UCLA TWAIN IX: Sunday 5 October 2008

[chrisn]

The UCLA College Bowl Club is pleased to announce TWAIN IX. All high school students are eligible to play and compete.

DATE: Sunday 5 October 2008

PARKING: Parking is $9 at various lots throughout the UCLA campus. It is recommended that parking lots 3 and 5 be used.
A map of UCLA is available at http://www.ucla.edu/map/. It lists all parking structures and building sites, but dining options are not included.

VENUE: The Event will be held at Bunche Hall and Bunche Hall 2209A will be the tournament headquarters.

SCHEDULE:
7:30 A.M. – 8:30 A.M.: Registration Period (All teams must be accounted for by 8:30 A.M. PST)
8:30 A.M. – 9:00 A.M.: Rules Meeting / Moderator Meeting
9:00 A.M.: Tournament Play

FOOD:
Breakfast: A "light, continental breakfast" will be served.

Lunch: It is recommended that each team member bring at least $10 for lunch oncampus. Hours of Operation vary for each dining option, but Ackerman Union is definitely open during the weekend. Please note that Ackerman may not be the closest dining option to tournament venue.

ELIGIBILITY: Anyone who pays the entrance fee (or gets a club to do that for them) is eligible to play in this tournament. All players and substitutes-alternates must be a high school student (9th-12th grade).

FORMAT: NAQT Invitational Set IS-77 Twenty-question, untimed rounds will be played in the preliminaries, repêchage, and playoffs.

PRICING STRUCTURE:
Team Discounts
Base fee = $110 per team
-$5 for a fully-functional buzzer system (Must have four working buzzers on both sides)
-$10(n-1) multiple team discount, where n is the number of teams from
your school, for all n (-$10 second team, -$20 third team, etc.)

School-wide Discounts
-$20 New School Discount (must not have played in any competition sanctioned by NAQT between the current date and July 1, 2005.
-$5 for a moderator or staff member (The TD has the right to accept or reject the moderator and also reserves the right to withdraw the discount retroactive to payment.)
Minimum fee (per team) = $75

WARNING! If you cannot have payment by tournament date, please contact the TD with at least 24 hours notice. If you arrive without warning of delinquent payment to tournament, we will assess a $50 penalty to be paid immediately in addition to the regular payment, which must be received by us within ten business days.

Checks should be made out to "College Bowl Club of UCLA". Please do NOT change this wording. For reasons of financial security, please bring the check to the tournament rather than mailing it in advance.

REGISTRATION:
The Tournament Directors for TWAIN IX are Ravi
Menghani and Chris Ngoon. The tournament cap will be set at 24 teams, but if demand is complemented by resources, we will consider expanding the tournament.

If you are planning to come, please e-mail Chris at crntjn@ucla.edu with:
1) Your school's name
2) Coach (or adult representative) name and e-mail address
3) The number of teams you are bringing
4) The number of buzzer systems and any other discounts you wish to validate

If you have any questions, please e-mail Chris at crntjn@ucla.edu.

Please keep yourself updated with more news as the tournament date approaches.

UPDATE: Registration Deadline is Tuesday 30 September 2008

We hope to see you at TWAIN IX on Sunday 5 October 2008


Thank You!

Chris Ngoon and Ravi Menghani
Tournament Directors, TWAIN IX

[chrisn]

As of 26 September 2008, the following schools have registered.

-Torrey Pines
-Hart
-Carlsbad
-La Jolla
-Rancho Bernardo
-Santa Monica
-Rancho Alamitos
-Edison
-Laguna Beach
-San Dieguito

Hopefully more teams will register in four more days.

