Fall 2012 schedule discussion

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Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by theMoMA »

I just cleaned out this forum of outdated threads. Let's discuss the fall 2012 schedule! Here's the list of Saturdays:

9/1: Labor Day weekend
9/8:
9/15:
9/22:
9/29:

10/6:
10/13:
10/20: Penn-ance
10/27:

11/3: ACF Fall [likely]
11/10: Delta Burke
11/17: Minnesota Open
11/24: Thanksgiving weekend

12/1:
12/8:
12/15:
12/22: Most schools on break
12/29: Most schools on break

A reminder of the general principles:
1. Sensible progression in difficulty throughout the year coupled with a good mixture of easy and hard events throughout the year.
2. Two tournaments per month when possible, but no more.
3. Encouraging collaboration and cooperation among teams.
4. SCT and Regionals are the February tournaments.
5. Respect existing events and weekends when possible.
6. All regions should play a tournament on one of two adjacent weekends (eliminate very delayed mirrors except in special cases, for example spring break time, beginning of the year, or right before winter break).
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Post reserved for a list of events.

Collegiate Novice
ACF Fall (likely 11/3)
Delta Burke (likely 11/9)
Michigan tournament (October)
Penn tournament (10/20 and 27)
Minnesota Open (late November)
Illinois tournament
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Cheynem »

So the events that are definitely happening are: Collegiate Novice and ACF Fall.

I'm not sure if MO is happening--maybe Rob and Eric or someone else can weigh in--I'm not working on it.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by ValenciaQBowl »

I'd like to lock in November 9-10 for Delta Burke. Mirrors can come on the same weekend or after, of course.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by itsthatoneguy »

Michigan is planning a house-write for sometime in October. Details will be announced shortly...I think.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Ras superfamily »

We would like the Oct 20/27 dates for our housewrite and its mirrors
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Minnesota is putting together an editing team for Minnesota Open, likely to take place in late November once again.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Ike »

Illinois is currently writing a MUT level in difficulty, event in the early Fall. If any team is planning on something similar, contact me and we may collaborate due to circuit weekend constraints. Either way, we will invariably get the help of some veteran to guide us.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Blackboard Monitor Vimes »

TheCopleyIndian wrote:We would like the Oct 20/27 dates for our housewrite and its mirrors
I guess I'll note that UVA is going to have to run Cav Classic (our more or less annual fall hs tournament) on 10/27 because of the difficulties our football schedule imposes on parking. If something's happening in the Mid-Atlantic on this set of weekends, 10/20 would be much better for us.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

So, uh, do we really need every school writing their own tournament? I'd suggest that it would be better if some of these events merged or were turned into packet sub.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Ras superfamily »

Sarah, we plan to run our site on 10/20, but we were assuming that, like October 2011, there would be two tournaments in the month with two weeks per tournament for mirrors

edit: grammar
Last edited by Ras superfamily on Mon Apr 30, 2012 1:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Vernon Lee Bad Marriage, Jr. wrote:So, uh, do we really need every school writing their own tournament? I'd suggest that it would be better if some of these events merged or were turned into packet sub.
I'll echo this. For example, it seems like Delta Burke and Illinois's effort might be a perfect match.

Michigan and Penn both running regular-difficulty events seems to be in line with what happened last year, when we had both MAGNI and MOO. If other programs are interested in writing a fall regular-season event, perhaps similar collaborations to last year's arrangements can be worked out.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

Vernon Lee Bad Marriage, Jr. wrote:So, uh, do we really need every school writing their own tournament? I'd suggest that it would be better if some of these events merged or were turned into packet sub.
Concur. I'm wondering especially what Penn needs/is going to change, given that the in-house team could only finish nine rounds of questions for its tournament last year.

