The Quizbowl Resource Center

grapesmoker

lol this thread

grapesmoker

If you have a check from ACF, please deposit it ASAP. We're in the middle of a transition from my tenure as treasurer to the glorious reign of Gautam Kandlikar, and it would be good to settle any outstanding debts before that's complete. If you think you should have a check from ACF but don't, pleas...

grapesmoker

Or, I tried to. I don't see the packets being shown on the right hand side.

grapesmoker

samus149 wrote:Has the set been posted yet?

I just uploaded it, here.

grapesmoker

Cheynem wrote: Jerry Vinokurov: -20

i thought we weren't going to talk about that :(

grapesmoker

I'd also like to see the tossup on Robin Lopez again. I seem to remember it being hard to understand the middle clues, but that may have been due to the mod not being understandable. This question was so bad. I get it, Robin Lopez has a sideshow (haha) as a man who "feuds" with mascots. I...

grapesmoker

I don't know if this is "errata" per se but I think that you should accept "spherical harmonics" on a very early buzz in that tossup on Legendre polynomials. I buzzed almost immediately after hearing that you could expand the Wigner d-matrix in terms of these things and was conf...

grapesmoker

I have mixed feelings about this set. On the one hand, this tournament did a really good job in its science distribution and was generally pretty interesting. On the other hand, it had a bunch of questions that just fell off cliffs in a really bad way ("Nazarenes" well in power in a tossup...

grapesmoker

I had a good time playing this set. It seemed like it covered a very good range of topics and pretty much all the questions were solid. A+, would play again.

grapesmoker

I don't know if this is "errata" per se but I think that you should accept "spherical harmonics" on a very early buzz in that tossup on Legendre polynomials. I buzzed almost immediately after hearing that you could expand the Wigner d-matrix in terms of these things and was confu...

grapesmoker

Something's clearly off about the "bonuses heard" stat for the main event.

grapesmoker

This was one of my favorite quizbowl experiences in recent memory. That's all I really have to say about it. Mike hit so many cool topics in so many diverse ways that it was just a total joy to play this.

grapesmoker

I mostly enjoyed this set and appreciated its exploration of all kinds of wacky thinkers. That said, I'd have to agree with Dr. Prof. Cheyne and say that some of the writing could have been a little more clear. I often found myself having trouble parsing just what it is that was being talked about i...

grapesmoker

As I've said over email, I'm scrapping the whole mini-tournament plan for various reasons; I'd like to get an hour sometime on Saturday or Sunday to just read the tossups to 3 or 4 teams of interested people.

grapesmoker

Hey, I quite liked this set. Point of no interest - my statline in the last match is actually the one that was assigned to Athena. I don't know if we just got swapped or if there are other mistakes. Attention must be paid! Sorry if I screwed that up. (If I remember correctly, your match's scoreshee...

grapesmoker

Yawar Fiesta wrote:
grapesmoker wrote:North Dakota Partisan League (0)
Was this actually a tossup on the Nonpartisan League?

Yeah, whoops, typo.

grapesmoker

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:Caracas was only converted in three rooms?!? Were there a lot of negs?

What Tejas said. Also, negs wouldn't matter because I'm only looking at whether it was answered eventually.

grapesmoker

So I crunched some more numbers and present to you the hardest tossups in each round. My criteria for "hardest" was "answered in no more than 50% of rooms" although obviously that still leaves a pretty decent gap between 50% conversion and 0%. I'll do the bonuses another time. Nu...

grapesmoker

I need teammates for both SHEIKH and VICO. I have also sent out an email explaining what's happening with the leftover CO packets.

edit: in case it's a concern it won't cost anything to play.

grapesmoker

I'll be emailing around a format for the remaining 3 CO packets. Basically, we're going to do an email draft so the teams are set up to play right away. There will be 8 teams and everyone will play all 3 packets. I'll need two more readers to make this happen so if you're interested in reading, plea...

grapesmoker

Black Miao wrote:Man like you can complain about ACF's trophiesnow but this year's are a step up from 2013's which literally say "first place overall" and don't even tell you they're for ACF Nationals (does not make for good club recruiting material)

Hey, you won... something!

Sorry about that.

grapesmoker

I mean, I understand that engraving your name on the trophy is a thing that's done in some competitive activities; it's just that no one has ever expressed any strong preferences for such a thing. Having a traveling trophy is suboptimal because it means that a school that wishes to exhibit said trop...

grapesmoker

Since I took home the scoresheets from CO, I thought I'd spend some time entering them into a Google spreadsheet to do some statistical analysis of the questions. There's one sheet for every round, and two columns, tossups and bonuses, for each room. If someone converted a tossup, I put a 10 or 15 t...

grapesmoker

People occasionally seem to forget about quizbowl's voluntaristic nature. I keep meaning to do a post about it.

grapesmoker

The problem with expanding the summer circuit (and I say this as someone wildly in favor of said expansion in general, not just as it pertains to this discussion) is that it requires a lot more travel. Which is fine for some people and not fine for others. I like CO weekend because it concentrates a...

grapesmoker

Yes, the logistical complications are mainly why it makes the most sense to resolve protests only when necessary. Obviously small tournaments don't have the same precautions taken as ACF Nationals does, but... is it really that important to know who made the top or middle bracket at Your Regional In...

