ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

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setophaga
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ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

Post by setophaga »

Carnegie Mellon Quizbowl is pleased to announce a site of ACF Regionals to be held Saturday, January 26, 2018, on our Pittsburgh campus.

Registration:
There are two steps to registration for this tournament. First, please fill out the central ACF registration form here.
After you have done this, please email me at sameerapte2019 [at] gmail [dot] com with information on the number of teams, buzzers, and staffers you will be bringing to the tournament.

There is a soft cap of 16 teams for this tournament, with potential to expand to 24 or over, pending staff.

Fees
Base fee: $135
Buzzer: -$5/functional system. Note: all buzzer systems MUST have eight functioning buzzers to receive this discount.
Staffers: -$10/staffer
Shorthanded fee (teams of 1 or 2 players): $60
New to quizbowl discount: -$100

Packet submission guidelines
Any team with at least one person on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or as a high school student) prior to September 1, 2017 is required to submit a half-packet. Teams composed of people who have not played regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournaments prior to September 1, 2017, are not required to submit a half-packet, but may choose to do so by the no penalty deadline for a -$50 discount. For more details, please refer to the global announcement linked above.

Please feel free to direct any questions you might have to my email above, and I would be happy to answer them.

Field (teams/buzzers/staffers): 16/16
Kenyon (2/1/0)
Penn State (3/2/0)
Wright State (1/1/0)
Michigan (3/2/0)
Michigan State (3/1/0)
Gettysburg (1/1/0)
West Virginia (1/0/0)
Ohio State (1/1/0)
CMU house (1)
Last edited by setophaga on Fri Jan 25, 2019 2:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Sameer Apte
Carnegie Mellon '19
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Re: ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

Post by setophaga »

There are currently two more spots remaining for teams. We will have a hard time expanding our soft cap, so please register as soon as possible if you are planning on attending! Any teams that register after we have filled our cap will be placed on a waitlist.
Sameer Apte
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Re: ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

Post by setophaga »

Thanks to all who came out for this tournament. Ohio State won a one-game advantaged final over Michigan State A to win the tournament. The D2 championship went to Wright State, the only D2 team in the top bracket. (They are listed as UG in the stats, but we have confirmed that they are in fact a D2 team).

Prelim, playoff, and combined stats are posted at http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/5581/. Thanks to all the CMU club volunteers who made this possible, and Ophir Lifshitz for driving up from DC to help out.
Sameer Apte
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Re: ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

Post by Ciorwrong »

Thanks for running this CMU! We enjoyed playing some new teams in Pennsylvania and the tournament went well.

However, there is an error in the stats. We played back-to-back games against OSU and the stats from each game seem to be duplicated. It would be great if this could be fixed before A values are released.
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Re: ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

Post by Victor Prieto »

Thanks to Carnegie Mellon, who did a great job of hosting. All the readers were good, things moved along very smoothly, and we were able to get home at a very reasonable hour. We look forward to the next time CMU hosts a tournament.

I would like to know one thing, though - the prelim seeding was very frustrating, as we felt like we should have made top bracket (and the stats back us up). It's my understanding that Sameer was not able to seed accurately because Wright State didn't report that Hari Parameswaran was playing, and had that information been known, both Wright State and Penn State A would not have been fighting for the second spot in the top bracket. Why wasn't this information communicated? Because of that, our A-value was averaged with both Gettysburg and Michigan A and our ranking dropped several spots, which is really concerning to us.
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Cody
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Re: ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

Post by Cody »

It sounds like there were a few mistakes made, but the critical failure, imo, was in using a format that was not robust to seeding errors.
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Re: ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

Post by setophaga »

Cody, just for future reference, what would you have changed about the format? Would you have played crossovers in the playoffs with 8/8 and games carrying over, instead of 2/2/2/2?
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Re: ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

Post by Cody »

setophaga wrote: Fri Feb 01, 2019 1:13 amCody, just for future reference, what would you have changed about the format? Would you have played crossovers in the playoffs with 8/8 and games carrying over, instead of 2/2/2/2?
Barring a compelling reason to replay games and keep the playoff brackets narrow, yeah, I would've used a crossover. For "smaller" tournament (around ~ 20 teams and less?), I think my usual preference is to keep at least 30%/33% of the field in contention after prelims.

My typical choice of format is a top bracket crossover of 4 and a bottom bracket crossover of 4. (And a similar format for 7/8 and 7/7, although 7/7 can only be done that way in HS.) A crossover of 3/3 with the bottom 2 going to a round robin bracket of 4 is also an option if limited by packets or other round constraints.
Cody Voight, VCU ’14.
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Re: ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

Post by setophaga »

We couldn't do this because of packet availability. 12 rounds was not a possibility for this tournament, because many of our teams had long drives back home and we wanted to be done with everything before finals by 5:30 (which we did in 10 rounds). Originally, we had a limited single-bye schedule, which would be 8 rounds in the morning, and then, if we did a crossover, 4 rounds in the afternoon plus a possible final. We never considered a crossover, though, simply because it would extend the length of an already long tournament.

Upon Victor's recommendation, we then switched to a schedule that burned through 10 packets in the prelim rounds to enable a regular round-robin schedule. That left only 5 packets on which to play the remaining rounds (there was still one submitted packet left, which we were going use for tiebreak or for finals if that team was involved in the tiebreak), making it impossible to do a crossover with this prelim format. Please correct me if I'm wrong in my calculations here.

In hindsight, for the fairest competition we should have probably run a 12-round tournament, but I'm not sure how teams would have reacted to staying that late, especially given that many people were really tired just at the end of 10 rounds.
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Re: ACF Regionals 2019 @ Carnegie Mellon (1/26)

Post by Cody »

With those packet and round constraints, a crossover of the top 3 teams in each bracket, a crossover of the middle 3 teams in each bracket, and a 4-team round robin of the bottom 2 teams in each bracket is round-equivalent to the format used, but keeps more teams in contention. (And is the format I would've used if pushed by teams to sacrifice the 4/4 crossover, since I personally get the jitters doing a 25% cut in a small field.)
Cody Voight, VCU ’14.
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