On a semi-related note, I also think it was suboptimal that neither regular tournament last fall was packet-sub; between teams not attending Fall and teams not attending MO, there wasn't a great chance to learn to write a good packet for all teams to play.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by ValenciaQBowl »

For example, it seems like Delta Burke and Illinois's effort might be a perfect match.
Hmm, perhaps, but I'll note that DB is a good notch below MUT in difficulty (well, supposed to be, anyway), and I have been endeavoring to shorten questions by a line for this year's effort to better serve our CC constituency. I've been looking at last year's conversion rates, and seeing TUs on Titian only get answered in 2 of 15 rooms has made me want to write at a level closer to the last couple Early Autumn tourneys. If Illinois folks want to go that route, that's great, but I'm not sure the Midwest four-year schools (and mirrors) would be as well served by the difficulty level I'm shooting for.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

ValenciaQBowl wrote:
For example, it seems like Delta Burke and Illinois's effort might be a perfect match.
Hmm, perhaps, but I'll note that DB is a good notch below MUT in difficulty (well, supposed to be, anyway), and I have been endeavoring to shorten questions by a line for this year's effort to better serve our CC constituency. I've been looking at last year's conversion rates, and seeing TUs on Titian only get answered in 2 of 15 rooms has made me want to write at a level closer to the last couple Early Autumn tourneys. If Illinois folks want to go that route, that's great, but I'm not sure the Midwest four-year schools (and mirrors) would be as well served by the difficulty level I'm shooting for.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Rufous-capped Thornbill »

I guess this is the place to put it out there that Jasper and I are interested in collaborating with someone this year.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by CaptainSwing »

Hey Ohio State, Illinois, or anyone else --

Carleton College has been doing some work on a new tournament for next year (this was hesitantly going to be CUT XIII) but I think it would be great to team up with someone else for a MUT-level difficulty event. I already have a small stockpile of questions sitting around for this. Anyone interested?
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Fond du lac operon »

I guess I'll pile on and mention that Alabama's looking to write/co-write a regular difficulty tournament for 2012-13. PM me if you're interested in teaming up, Avengers-style.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

Some thoughts:

-I'd like to hear more about this Michigan event from someone at Michigan. Is it definitely going to use the first two weeks of October? Difficulty and length will have to be controlled as much as, or ideally more than, MOO's, right?

-It seems like there's room for only one more event, on December 1 or 8 (and probably just December 1, due to finals, though I suppose that second week has to be there depending on when high school tournaments and final exams strike in each region). Would an MUT-difficulty event go there, and if so, who among the set of interested people/teams are collaborating to write it? Does it make more sense to have the easier event in October and the more regular one in December? Talk it out, folks.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Ringil »

RyuAqua wrote:Some thoughts:

-I'd like to hear more about this Michigan event from someone at Michigan. Is it definitely going to use the first two weeks of October? Difficulty and length will have to be controlled as much as, or ideally more than, MOO's, right?

-It seems like there's room for only one more event, on December 1 or 8 (and probably just December 1, due to finals, though I suppose that second week has to be there depending on when high school tournaments and final exams strike in each region). Would an MUT-difficulty event go there, and if so, who among the set of interested people/teams are collaborating to write it? Does it make more sense to have the easier event in October and the more regular one in December? Talk it out, folks.
So, we're intending at the moment for a set that is regular+, in the sense of BARGE. Length will be at least as controlled as MOO. We intend it to be done by the first week of October, so the first two weeks are both fine with us.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

I'm not happy about stepping on anybody's toes here, but having two hard tournaments in the fall seems excessive.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Vernon Lee Bad Marriage, Jr. wrote:I'm not happy about stepping on anybody's toes here, but having two hard tournaments in the fall seems excessive.
I tend to agree with this. I obviously wear a couple hats here as an MO editor and a schedule reform organizer, but it seems to me that our principle of having a good difficulty progression throughout the year cautions against having two above-regular events in the fall.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

Perhaps there's room for a harder tournament really early in the fall? Generally teams haven't done a ton of recruitment by like 9/8 or 9/15 (especially for schools that don't start that early), so a tournament that caters more to returning players might work in that slot.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

theMoMA wrote:
Vernon Lee Bad Marriage, Jr. wrote:I'm not happy about stepping on anybody's toes here, but having two hard tournaments in the fall seems excessive.
I tend to agree with this. I obviously wear a couple hats here as an MO editor and a schedule reform organizer, but it seems to me that our principle of having a good difficulty progression throughout the year cautions against having two above-regular events in the fall.
So I have a solution to this.

