ACF Nationals 2019 - 4/13-14/2019 - University of Pennsylvania
Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2018 12:23 pm
Hey everyone. This is the announcement thread for ACF Nationals 2019, which will take place on the weekend of April 13th at the University of Pennsylvania.
This tournament will be edited by Alex Damisch, Andrew Wang, Athena Kern, Andrew Hart, Ike Jose, Jason Cheng, JinAh Kim, Jordan Brownstein, Matt Bollinger, and myself as the head editor. I am very excited to work with this ensemble cast of both established and up-and-coming editors, who will breathe fresh life into the game's highest echelons while ensuring consistency, difficulty control, and polish.
This tournament will combine aspects of the previous two ACF Nationals, which will be reflected in the sections below.
Eligibility
Information on who is eligible to play ACF tournaments and details regarding packet submission can be found at the ACF Packet Submission Guidelines. (Note: because our distribution is different, do not follow the guidelines for the distribution that appear in this link)
Qualification
This tournament will use the A-value qualification system, an explanation of which can be found here. Hosts of ACF Regionals 2019 should send information about the teams that receive bids to our set email, [email protected].
Packet Submission
To ensure a fair format and adequate tiebreakers, the editors are committing to writing 11 packets this year. We will produce an additional 9 packets based on submissions that will be used in the preliminary phase of the tournament.
Like the editors of last year's ACF Nationals, I'm hoping that I can coordinate with teams on their packets so that we get somewhere around 15 quality submissions. Please fill out this form if you would like to submit a packet.
Under this arrangement, packet submission will not be mandatory, but we're counting on teams capable of writing quality packets to work with us to ensure that we have enough submissions to edit the tournament. If we can't be sure that we'll have enough packets to make this work, we'll consider other options.
Fee Schedule
Base fee: $320
-$100 discount: Monday, January 21
-$50 discount: Sunday, February 17
-$25 discount: Sunday, March 10
Buzzer discount: -$10 per working system
Staffer discount: -$100 for each staffer capable of reading a round in 35 minutes or less
Quality discount: -$50
I will work with teams to coordinate their submissions. We will continue to offer an additional $50 dollar discount to any team that writes at least 20/20 that doesn’t need any major editing (packets requiring relatively few changes to clues, answer lines, or grammar will qualify).
In the unlikely event that a team submits a packet but does not qualify for ACF Nationals, we will be in touch with you make sure that their school will receive whatever discount they earn as a discount at a future ACF tournament.
Field Size
The initial field cap will be 42 teams. Expansion up to 48 teams is very possible once we confirm staffers. Expansion beyond 48 teams may not be possible because of format, but if demand is high, we will explore our options.
If every team that played ACF Regionals, and thus has an A-value, is offered a spot in the Nationals field and there are still spots remaining, they will be filled first come, first served.
Please stay in touch with me or other ACF members if we are trying to verify your attendance at this event. We may be forced to drop teams from the field if they do not confirm their attendance in a timely manner.
Lodging
We have secured a hotel block for the tournament. More details are available here.
Staffing
If you would like to staff ACF Nationals, please send an email both to [email protected] and [email protected] with the subject line ""ACF Nationals staffing"
Distribution
We've made minor changes to the distribution for this tournament; please see below for specifics.
5/5 Literature: This includes 1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 1/1 world, and 1/1 other (which can include any of the preceding categories). Vary your questions by time, place, and genre, and please make sure that drama, poetry, and short fiction are represented.
5/5 History: This includes 1/1 American, 2/2 European, 1/1 world, and 1/1 other (which can include any of the preceding categories or questions spanning multiple places). Please make sure that your questions aren’t all from the same time period or place and aren’t all one type of history (for instance, try not to submit 5/5 political history or 5/5 military history).
5/5 Science: This includes 1/1 biology, 1/1 chemistry, 1/1 physics, 1 math or computer science, 1 astronomy, earth science, or other science, and 1/1 other science (which can include any of the preceding categories).
3/3 Arts: 1/1 painting and sculpture (this encompasses drawing, painting, printmaking, illustration, ceramics, sculpture, and other small "handicrafts"). 1/1 classical music. 1 question on other visual arts (architecture, film, photography, performance art, installation art, non-Western artistic traditions that do not fall under "painting and sculpture," etc) and 1 question on other auditory arts (jazz, ballet, opera, musical theater, folk music, non-Western musical traditions, popular music from the early 20th century, etc) Vary by genre, place, and time period. If you are writing a packet and have any questions about whether a given topic is suitable for this distribution, please email me.
