The Quizbowl Resource Center

This is an announcement that production of Bayou-A-Drank 2012 is underway. To ensure a more consistent difficulty/quality of this set compared to last fall's, the 2012 iteration of Bayou-a-Drank will be completely house-written. We hope to have at least 10 rounds written by the end of August with an eye toward the set being play-tested, edited, and ready for distribution by September. Content will be similar to the Tulane-produced sets from Bayou-a-Drank 2011 and will not exceed the difficulty/scope of this semester's TERP set.

Question distribution will be approximately as follows:
5/5 Music (1/1 last five years, 1/1 90s-early Oughts, 1/1 80s, 1/1 classic/before 1980, 1/1 your choice)
5/5 Sports (1/1 baseball, 1/1 basketball, 1/1 football, 1/1 other, 1/1 your choice)
4/4 Movies (1/1 last five years, 2/2 80s/90s/early Oughts, 1/1 classic/before 1980)
4/4 TV (1/1 last five years, 1/1 90s-early Oughts, 1/1 80s and before, 1/1 your choice)
1/1 Comics
1/1 Video Games
1/1 Misc. (Broadway, trash lit that isn't comics, food, etc.)

The mirror fee is $12 per team in attendance; email me and I can provide you with information about where to send the check.

Will this be potentially ready by KABO weekend in August?

Update: the total number of packets for this event has been lowered from the 12 we initially announced to 10, not including the round that Mike Cheyne pitched in for this weekend. The plan is to have those rounds completed and (hopefully) polished in time for a possible Canadian mirror on 8/25.

A truncated version of this was played today at Maryland and Michigan--I'll ask that commentary on those rounds be saved for an email or PM to me or until a private thread is set up. We (the Tulane team) will take any notes, including those regarding the typos that I noticed after I sent the rounds, into account as we're getting the full set together. Thank you to those teams that played Bayou-a-Drank today--I hope we can get some feedback from you, but more importantly that you enjoyed it!

UWashington, both KABO sites, and a tournament in Ohio have played versions of this--it's probably a little easier than other trash sets, but it has received generally positive reviews. Because there isn't a lot of trash on the horizon for the rest of the semester, we'll probably keep it under lock and key until some time around the holidays. Email or PM me if you're interested.

Does this tournament have more than 7 packets now? Because if it doesn't, I don't see why you'd bother keeping a pretty iffy 7-packet tournament on lockdown until January. I'd be surprised to hear anyone else wanted to host this now that the season is underway and would thereupon discourage them from doing so, but it's nice for teams to have something diverting available for practice. In particular, easy recent trash (even when of dubious quality overall) is a great tool to have for the next batch of new people, who evidence suggests are increasingly likely to respond to unanswered tossups on MacGyver by asking "is that an internet parody of MacGruber?"

It's possible, of course, that the tournament has been expanded and improved since I played it, so if that's the case never mind (and I'd appreciate a copy of the new set).

Sorry it's taken me so long to respond to this--I've been absolutely slammed by law school work. This set has been expanded and modified since KABO, with ten total packets and an eleventh that will be added as soon as possible (it's ultimate completion has been pushed back because of Hurricane Isaac, hurricane make-up classes, school work, and other unforeseen reasons).

I don't have any problem with teams practicing with these questions if they've used up the resources on Wastebin. My concern is that, in the unlikely event that a team wants to use this set at a tournament and for some kind of profit, that we could collect a mirror fee out of that. Chris makes a good point that new trash is sometimes good as practice material, so if anyone wants a copy of the set to use in-house then feel free to email or PM me and I can send it along to you for free. I'd just like to keep it off Wastebin for the time being--probably until some time around the end of the semester--in case somebody wants to use it outside of their team's weekly practices.

Hey...so we're looking to do a Canadian mirror of this. It'll be at University of Toronto @ Mississauga, aiming for early Dec. Would I be able to get those packets to send along to the TD over there? He's asked me to ask you for some reason. My email is [email protected]

In addition to the Canadian mirror mentioned in the above post, there will likely be a mirror of this at Macalester in February. As a result, I'll keep the set off Wastebin until then. If you would like to have it for practice, you can contact me (as a handful of teams already have) and I'll send it along. I'll try to keep the questions relatively up to date (like, if someone in an answerline dies or something), and I'll also probably supplement the tournament with one or two new rounds between now and February.