MO needs a physics editor, and there's concern about you being able to finish it. Michigan seems to want to write a hard tournament and has both a physicist and a statistician on staff. On top of all that, people only want one hard tournament in the fall. Why not combine your efforts and make it a Minnesota-Michigan Open? It seems like that would solve everyone's problem.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

I'd agree that the fall needs more regular events and only really needs one hard event. However, Eric, I'm not seeing another writing team forming besides Michigan which would want to replace Michigan's event if it up and left to join MO.

Part of scheduling reform is ensuring that multiple regular-difficulty events run both semesters which are appropriate for all teams, and if a school is willing to write a whole event by itself, it seems like the best use of resources is to have that school write its own event and keep it difficulty-controlled so as to be truly appropriate for all teams. There's plenty of interesting, hard, gettable stuff in the harder shades of regular itself, and targeting an event to Regionals 2010 or THUNDER II difficulty, a notch below BARGE, will still challenge the best teams a great deal in games against one another. Given that more teams attend regular events than "regular-plus/hard-minus" events, meaning more money for you guys, it seems like this is financially sensible as well and I'm not sure what arguments hold up against toning it down some. Your thoughts, Michigan?
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Yeah, it seems to me that the best solution is for Michigan to write a regular-difficulty event. I would happily take on Libo or any other qualified Michigan-trained person as MO's physics editor (though I have a contingency plan in place should we not get an editor, depending on the availability of a potential contributor), but I think that losing a possible regular-difficulty event this fall would be unfortunate.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Ringil »

So, it seems like the idea of a Michigan written regular+ tournament has some opposition.

I'd like to ask though, how come consistently in the Winter, there are around 1-2 tournaments, not counting Nats, that are more difficult than regular, but that in the fall, the second tournament that will be a bit harder than regular is an idea that is so frowned upon? It seems that if we wish to balance the schedule between Winter and Fall especially considering that Nats are themselves a hard tournament duo, having a second harder tournament in the Fall is a reasonable idea.
Here's a list of harder than regular tournaments from the past couple years with the semicolon marking Fall vs. Winter semesters:
2011-12: MO; BARGE, PR
2010-11: MO; Sack, IO
2009-10: FIST, MO, and TIT/IO, described by Chris Ray as "a bit over a regular collegiate difficulty"); HI

Furthermore, there does not appear to be another tournament that would take that slot at the moment, which means that there really isn't a regular tournament that has been excluded to teams.

While personally I'm indifferent as to writing a harder than regular tournament or not, we as a club have decided we wish to write a tournament that is regular+. Although we realize that we could probably earn more money by writing an easier tournament and market it to more regions, we believe there is some some demand. We will try our best to make sure we don't make the tournament into a true hard tournament that would be completely alienating to newer teams. All our bonuses will have truly easy parts expected from a regular tournament along with mostly reasonable middle parts. It is only in the third parts of bonuses and a small percentage of tossup answer lines that will be considered harder than regular.


Regarding MO, I personally am not interested in being the physics editor.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Muriel Axon »

Don't we already have enough regular difficulty tournaments planned for this fall? It seems like everyone's writing one. I agree that it is a bit much to have two hard tournaments in the fall, but that's just a byproduct of the real issue, which is that there are a lot of tournaments, period. I can't see the harm in having another regionals+ tournament, and I trust Michigan to do a good job of it.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

The Eighth Viscount of Waaaah wrote:Don't we already have enough regular difficulty tournaments planned for this fall? It seems like everyone's writing one. I agree that it is a bit much to have two hard tournaments in the fall, but that's just a byproduct of the real issue, which is that there are a lot of tournaments, period. I can't see the harm in having another regionals+ tournament, and I trust Michigan to do a good job of it.
I count one.

