2015 BrainBusters Solo Tournament - May 16, 2015, Geneva HS

[Ithaca Cricket Ump]

The Second Annual BRAINBUSTERS SOLO quizbowl tournament will take place on SATURDAY, MAY 16, 2015 at GENEVA HIGH SCHOOL in GENEVA, NEW YORK, with registration beginning at 8 am and play to start at 9 am. This event is open to all students, grades 7 through 12. The entry fee is $25 per participating player, payable at the site on the day of the tournament. If you can provide a buzzer system for us to use during the tournament, we will give a $10 discount to one player from your school in return, but we reserve the right to cut off this discount when we have enough buzzers to run the tournament properly. (In other words, that discount is first-come, first-served.) Awards will be given to the top 8 overall finishers, the top sophomore, freshman and middle schooler who do not make the top 8, and the Earl Weaver Memorial Award for the player who incorrectly interrupts the most questions over the course of the tournament (and suffers the ensuing one-question "ejection penalty", hence the name).

In this tournament, students participate as solo players and play for themselves. There are 8 rounds of play, containing 35 tossups each, in the following category distribution per round:

8 - HISTORY
7 - LITERATURE
2 - each of ART & ARCHITECTURE, BIOLOGY, CHEMISTRY & GEOLOGY, GEOGRAPHY, MATHEMATICS (non-computational) & COMPUTER SCIENCE, MUSIC, PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY, TRASH (current events and popular culture)
1 - each of MYTHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SOCIAL SCIENCES

After each round, the players in the overall 1-8 positions are placed in the same room, 9-16, 17-24, etc., so that players (except for the randomly-drawn first round) are always playing against other players who have done about as well as them to that point in the tournament.

One of the great things about the power-matched BrainBusters Solo format is that it allows players of all skill levels and grade levels to meaningfully participate and answer lots of questions in the tournament. In last year's tournament, a middle schooler finished squarely in the middle of the pack against high schoolers in the overall standings, and even the middle school player who finished last overall answered 15 tossups correctly over the course of the tournament.

In addition, players who are dominating a round are removed after answering their 8th question correctly and given bonus points depending on how quickly they got to 8 (up to 12 bonus points available per round for a total 20 points possible per round). This is another factor in allowing as many people to participate fully as possible.

The top 8 overall scorers after 8 rounds of play will play in an unlimited-questions final (first to 15), and the winner of that final is declared the BrainBusters Solo champion. Unlike last year, players may be given "headstarts" in points in the final to reward them for particularly impressive preliminary performances.

The OFFICIAL registration for BB Solo will take place in Geneva on the day of the tournament - you can just show up on May 16 (with your team or independently), pay the fee, and play. However, if you have players planning to play, I'd appreciate if you could just drop me a line at [email protected] or post in this thread and let me know how many players to expect from your school so that we have the proper number of rooms and buzzers.

Please contact me with any questions, and we hope to see you on May 16 at Geneva!

--Scott

[Adventure Temple Trail]

What question set is being used at this event?

[Ithaca Cricket Ump]

Housewritten set, mostly questions that were originally intended to be used for American Academic Challenge and that I'm currently working on editing to fit this format. Matthew Lehmann of Barrington HS is writing most of the literature and mythology, and I have written most of the rest of the set and am editing the entire thing.

[Ithaca Cricket Ump]

Anyone who goes to this website by 11:59 pm on Wednesday, May 13 to pre-register for BrainBusters Solo will receive a $5 discount ($20 instead of $25) on the registration fee when they arrive at Geneva on Saturday. Pre-registrations cannot be transferred to other players if the pre-registrant does not, in fact, show up themselves.

http://www.brainbusterstq.com/solo-preregister

Also, I'm very interested in mirroring another tournament's tossups for future editions of BrainBusters Solo. The writing process has been exhausting enough for me this spring (between AAC and finishing this off) that in future years, I would much rather pay a mirror fee (we'd have to work out a flat fee or fee per individual in the range of $2-3 per player or something) and slightly edit another tournament's questions to fit this format rather than do it myself (or with one or two others). If anyone who's going to be writing a housewrite in the next year (preferably one that isn't already going to be mirrored in the Northeast) is interested in working with me on setting something up, drop me a line at scottblish at gmail.com and let me know.

--Scott

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Anyone who goes to this website by 11:59 pm on Wednesday, May 13 to pre-register for BrainBusters Solo will receive a $5 discount ($20 instead of $25) on the registration fee when they arrive at Geneva on Saturday. Pre-registrations cannot be transferred to other players if the pre-registrant does not, in fact, show up themselves.

http://www.brainbusterstq.com/solo-preregister

Also, I'm very interested in mirroring another tournament's tossups for future editions of BrainBusters Solo. The writing process has been exhausting enough for me this spring (between AAC and finishing this off) that in future years, I would much rather pay a mirror fee (we'd have to work out a flat fee or fee per individual in the range of $2-3 per player or something) and slightly edit another tournament's questions to fit this format rather than do it myself (or with one or two others). If anyone who's going to be writing a housewrite in the next year (preferably one that isn't already going to be mirrored in the Northeast) is interested in working with me on setting something up, drop me a line at scottblish at gmail.com and let me know.

--Scott

Might the Scobol Solo set be usable for this purpose? I don't represent that set in any way, but as I understand it from a distance, it is very rarely mirrored elsewhere and is designed for multi-way solo competition from the get-go.

[Ithaca Cricket Ump]

I would definitely be interested in mirroring Scobol Solo in future years if David Reinstein was interested in an arrangement. I would probably add a few self-written questions to the mix since there is a small trash component to the BrainBusters Solo distribution that doesn't exist in Scobol Solo, but I've always been highly impressed with the quality of that tournament's questions. Since one tournament is in Illinois and the other consists of players from New York and Pennsylvania, there would be no danger of players playing in both tournaments. The 2014 NTSS set has been publicly released on the archive already so it's too late to arrange anything for this year, but in future years I'd like to work something out with them.

I might not use the set exactly as-is since middle school players compete alongside high school players at BrainBusters Solo, and therefore I'm going more for a "questions on easier answerlines that start out quite difficult" paradigm, but at least 75% of the NTSS material would certainly be usable in some form in our tournament.

--Scott