreasonable say that it's difficult to fully satisfy today's standard/expectations of high quality tournament with ten rounds of questions. I sympathize about the situation this year, but Sarah, two months is a lot of time to write just three extra packets. I would imagi...

aestheteboy

WJ will attend if the price isn't anything ridiculous.

aestheteboy

The fact is, if you don't want to come to the tournament, don't come. We do the best we can with what and who we have, and any implications that we were being lazy or incompetent are just plain wrong. Every decision made was done so for a justifiable reason. Whether or not you might agree with it i...

aestheteboy

If not for Chris Ray (who allegedly convinced the TD to carry over the prelim record), we would have had a wonderful four-way tie between UMD B, UVA, Ted/Dan, and George/Daichi. I'm kind of upset that he had to mess that equilibrium up.

Matt Weiner beat the world in the ICT scrimmage.

aestheteboy

It's negotiable, maybe, if you're school's name is Charter.

aestheteboy

There will be negs but no powers. Assuming we reach 48 teams, we'll run 6 round-robin brackets of 8 with the top 8 teams making the play-offs, which will be single-elim. We'll be working on some sort of consolation system to keep people playing, so if you know your team absolutely wouldn't want to ...

aestheteboy

Walter Johnson High School would like to invite all interested teams to its third WJIAT (Walter Johnson Invitational Academic Tournament) to take place on February 14th, 2009. It will feature awesome, well-edited pyramidal questions in 20/20 format, house-written by Hunter and WJ (that means that yo...

aestheteboy

Yeah, I agree completely. It's really not that difficult to upload SQBS data if you have webspace (which is extremely easy to get these days). There's no reason that TDs can't stay extra 10 minutes after the tournament to upload the data and make everyone happy. If the data is incomplete, TDs can up...

aestheteboy

Is this tournament using an original house-written set? I noticed that Illinois and Minnesota, who apparently are collaborators for the set, are using HSPAQ set for their fall tournaments. If that's not the case, there might be a problem since Hunter and Kellenberg both played on the set already.

aestheteboy

Quizbowl clues are things that you encounter if you have a good liberal arts education. Trivia usually has no academic significance.

aestheteboy

I'm not at all advocating the use of two different question sets. Good pyramidal sets are designed so that both top teams and lower teams can enjoy playing. The other issue that I forgot to bring up is powers. The few people I talked to seemed to agree that powers are pretty cool. I don't think it w...

aestheteboy

Yeah, it seems like the top teams are much closer together than usual (i.e. compared to past few years), and I'm not sure that there will even be an 09 equivalent to TJ '05, RM '06, Gov '07, and Whitman '08. I hope we collectively can continue the good tradition of winning at least one of the two m...

aestheteboy

I hear Charter beat GDS in the finals match. Hunter beat WJ in the third place match, and Gonzaga beat TJ in the 5th place match. EDIT (to actually add content): I enjoyed the tournament a lot. UMD folks and other moderators did a fine job. I thought the questions were very good, although that's not...

aestheteboy

I'd like to register myself in the master's bracket. If there's going to be separate brackets, I would prefer that everyone play solo (for the sake of having more teams & not playing the same teams like three times).

aestheteboy

So the social sciences is only econ and psych, or does it also have cool things likes sociology and anthropology? I also like the distribution, although I would prefer more than 16% lit and history.

aestheteboy

closesesame wrote:So it seems our literature guy will not be coming Sunday...because it's Sunday.

Hey, that's not so bad. There is a good chance that I will be playing with one teammate (if not solo).
EDIT: btw, do we have powers?

aestheteboy

When I left, I think it was like (I'm not certain though):
Semi-Finalists: Charter, Zaga, TJ A, Gov A
Qtr. Finalists: GDS, WJ, Whitman, DCC

aestheteboy

A few points: 1. One potential demerit of the standard fromat is that it could screw things up if the initial bracket of 9 is unequal in power, which I feel is quite likely given that it's the first tournament of the year for most of us. Do I actually think that a team that loses 3 games out of 8 in...

aestheteboy

I'm going to go ahead and agree that this seems pretty inefficient. I would prefer something different. However, it's probably within the host's discretion to choose weird formats, and I don't necessarily hate this either. BTW, the grouping should be something other than even (2,4, . . . , 12) vs od...

aestheteboy

Hey, I don't know, but I think it'd be a near consensus if I said that we'd rather play more rounds than be let out at 3:00. All of the teams that signed up are dedicated teams, and many are coming from far away. 8 rounds including the finals like last year's RotP would be rather unsatisfying.

aestheteboy

Also, I find the assertion that Whitman was the dominant DC area team a little misleading, considering another noted DC metro area team, TJ, got within literally 5 points of winning both national titles. You're probably right. I'm always partial to local schools and local people. In fact, if we don...

aestheteboy

Yeah, it seems like the top teams are much closer together than usual (i.e. compared to past few years), and I'm not sure that there will even be an 09 equivalent to TJ '05, RM '06, Gov '07, and Whitman '08. I hope we collectively can continue the good tradition of winning at least one of the two ma...

aestheteboy · Re: Announcement: QuAC I at Penn (11/22/08), Phila., PA I'm hoping to come.

I'm hoping to come.

aestheteboy

More practical (and perhaps the only practical solution) would be to simply quit playing for the school. Most of the people running good tournaments would probably understand and let those unfortunate people play without representing a school. This would get your tournament disqualified by the MSHS...

aestheteboy

Hey sign us up for like 1 team and 1 or 2 buzzer systems.

aestheteboy

Wow. I didn't know that the situation was quite that awful in Missouri. If individual principals have any decency, I imagine they would try to step in, but I guess that's not the case. More practical (and perhaps the only practical solution) would be to simply quit playing for the school. Most of th...

aestheteboy

How's this for a side event? Although I do enjoy playing against Guy Tabachnick, it's not much of an incentive since I was planning to head back and play at the UMD mirror with some cool kids. Wouldn't it be just as easy for us to just play this mirror and then go home? Yeah, it would be almost equ...

aestheteboy

Matt Weiner wrote:How's this for a side event?

Although I do enjoy playing against Guy Tabachnick, it's not much of an incentive since I was planning to head back and play at the UMD mirror with some cool kids.

aestheteboy

metsfan001 wrote:If anyone runs a computational math tournament, I swear, I'll chase you down and kick you really hard in the balls. I'm not even joking.

I might be able to find out who hosts mathcounts for you.

aestheteboy

Hey, I have a request/suggestion: would it be feasible to attach a side-event to this tournament? Since HFT generally attracts the strongest field outside of WoQ and nationals, I think it would be worthwhile. Right now, I'm on borderline for attending this tournament since I'm not sure if great ques...

aestheteboy

segregold wrote:But, if not, we do really need the money.

The thing to do is write questions. Still, naqt is always better than trash so good job.

aestheteboy

I've noticed that the noted prophet Evan Adams hasn't yet spoken. I patiently await.

aestheteboy

To a very high degree of approximation, un-timed tournaments proceed the speeds of their slowest readers. This is precisely the reason that there is no need for experienced moderators to read at "the quickest comprehensible speed." Every tournament has at least one moderator who is slower...

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