Anyway, if Michigan's tournament shades harder than regular on purpose, but they avoid sacrificing easy & middle parts or a majority of tossup answers to that shading as LIbo says they'll avoid doing, thereby keeping things meaningful at many skill levels, I suppose there could be worse things than that. Don't be afraid to seek out advice or playtesting, so as to avoid overstepping.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

OK, but I don't trust Michigan to be able to do that after MOO, and, like, this whole argument that there should be some balance on the circuit, thus we should run EVEN MORE hard events, is basically causing the exact problem we wanted to treat by coordinating the schedule. If you want to write another BARGE, do it during the summer or something.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by CaptainSwing »

Here is how I see this situation:

The November schedule, as usual, is locked down w/ Fall, MO, and Delta Burke. That doesn't need to be changed.

Late October has Penn-ance, which seems like the right kind of event to put immediately before Fall. Now, two harder tournaments in the fall is something that can and should happen, but I don't think one of those events should happen in early October. Carleton is on it's way with writing a MUT-level event, and we are looking to team up with Illinois. In the fall, when teams are trying to recruit and people are looking for warm-up events for ACF Fall, I think that kind of tournament is more appropriate. I would like to offer up Carleton's tournament or our impending collaboration to go in the early October slot.

MIchigan's harder tournament should happen in mid or late September alongside ACF Novice. This can be an event that veteran quiz bowlers can play while teams as a whole are busy assembling their membership for the new year, etc. This seems like a more efficient use of time and gives us a nice balance in the fall: Two novice events (ACF Novice and Delta Burke), two easier tournament (ours and Fall), a regular difficulty tournament (Penn-ance), a regular+ tournament (Mich), and a true open event (MO).
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

The whole point of this thread is to schedule things better than they have been in the past to avoid problems like "Two hard tournaments in the fall." The fact that there have been multiple hard tournaments in the fall in the past is the reason we're doing this, not a reason that that should happen again.

I also just don't think the tournament you want to write is going to be a tournament with "true easy parts." During MOO, I think some of the intended easy parts were William Congreve and George Meredith; there are certainly tournaments for which that would be entirely reasonable, but if you're trying to write one, that's going to be a hard tournament rather than close to regular.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

CaptainSwing wrote:Here is how I see this situation:

The November schedule, as usual, is locked down w/ Fall, MO, and Delta Burke. That doesn't need to be changed.

Late October has Penn-ance, which seems like the right kind of event to put immediately before Fall. Now, two harder tournaments in the fall is something that can and should happen, but I don't think one of those events should happen in early October. Carleton is on it's way with writing a MUT-level event, and we are looking to team up with Illinois. In the fall, when teams are trying to recruit and people are looking for warm-up events for ACF Fall, I think that kind of tournament is more appropriate. I would like to offer up Carleton's tournament or our impending collaboration to go in the early October slot.

MIchigan's harder tournament should happen in mid or late September alongside ACF Novice. This can be an event that veteran quiz bowlers can play while teams as a whole are busy assembling their membership for the new year, etc. This seems like a more efficient use of time and gives us a nice balance in the fall: Two novice events (ACF Novice and Delta Burke), two easier tournament (ours and Fall), a regular difficulty tournament (Penn-ance), a regular+ tournament (Mich), and a true open event (MO).
Guys, we're on track for one regular-difficulty event in the fall. One. Don't pretend that four easy tournaments, two hard tournaments, and one regular tournament is a "nice balance". It isn't. The point of scheduling reform is to get a schedule of multiple tournaments that all college teams can play against all other college teams, and that means maximizing the number of regular, for-everyone tournaments while minimizing the amount of everything else. (I also don't think that getting circuits to host two separate events in the latter half of September is realistic, when a lot of schools aren't back until late in the month (or early October) and teams are scrambling to get their novices to one place and their experts to another within that two-week window, but I could be persuaded by a good argument.)

