Announcement: Minnesota Deep Bench, October 20 2007
Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 8:17 pm
What is going on here? The University of Minnesota is hosting its annual Deep Bench tournament on Saturday, October 20, 2007. Tournament editors are Rob Carson ([email protected]) and Andrew Hart ([email protected]). We’re making several significant changes to the distribution, question length, and bonus requirements in an effort to make this a better tournament. It would be excellent to see the kind of turnout for Deep Bench that Wisconsin’s Elvis reincarnation received last year, and I can promise at least two fewer El Cid questions. Stay tuned for field updates as well as finalized times and locations.
Deep Bench Format: Each school has a team of eight players, and each player plays for both a singles or doubles team and a quads team. So each of the eight will play for either first or second singles, or first, second or third doubles, and those teams will be somehow reconstituted as two four-person quads teams. Each win by a #1 team (singles, doubles, or quads) will be worth 5 points. Each win by a #2 team will be worth 4 points, and each win by #3 doubles will be worth 3 points. The team with the most points at the end of the tournament wins.
Update: This will NOT be a timed tournament like in past years. Rounds will be probably 22 questions in length with a 1-question tiebreaker, though they could be 24 depending on the number of solid submissions we get.
Logistics: The tournament format is two single round robins. The first is of singles/doubles play within each classification (each #1 singles will play all other #1 singles players, and so on, simultaneously). This phase will be held on packets of 24 tossups, no bonuses. The second phase is a single round robin in which all the #1 quads and all the #2 quads teams will play each other. This tournament will take place on 24 tossup, 24 bonus packets. The singles/doubles rounds will alternate. Each player is guaranteed to play (total teams * 2) – 2 packets (so 16 in a nine-team field). The format works best with an odd number of teams, and we want as many teams competing as want to play. If more than seven teams are interested in fielding a team, there is a good possibility that there would be rounds on Friday night. This will be confirmed or denied soon.
Who can come? Traditionally Deep Bench has been a true invitational, but this year will be a little different. We extend invitations to all teams invited last year and a few new ones. Any other school that can field an eight-player team is welcome to email [email protected] to solicit an invitation. Any team that wants to play will be able to play.
Invitations:
Carleton (confirmed)
Chicago
Drake (confirmed)
Grinnell
Illinois (confirmed)
Iowa
Iowa State (confirmed)
Macalester
Michigan (confirmed)
Northwestern
Ohio State
St. Olaf (confirmed)
Truman State
Washington University
Wisconsin (confirmed)
Submission Requirements and Difficulty: Each team is required to submit two packets worth of questions, one for quads and one for singles/doubles play. Teams must submit 25/25 for quads play and 25/0 for singles/doubles play. The 25/25 for quads should be moderate to difficult (in the neighborhood of Division I SCT or ACF Regionals) while the 25/0 should be more accessible (harder than IS sets, but not by much) because of the nature of singles and doubles play. You will not be playing questions written by any of your teammates, so anyone on the team can write these questions. Obviously keep them blind to other teams competing.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention this originally. Please separate your tossups and bonuses by category, with a category header labeling each. IE, all lit tossups, then all lit bonuses, then all history tossups, then all history bonuses, and so forth.
Tossup length: Tossups will be longer than the ones at last year’s Deep Bench. Since your editors have no desire to do character counts on each tossup, use this convenient guide: Using the default page formatting of 10 point Times New Roman with 1-inch margins, tossups must be longer than 4 lines, but shorter than 6 lines. Questions that are consistently shorter or longer than these will be spitefully returned for rewriting.
Power Tossups: There will be power tossups at this tournament, but the editors will place them. Please do not insert power marks into your tossups. It will annoy me and I will probably email your packet back to you to make you get rid of them.
Bonuses: Bonuses should be in the 10-10-10 format with ascending difficulty. The first part should be gettable by nearly all of the teams, the middle part should be converted by around half the teams, and the hard part by the best fifth of the field or so. All bonuses must have an easy, middle, and hard part, but they can be out of ascending order if doing so is necessary. Please avoid 30-20-10 bonuses, 10-5-10-5-10-5 bonuses, or any other whacky formats. If your packet contains bonuses that deviate significantly from this guide it will be returned spitefully for rewriting.
Distribution: This distribution is somewhere in between the traditional Deep Bench format and a typical circuit tournament. These numbers lump together the singles/doubles and quads rounds, but please keep these packets distinct as the difficulty gap will be significant. Take care to balance the distribution by geographic region, time, language, etc.
10/5 Literature (at least 4/2 non-western)
10/5 History (evenly split between U.S. and World)
10/5 Science (2/1 each of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Math, and Other)
6/3 Religion/Myth/Philosophy (2/1 of each)
4/2 Fine Arts (2/1 each of visual and musical)
2/1 Social Science (Includes anthropology, psychology, economics, archaeology, game theory, sociology, law, linguistics. No more than one question per field)
2/1 Geography
2/1 Current Events
2/1 Pop Culture
2/1 Sports
TOTAL: 50/25
Packet Formatting: Packets must be emailed to [email protected] as a .doc or .rtf file. They must be typed in Times New Roman, 10 point font, with 1-inch margins all around (note that this is not the MSWord default). Below is the formatting required. Note convention for prompts, do not accepts, and alternate answers. Packets that deviate significantly from this will be spitefully returned for reformatting.