1/1 Religion (please try to write interesting questions exploring the culture, practices, texts, and study of the world's major belief systems or of well-known historical or ethnic groups)
1/1 Philosophy
1/1 Social Science (this encompasses both hard, ie economics, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, political science, or other social science that is rooted mainly in empirical, scientific methods, ideally topics that are still relevant in their fields today, and "soft thought," such as cultural criticism, theory, and texts or people of interest primarily for historical reasons rather than current relevance)
1.5/1.5 Mythology/Current Events/Geography: 1 mythology question drawing from myths from the world's major mythological systems, or relating to "legends" that are more cultural than classical (such as American lore, European folktales, or similar stories that are less likely to show up in the canonical "mythology" category), or about mythography. 1 current events question describing interesting and relevant contemporary issues without devolving into a list of politicians and political parties or focusing on flavor-of-the-day stories. 1 geography question incorporating cultural and environmental clues instead of purely discussing physical features.
1.5/1.5 Other Academic: at least 1/1 of this category must be dedicated to questions that don't fit other categories or blend clues from varying categories. Disciplines that could be represented in this category include, but are by no means limited to, environmental art, library science, urban studies, and culinary arts. Clues that place academic topics in a popular-culture context are welcome in this category, if done sparingly and well (but please keep in mind that ACF Nationals does not have question on purely popular culture). Please email me if you have any questions or ideas for how to satisfy this requirement. The remaining question may be an "extra" of prior categories.
As overriding principles, please vary your questions by time, place, and subject matter, so that there aren't strange clusters of related questions in your packets; please think twice before submitting tossups on very difficult answer lines; and please try to write your questions on simple answers, using interesting clues, rather than writing on complex answer lines that may confuse readers or players and lead to protests.
Difficulty
In emulation of the difficulty of ACF Nationals 2017, we aim to ensure that scaled down versions of at least 60% of the tossup answers (including ones that are "common link") in each packet could appear as tossups at regular difficulty college tournaments or below. A simple way to ensure that more of your submission gets used is to keep this metric in mind when writing.
How to submit your packet
All packets should be sent to [email protected]. If you have any questions about packet writing, you can send them to that email address as well. Here is a list of the currently submitted packets:
-$100 deadline:
McGill
Minnesota
Chicago A
Penn State
Illinois
Virginia
Johns Hopkins
UCLA
Florida
-$50 deadline:
OSU
MSU
Wright State
Berkeley A
Yale
-$25 deadline:
Harvard
Rutgers
Chicago B
Texas
Michigan
Maryland B
Oxford
This tournament will be edited by Alex Damisch, Andrew Wang, Athena Kern, Andrew Hart, Ike Jose, Jason Cheng, JinAh Kim, Jordan Brownstein, Matt Bollinger, and myself as the head editor. I am very excited to work with this ensemble cast of both established and up-and-coming editors, who will breathe fresh life into the game's highest echelons while ensuring consistency, difficulty control, and polish.
This tournament will combine aspects of the previous two ACF Nationals, which will be reflected in the sections below.
Eligibility
Information on who is eligible to play ACF tournaments and details regarding packet submission can be found at the ACF Packet Submission Guidelines. (Note: because our distribution is different, do not follow the guidelines for the distribution that appear in this link)
Qualification
This tournament will use the A-value qualification system, an explanation of which can be found here. Hosts of ACF Regionals 2019 should send information about the teams that receive bids to our set email, [email protected].
Packet Submission
To ensure a fair format and adequate tiebreakers, the editors are committing to writing 11 packets this year. We will produce an additional 9 packets based on submissions that will be used in the preliminary phase of the tournament.
Like the editors of last year's ACF Nationals, I'm hoping that I can coordinate with teams on their packets so that we get somewhere around 15 quality submissions. Please fill out this form if you would like to submit a packet.
Under this arrangement, packet submission will not be mandatory, but we're counting on teams capable of writing quality packets to work with us to ensure that we have enough submissions to edit the tournament. If we can't be sure that we'll have enough packets to make this work, we'll consider other options.
Fee Schedule
Base fee: $320
-$100 discount: Monday, January 21
-$50 discount: Sunday, February 17
-$25 discount: Sunday, March 10
Buzzer discount: -$10 per working system
Staffer discount: -$100 for each staffer capable of reading a round in 35 minutes or less
Quality discount: -$50
I will work with teams to coordinate their submissions. We will continue to offer an additional $50 dollar discount to any team that writes at least 20/20 that doesn’t need any major editing (packets requiring relatively few changes to clues, answer lines, or grammar will qualify).
In the unlikely event that a team submits a packet but does not qualify for ACF Nationals, we will be in touch with you make sure that their school will receive whatever discount they earn as a discount at a future ACF tournament.