This is why I'm trying to argue that Michigan should reduce its difficulty, rather than reduce the number of possible regular events to one by keeping it BARGE-level (and thereby hard). What I was trying to get Michigan to realize was this: I didn't actually make a consession in the last post, I made an if statement. It's only if all your bonuses' easy and middle parts look like ACF Regionals, and if sixteen to eighteen of the tossup answer lines per packet would look reasonable at ACF Regionals, and if no tossup exceeds the eight-line limit -- basically, if the "plus" next to "Regionals" is as small as you can make it -- that this tournament is going to be an appropriate event to add to the fall. Otherwise, move it or don't write it. I would like you guys to have a plan for actually controlling yourselves more this time, given that MOO had some of the worst difficulty and length control of the past year - whether that involves playtesting, or inviting a suitable non-student to supervise you, or something similar.

The reason why it's bad to have multiple hard tournaments in the fall, Libo, is the same reason it's bad to have multiple hard tournaments in the spring (and the same reason I'll argue against having more than one hard tournament in the spring besides ICT and Nats, and the same reason I think BARGE and PR should not have both happened). It's because hard tournaments crowd out space for regular tournaments that everyone can just play, which is the most important thing to secure in a healthy college circuit.

As I said before, there does seem to be a spot in December. If people want to go ahead and say December should never have college tournaments, due to the ubiquity of exams and the possibility of high school tournaments, they should come out and argue that explicitly, which would make managing October and November all the more important.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Cheynem »

The problem I have with scheduling discussions is that a lot of times it just seems like an arms race to name and claim a tournament to get it on the schedule, as opposed to what I think would be the more generative idea of talking over various tournament ideas first (although this insidiously reeks of central planning I guess). There is nothing wrong with MO and Pen-zance--MO has a history of continuity and both have good head editors--but they grabbed slots early effectively by announcing their intentions and grabbing a date. If that's the way we're going to scheduling, great, but I worry that in the future we will effectively turn scheduling into a "first past the post" system of announcing things. Again, let me explain, I'm not blasting MO or Pen-nance, they will assuredly be good tournaments, but I'd like to see more substantive discussion of the schedule before things get announced in the future.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Matt Weiner »

On the contrary, there is something wrong with the Penn tournament, which is that the Penn team has proven over and over again that it is not capable of writing a tournament. When Eric agreed to do VCU Closed instead of Penn Bowl, I foolishly did not assume that Penn would be creating a whole other tournament, with three fewer months to work on than Penn Bowl, and without submitted packets. I can only await the announcement of Pennance Trash, written by Joe Nguyen, Charles Hang, and Kirk Nagy and scheduled for four days from now.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Cheynem wrote:The problem I have with scheduling discussions is that a lot of times it just seems like an arms race to name and claim a tournament to get it on the schedule, as opposed to what I think would be the more generative idea of talking over various tournament ideas first (although this insidiously reeks of central planning I guess). There is nothing wrong with MO and Pen-zance--MO has a history of continuity and both have good head editors--but they grabbed slots early effectively by announcing their intentions and grabbing a date. If that's the way we're going to scheduling, great, but I worry that in the future we will effectively turn scheduling into a "first past the post" system of announcing things. Again, let me explain, I'm not blasting MO or Pen-nance, they will assuredly be good tournaments, but I'd like to see more substantive discussion of the schedule before things get announced in the future.
I think this is a good point. When I put something into the schedule, it doesn't mean that discussion is over about that particular weekend or that particular event. But it's probably worth having a designated discussion period during which we all agree not to announce tournaments, just so we can solidify things, particularly collaborations, before we start announcing tournaments.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Last year's two regular-difficulty October may have been an anomaly, historically. But I think it worked out really well. I have nothing bad to say about well-written regular-plus events, as I'm sure Michigan's will be. But it does seem contrary to part of our central mission here, which is to offer a lineup of events that keeps people involved throughout the year. As it stands, we have a super-novice tournament (Novice), followed by a regular-plus tournament (Michigan), followed by a regular tournament (Penn), followed by Fall, followed by Delta Burke, followed by MO. Of the six slots, we're dedicated two to events that don't cater to new players or regular programs. This seems unfortunate.