[ihavenoidea]

The results as far as I know:

1. Arcadia A
2. Santa Monica
3. La Jolla A

[Kaisuopai]

Good game, all. I look forward to seeing some of you at Caltech (if we manage to go, that is...school budget cuts :P)

Forgive me for being hasty, but when can we hope for the stats to be up? :o

-Kai

[cvdwightw]

Good game, all. I look forward to seeing some of you at Caltech (if we manage to go, that is...school budget cuts :P)

Forgive me for being hasty, but when can we hope for the stats to be up? :o

-Kai

UC Irvine is hosting a tournament on the 18th that is over an hour closer, if you can make it.

[ihavenoidea]

Even if it wasn't on the day of the PSAT and our Homecoming, I still wouldn't go because of the absurd $125 entrance fee.

Chris, could we expect the question sets to be emailed to us?

[Kaisuopai]

UC Irvine is hosting a tournament on the 18th that is over an hour closer, if you can make it.

It's too soon after UCLA; our team's a bit tired from their first match and half of them are juniors taking the PSAT. It's not gonna work well. ^^; I wish the tournaments would have been spaced out a bit better, because they seem really rushed this year.

-Kai

[ihavenoidea]

It's been a week...when can we expect the set and the stats?

[idrayer]

Probably not going to see the question set because it's NAQT, and I'll let Chris know at practice that the stats aren't up yet.

[ihavenoidea]

Um..I attended this tournament...I think I deserve a copy of the questions.

[Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It]

Yeah, whenever we went to NAQT tournaments we got a copy of the questions immediately afterwards, and if teams are paying a $110 (!) base fee for a tournament there really is no excuse not to give the questions free.
Also, why are tournaments in California routinely almost twice the national standard for high school? I've never understood that.

[every time i refresh i have a new name]

Yeah, whenever we went to NAQT tournaments we got a copy of the questions immediately afterwards, and if teams are paying a $110 (!) base fee for a tournament there really is no excuse not to give the questions free.
Also, why are tournaments in California routinely almost twice the national standard for high school? I've never understood that.

I know UCLA in particular has been having some financial difficulty, but can't say anything for the other three programs in SoCal which routinely host tournaments.

[ihavenoidea]

Yeah, whenever we went to NAQT tournaments we got a copy of the questions immediately afterwards, and if teams are paying a $110 (!) base fee for a tournament there really is no excuse not to give the questions free.
Also, why are tournaments in California routinely almost twice the national standard for high school? I've never understood that.

Charlie, I don't understand it either. I speculate that because there are fewer teams in attendance, hosts tend to raise prices on tournaments. However, this doesn't motivate borderline teams to attend. It deters away teams that are tight on budget. If that's not a correct reason, would one of the college TDs like to clear it up for us?

[cvdwightw]

Ray Anderson has explained to me that the extortion-like $125 base fee for CBCT is a result of increasing the base fee to provide a greater incentive to bring buzzers and staffers, which are discounted more. I do not understand this line of reasoning given that most teams have at most two buzzer systems and are therefore paying at least $10 more than they would be otherwise. I do have a very strong gut feeling that this is the reason why we have a significantly smaller than usual field.

UCLA's base fee was initially announced at $100, then upped to $110. I'm pretty sure that the $110 was a compromise between the $100 that Chris announced and the $120 that Ravi wanted to charge, given that a similar situation happened with the EFT mirror.

I'm now going to post a much longer response to Zhao's question.

[cvdwightw]

Back in the "good old days", several area college clubs were run by people who, at least according to the impressions I have formed either firsthand or secondhand or both, believed that the purpose of a quizbowl club was to make money for the quizbowl club. This was accomplished by running as many tournaments as possible, and attending as few tournaments as could be attended without revolt. California quizbowl is rife with stories about hilarious tournament mismanagement by these people, who apparently didn't care much about what everyone else in the club thought about what they were doing (assuming that there were other people in the club that were both angry and competent enough to attempt to take over a leadership role). It was during this time that the "norm" for high school tournament base fees grew to $100. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but I have a feeling it was the result of a combination of circuit isolation, greed, and whatever factors either had pushed or were pushing college tournament base fees to $100.