Tossups should look like this:
He lists Pepsi products under his Facebook interests, which led a newspaper reporter to contact him regarding Coca-Cola’s monopoly on his university’s campus. He was nicknamed “shadesâ€
Deep Bench Format: Each school has a team of eight players, and each player plays for both a singles or doubles team and a quads team. So each of the eight will play for either first or second singles, or first, second or third doubles, and those teams will be somehow reconstituted as two four-person quads teams. Each win by a #1 team (singles, doubles, or quads) will be worth 5 points. Each win by a #2 team will be worth 4 points, and each win by #3 doubles will be worth 3 points. The team with the most points at the end of the tournament wins.
Update: This will NOT be a timed tournament like in past years. Rounds will be probably 22 questions in length with a 1-question tiebreaker, though they could be 24 depending on the number of solid submissions we get.
Logistics: The tournament format is two single round robins. The first is of singles/doubles play within each classification (each #1 singles will play all other #1 singles players, and so on, simultaneously). This phase will be held on packets of 24 tossups, no bonuses. The second phase is a single round robin in which all the #1 quads and all the #2 quads teams will play each other. This tournament will take place on 24 tossup, 24 bonus packets. The singles/doubles rounds will alternate. Each player is guaranteed to play (total teams * 2) – 2 packets (so 16 in a nine-team field). The format works best with an odd number of teams, and we want as many teams competing as want to play. If more than seven teams are interested in fielding a team, there is a good possibility that there would be rounds on Friday night. This will be confirmed or denied soon.
Who can come? Traditionally Deep Bench has been a true invitational, but this year will be a little different. We extend invitations to all teams invited last year and a few new ones. Any other school that can field an eight-player team is welcome to email [email protected] to solicit an invitation. Any team that wants to play will be able to play.
Invitations:
Carleton (confirmed)
Chicago
Drake (confirmed)
Grinnell
Illinois (confirmed)
Iowa
Iowa State (confirmed)
Macalester
Michigan (confirmed)
Northwestern
Ohio State
St. Olaf (confirmed)
Truman State
Washington University
Wisconsin (confirmed)
Submission Requirements and Difficulty: Each team is required to submit two packets worth of questions, one for quads and one for singles/doubles play. Teams must submit 25/25 for quads play and 25/0 for singles/doubles play. The 25/25 for quads should be moderate to difficult (in the neighborhood of Division I SCT or ACF Regionals) while the 25/0 should be more accessible (harder than IS sets, but not by much) because of the nature of singles and doubles play. You will not be playing questions written by any of your teammates, so anyone on the team can write these questions. Obviously keep them blind to other teams competing.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention this originally. Please separate your tossups and bonuses by category, with a category header labeling each. IE, all lit tossups, then all lit bonuses, then all history tossups, then all history bonuses, and so forth.
Tossup length: Tossups will be longer than the ones at last year’s Deep Bench. Since your editors have no desire to do character counts on each tossup, use this convenient guide: Using the default page formatting of 10 point Times New Roman with 1-inch margins, tossups must be longer than 4 lines, but shorter than 6 lines. Questions that are consistently shorter or longer than these will be spitefully returned for rewriting.
Power Tossups: There will be power tossups at this tournament, but the editors will place them. Please do not insert power marks into your tossups. It will annoy me and I will probably email your packet back to you to make you get rid of them.
Bonuses: Bonuses should be in the 10-10-10 format with ascending difficulty. The first part should be gettable by nearly all of the teams, the middle part should be converted by around half the teams, and the hard part by the best fifth of the field or so. All bonuses must have an easy, middle, and hard part, but they can be out of ascending order if doing so is necessary. Please avoid 30-20-10 bonuses, 10-5-10-5-10-5 bonuses, or any other whacky formats. If your packet contains bonuses that deviate significantly from this guide it will be returned spitefully for rewriting.
Distribution: This distribution is somewhere in between the traditional Deep Bench format and a typical circuit tournament. These numbers lump together the singles/doubles and quads rounds, but please keep these packets distinct as the difficulty gap will be significant. Take care to balance the distribution by geographic region, time, language, etc.
10/5 Literature (at least 4/2 non-western)
10/5 History (evenly split between U.S. and World)
10/5 Science (2/1 each of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Math, and Other)
6/3 Religion/Myth/Philosophy (2/1 of each)
4/2 Fine Arts (2/1 each of visual and musical)
2/1 Social Science (Includes anthropology, psychology, economics, archaeology, game theory, sociology, law, linguistics. No more than one question per field)
2/1 Geography
2/1 Current Events
2/1 Pop Culture
2/1 Sports
TOTAL: 50/25
Packet Formatting: Packets must be emailed to [email protected] as a .doc or .rtf file. They must be typed in Times New Roman, 10 point font, with 1-inch margins all around (note that this is not the MSWord default). Below is the formatting required. Note convention for prompts, do not accepts, and alternate answers. Packets that deviate significantly from this will be spitefully returned for reformatting.
Tossups should look like this:
He lists Pepsi products under his Facebook interests, which led a newspaper reporter to contact him regarding Coca-Cola’s monopoly on his university’s campus. He was nicknamed “shadesâ€