I do think that Max's idea carries some appeal (though I'd have to hear a bit more about the editing team before giving a ringing endorsement). Adding an EFT-like event in early October would be a solid choice, and I'd certainly be willing to play Michigan's event sometime in September. It still strikes me as a bit unnecessary to have two above-regular events in the fall, but it's something I could live with if Michigan simply won't write a regular event.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Rococo A Go Go »

theMoMA wrote:I do think that Max's idea carries some appeal (though I'd have to hear a bit more about the editing team before giving a ringing endorsement). Adding an EFT-like event in early October would be a solid choice, and I'd certainly be willing to play Michigan's event sometime in September. It still strikes me as a bit unnecessary to have two above-regular events in the fall, but it's something I could live with if Michigan simply won't write a regular event.
I like the idea of an EFT-like event in early October as well, but I wonder if it wouldn't be better for Michigan to host their event in early December? I know finals causes some issues there, but it's not exactly unprecedented to have an event during that time (THUNDER comes to mind), and if they end up writing something regular+ it wouldn't be as harmful then as it would be in October.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by AKKOLADE »

Hey y'all, let me toss out some ideas from an outsider's perspective:

1) For easy to regular tournaments, shouldn't we aim for these to tend to be a bit later in the semester? Fairly new teams are unlikely to be able to get anything together for September, just due to inertia.

2) That said, I do think it'd be desirable to keep the number of hard tournaments to no more than 2, and probably just 1, during this semester. It's the beginning of the season, and it seems reasonable to not lock new teams into possibly facing nothing but tournaments harder than Regionals.

3) Wouldn't it better to avoid putting together a calendar for now, and just get people who are interested in writing something to post such intentions, preferably with a desired time window? And then go to the calendar? That's probably the best way to handle the concern "Sugar Cheyne Mosley" raised.

4) I think it's essential to make teams face facts about their ability to actually produce the tournaments they want to; it's more essential for these prospective hosts to be honest with themselves and their abilities. This is one angle of quiz bowl where excessive hubris can really cause harm to the circuit.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Friedrich Hayek »

Cheynem wrote:The problem I have with scheduling discussions is that a lot of times it just seems like an arms race to name and claim a tournament to get it on the schedule, as opposed to what I think would be the more generative idea of talking over various tournament ideas first (although this insidiously reeks of central planning I guess).
What is promised to us as the way to a balanced schedule is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when quizbowl embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as "the general welfare." There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to go to a tourney together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to to go to the tourney which most of them do not want at all: VETO.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Ras superfamily »

Matt Weiner wrote:On the contrary, there is something wrong with the Penn tournament, which is that the Penn team has proven over and over again that it is not capable of writing a tournament. When Eric agreed to do VCU Closed instead of Penn Bowl, I foolishly did not assume that Penn would be creating a whole other tournament, with three fewer months to work on than Penn Bowl, and without submitted packets. I can only await the announcement of Pennance Trash, written by Joe Nguyen, Charles Hang, and Kirk Nagy and scheduled for four days from now.
We literally did not work on Pennbowl until after winter break. That's actually much less time than we are putting into Penn-ance. Like Eric posted, we will post updates on our progress, so if people think that we are not doing enough then something else should go there. I don't think one tournament is an example of the future capabilities of the Penn team which is made up of many freshman who were not responsible for the past iterations of Pennbowl (Eric did not work on the past versions either). Also, we will likely never again host a trash tournament, and the Pennbowl trash writers are no longer at this school.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Sam »