grapesmoker

I'd like to point out that point #1 does have some basis, especially since a decent number of HS and collegiate tournaments use paper tiebreakers in some way to determine advancement. If you're using PPG or PPB to determine who gets to advance to playoffs or to the finals, then it's grossly unfair ...

grapesmoker

I'm less likely to play a Friday night event since it may keep me up late the day before the most important tournament, which is maybe not worth the risk. I don't understand the gist of this thread. If playing 4 events in a weekend tires you out, then play less - nobody's making you play all 4. It'...

grapesmoker

If the greatest quizbowl crime I've ever committed in my life is providing a sub-par book prize, I shall sleep very soundly indeed.

grapesmoker

Incidentally, I strongly resent the implication that our trophies were in any way "dime-store." Just FYI, we spent over $800 on trophies for Nationals this year, including some pretty solid pieces that you would not be ashamed to put in a glass case at your institution of higher learning. ...

grapesmoker

These are the very strangest of quizbowl hills to die on.

grapesmoker

I don't personally mind Nationals difficulty as is but clearly I feel perfectly at home at CO-level difficulty, so I'm not much one to speak. What does bother me is that we are attempting to reach so many new teams at Nationals yet not moderating difficulty accordingly. Tossups don't really need to...

grapesmoker

Ok, so as someone who has also used some of these tools in the past, I'm sort of confused as to why people would want questions on them. It's not that they're not important and useful, but I think most of the questions written on these things are going to either immediately reward someone who uses t...

grapesmoker

You can also watch all the videos I recorded of the rounds in one playlist.

grapesmoker

I liked this tournament a lot. The only complaints I had were that some of the easy answers clued in material that was too easy. The Edgar Allan Poe and Socrates tossup struck me as egregious - the Poe TU used some relatively easy clues from Usher very early - that's like serving a three dollar sco...

grapesmoker

I'd like to echo everyone else and say this was an enjoyable tournament. Thank you to the tireless editors and staff! Although I suppose I take issue with the hardness of a few TUs (some were pate-scratchingly easy for CO), on the whole it was a pleasant and gruelling experience. Congrats to the wi...

grapesmoker

minusfive wrote:I guess if Arrabal and Sn'F come back

They won't.

Also: Bring Back the Trash distribution in CO for the love of god.

Edit CO, do what you want.

grapesmoker

My plan was to do a sort of "draft" (which can be done online or via email before the tournament) and have 8 teams that would play a quarterfinal/semifinal/final structure playoff. It would be like a 3-round single-elim tournament with consolation games so that everyone would get to hear a...

grapesmoker

I apologize for the length of the questions. We definitely didn't control it the way we should have. All I can say is that in the google doc they seemed shorter than they ended up being in the PDF, not that that's any excuse.

grapesmoker

I guess since there's not a whole lot of discussion happening anyway, it won't derail it for me to briefly offer some opinions on the submitted packets. Overall, I thought the quality of submissions was quite high. There were a lot of teams that obviously took their question writing seriously and ev...

grapesmoker

I think this year's Chicago Open difficulty was fine. I don't really think this tournament should be any easier, or really much harder - after all a 20ppb metric isn't really a metric of quality or anything, it's just kind of arbitrary. There was only one packet - the one with tossups on the Philad...

grapesmoker

Since it's traditional for the outgoing CO editors to choose their successors, consider this a call for editing CO next year. If you're interested, email me at [email protected].

grapesmoker

no ice wrote:Will high school-only mirrors of ACF sets have the same registration fee as college mirrors?

There are no plans to change the fee structure at this time.

grapesmoker

setht wrote:It looks like I won't make it to any of the VCU Open sites

you cannot fool me seth teitler

So yeah, I can write a packet if some enterprising chemist and/or biologist would like to team up with me. Can we get a definitive yea or nay on whether this is happening?

grapesmoker

Grammatical clarity aside, though, I was really impressed by this submission: it was actually a good high-level question on a Jewish holiday. Rather than just spitting out names of songs for leadins like run-of-the-mill Jewish holiday tossups, this one tested knowledge of liturgical customs, so it'...

grapesmoker

To be clear, I agree that the fact that one of my teammates also knew the clue is not relevant to protest resolution. What I disagree about is that you can have a clue without a pronoun. I agree in general that it is content, not syntax, which is relevant to whether something or not is a clue; thus...

grapesmoker

As the person who made the ruling on the protest in question, I'm happy to explain my reasoning. According to the sheet I was handed, the buzz occurred after the two-word quote in the first line, somewhere around "a text." At that stage, I do believe that rule 4.2 does come into effect; su...

grapesmoker

As Eric mentioned in the CO thread, we still have 3 editor packets that are completely blind to all teams. I think there's probably sufficient interest at this field to hear them, right? If we split up the field into 8 teams, we could do a sort of "playoffs" type thing (quarterfinals, semi...

grapesmoker

Thanks to everyone who came out to play Chicago Open yesterday. It was a bit of a slog at times, but you were all real troopers, and I hope everyone had a good time. Before the discussion gets under way, I'd like to recognize the people who helped make all this happen. First, shoutout to my fellow e...

grapesmoker

Congratulations to Sustainable Ibex Farming (Auroni Gupta, Matt Bollinger, Matt Jackson, and Tommy Casalaspi) on their victory in the 2015 Chicago Open! SFI ran the table against a tough field (and some tough packets) and cleared everyone by two games, obviating the need for a final. In addition, th...

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