Field Size
The initial field cap will be 42 teams. Expansion up to 48 teams is very possible once we confirm staffers. Expansion beyond 48 teams may not be possible because of format, but if demand is high, we will explore our options.
If every team that played ACF Regionals, and thus has an A-value, is offered a spot in the Nationals field and there are still spots remaining, they will be filled first come, first served.
Please stay in touch with me or other ACF members if we are trying to verify your attendance at this event. We may be forced to drop teams from the field if they do not confirm their attendance in a timely manner.
Lodging
We have secured a hotel block for the tournament. More details are available here.
Staffing
If you would like to staff ACF Nationals, please send an email both to [email protected] and [email protected] with the subject line ""ACF Nationals staffing"
Distribution
We've made minor changes to the distribution for this tournament; please see below for specifics.
5/5 Literature: This includes 1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 1/1 world, and 1/1 other (which can include any of the preceding categories). Vary your questions by time, place, and genre, and please make sure that drama, poetry, and short fiction are represented.
5/5 History: This includes 1/1 American, 2/2 European, 1/1 world, and 1/1 other (which can include any of the preceding categories or questions spanning multiple places). Please make sure that your questions aren’t all from the same time period or place and aren’t all one type of history (for instance, try not to submit 5/5 political history or 5/5 military history).
5/5 Science: This includes 1/1 biology, 1/1 chemistry, 1/1 physics, 1 math or computer science, 1 astronomy, earth science, or other science, and 1/1 other science (which can include any of the preceding categories).
3/3 Arts: 1/1 painting and sculpture (this encompasses drawing, painting, printmaking, illustration, ceramics, sculpture, and other small "handicrafts"). 1/1 classical music. 1 question on other visual arts (architecture, film, photography, performance art, installation art, non-Western artistic traditions that do not fall under "painting and sculpture," etc) and 1 question on other auditory arts (jazz, ballet, opera, musical theater, folk music, non-Western musical traditions, popular music from the early 20th century, etc) Vary by genre, place, and time period. If you are writing a packet and have any questions about whether a given topic is suitable for this distribution, please email me.
1/1 Religion (please try to write interesting questions exploring the culture, practices, texts, and study of the world's major belief systems or of well-known historical or ethnic groups)
1/1 Philosophy
1/1 Social Science (this encompasses both hard, ie economics, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, political science, or other social science that is rooted mainly in empirical, scientific methods, ideally topics that are still relevant in their fields today, and "soft thought," such as cultural criticism, theory, and texts or people of interest primarily for historical reasons rather than current relevance)
1.5/1.5 Mythology/Current Events/Geography: 1 mythology question drawing from myths from the world's major mythological systems, or relating to "legends" that are more cultural than classical (such as American lore, European folktales, or similar stories that are less likely to show up in the canonical "mythology" category), or about mythography. 1 current events question describing interesting and relevant contemporary issues without devolving into a list of politicians and political parties or focusing on flavor-of-the-day stories. 1 geography question incorporating cultural and environmental clues instead of purely discussing physical features.
1.5/1.5 Other Academic: at least 1/1 of this category must be dedicated to questions that don't fit other categories or blend clues from varying categories. Disciplines that could be represented in this category include, but are by no means limited to, environmental art, library science, urban studies, and culinary arts. Clues that place academic topics in a popular-culture context are welcome in this category, if done sparingly and well (but please keep in mind that ACF Nationals does not have question on purely popular culture). Please email me if you have any questions or ideas for how to satisfy this requirement. The remaining question may be an "extra" of prior categories.
As overriding principles, please vary your questions by time, place, and subject matter, so that there aren't strange clusters of related questions in your packets; please think twice before submitting tossups on very difficult answer lines; and please try to write your questions on simple answers, using interesting clues, rather than writing on complex answer lines that may confuse readers or players and lead to protests.
Difficulty
In emulation of the difficulty of ACF Nationals 2017, we aim to ensure that scaled down versions of at least 60% of the tossup answers (including ones that are "common link") in each packet could appear as tossups at regular difficulty college tournaments or below. A simple way to ensure that more of your submission gets used is to keep this metric in mind when writing.
How to submit your packet
All packets should be sent to [email protected]. If you have any questions about packet writing, you can send them to that email address as well. Here is a list of the currently submitted packets:
-$100 deadline:
McGill
Minnesota
Chicago A
Penn State
Illinois
Virginia
Johns Hopkins
UCLA
Florida
-$50 deadline:
OSU
MSU
Wright State
Berkeley A
Yale
-$25 deadline:
Harvard
Rutgers
Chicago B
Texas
Michigan
Maryland B
Oxford