TheCopleyIndian wrote: Also, we will likely never again host a trash tournament, and the Pennbowl trash writers are no longer at this school.
The sway your team has with Penn's administration is frightening.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

I plan to write a wacky side event for MO. It will be either Wild Kingdom 2 or YourChoiceFest. If its the latter I will want some cowriters.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Matt Weiner »

Look, I certainly know what it's like to seek redemption after failing to finish "one tournament" or more, but in this case it's the last several tournaments involving Penn and there doesn"t seem to be any kind of change in the setup. Who can forget last year's Penn Bowl finals packet, which was a document with the word "FINALS" above ten blank pages, or waiting for rounds of THUNDER to come in, hopefully before the prior round was finished? You have multiple people who are, in some cases, competent writers but this happens every time. Why should I think it won't happen again?
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Auroni »

The THUNDER thing was actually my fault -- I spent the entire night proofreading and randomizing rounds for that and didn't finish in time, and then I had my tournament to read at so I couldn't do the last few rounds in the timeliest manner. That has nothing to do with Eric or anyone else on Penn.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by marnold »

Someone should make a Burke gimmick account to point out how much easier this used to be (or at least it seemed like it) when there were standard, established weekends for events that happened every year (MLK weekend = regular difficulty-ish tournament, a Regionals+ level in February that would be mirrored as Cardinal Classic, etc.) and the issues were people jockeying to be the editor or host for that tournament. Fitting people into slots with some continuity is much easier than trying to make the entire schedule from scratch by just throwing a bunch of shit against the wall.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by theMoMA »

marnold wrote:Someone should make a Burke gimmick account to point out how much easier this used to be (or at least it seemed like it) when there were standard, established weekends for events that happened every year (MLK weekend = regular difficulty-ish tournament, a Regionals+ level in February that would be mirrored as Cardinal Classic, etc.) and the issues were people jockeying to be the editor or host for that tournament. Fitting people into slots with some continuity is much easier than trying to make the entire schedule from scratch by just throwing a bunch of shit against the wall.
I think there's definitely some truth to this. Quizbowl is somewhat similar to golf in that the regular tournaments tend to be hosted on the same weekend every year. If we could create tournament slots that are consistent from year to year, it might be easier to fit a schedule together.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by MLafer »

It's pretty easy to proclaim that there are no regular difficulty events when anything harder than regionals is rounded up to 'hard tournament' and anything easier is rounded down to 'easy tournament'. Are there really that many teams for which ACF Fall is far too easy but BARGE-level is *IMPOSSIBLE*?
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Yes.
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Re: Fall 2012 schedule discussion

Post by kdroge »

MLafer wrote:It's pretty easy to proclaim that there are no regular difficulty events when anything harder than regionals is rounded up to 'hard tournament' and anything easier is rounded down to 'easy tournament'. Are there really that many teams for which ACF Fall is far too easy but BARGE-level is *IMPOSSIBLE*?
I think this is a valid point. I would like to stress that our tournament is designed to be slightly above regionals difficulty, not massively so. There will be many, many tossups that could appear in a regionals level set (out of 14 in each sub-category, at least 11 or 12). We are working very hard to control difficulty by having people look at questions both inside and outside their areas of expertise to make sure that they are accessible. If there is doubt about difficulty, we are erring on the easier side. Tossup length is being controlled at no more than eight lines with an average of about seven full lines, with the vast majority of bonus parts at no more than two lines each. As to the question of "why not just write a regular difficulty event," I think that writing slightly above regular gives a little more freedom in terms of topic selection and exploration of subjects that we're not as familiar with.

If people think that it would be better to host our event in early December or late September rather than in early October, I'm pretty sure that we could accommodate (I'd have to talk to the rest of our team about it, but I wouldn't foresee any major problems).
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