My assumption is that most teams who run tournaments around here now subscribe to the much-more-reasonable view that clubs run tournaments not just to make money but to use tournament-generated income on travel costs and (collegiate) tournament entry fees, in order to minimize the amount of out-of-pocket costs by club members; however, many of those clubs now subscribe to the idea that they should attend as many tournaments as opportunity and interest allow, so club expenses have increased. Nationals expenses for teams in California are much higher than nationals expenses in other areas. A high estimate places travel-related nationals expenses for California colleges at roughly $2200; high schools that travel with a coach and maybe an alternate or two and probably need two hotel rooms and might want to come in the Thursday before the tournament could see costs rise over $3000. Figure another $1000 as a conservative estimate for regular-season tournament entry fees, this is obviously more for teams like UCLA and Stanford that are sending multiple teams to a lot of tournaments. So we're looking at a club needing $3000-$4000 to prevent people from paying out of pocket. A lot of places, this kind of money can come by charging $60-70 a team and getting 50 teams, or running two tournaments with 30 teams each. Most schools in California run one high school tournament a year and if we're lucky we'll get 24 teams. Colleges will make somewhere between $500 and $1000 on college tournaments, and high school teams if they're not unlucky will get at least that much as a quiz bowl budget. So, assuming an operating budget of $3000 and a minimum of $500 as outside income, clubs here need to charge around $100 on their one high school tournament to have a somewhat balanced budget.

I sent a message out a few weeks ago to our local hsquizbowl mailing list asking schools to, starting in January, voluntarily cap fees at $80-$90 base fee (depending on production costs), with what I thought to be reasonably standard discounts. My reasoning was that a 20-team tournament at $100 a team brings in $2000; by bumping down to $80, you need 25 teams to make the same amount. By the same token, a school with a $400 budget can send a single team to four tournaments at a $100 base fee or five tournaments at an $80 base fee. Under the assumption that schools are acting in good faith and trying to spend their quizbowl budget on attending tournaments, then every school can afford to send a single team to one extra tournament, or send a second team to one tournament, for every $400 in their budget. Yes, there's a finite amount of quizbowl money in the area high schools, and it's shrinking, and teams should compete to get as much of that finite amount as possible. I also know that schools were running out of quizbowl money before the end of the season, even before the budget cuts hit. In a kind of Nashian intuitive quizbowl-related argument, tournament hosts need to do what is best for the tournament host within the context of what is best for the circuit. Escalating tournament fees will lead to fewer teams attending tournaments, which means that the later tournaments will have fewer teams in attendance and will make less money. In an attempt to make as much money as they used to make, they will have to leapfrog other tournament dates the next year - kind of like the ridiculous primary leapfrogging that happened this year. Worst case scenario, this leads to a terrible bunching of tournaments in October/November and virtually nothing later in the year - hey, this was already happening before a couple of high schools started hosting tournaments in the winter - followed by a slow death of programs burnt out by the fall-heavy schedule/rising entry fees and hosts that can't secure one of the prime weekends. Best case scenario, the hosts make the same amount of money, no ridiculous race for prime tournament weekends occurs, and only a few teams, chief among them those that are already paying out of pocket for tournaments, stop attending tournaments; however, each field has fewer teams, there's no guarantee that the next set of price escalations won't trigger the worst case scenario, and the circuit is dangerously unhealthy as self-sustained teams, especially nationally competitive ones like Rancho Bernardo, are forced to drop.

Out of the responses I received, one (Zhao) completely agreed with me that tournament fees have gotten out of hand; one claimed that while he understood where I'm coming from, at the same time colleges do not provide these services (i.e. tournaments) as a charity and tournaments should make enough the college clubs enough money that its members are not paying out of pocket for tournaments (at which point I wasn't going to reiterate why a slight decrease in tournament prices would not substantially change the long-term amount of income derived from a tournament); and one claimed that lowering tournament prices would not change anything because the "self-annointed gods of quiz bowl" [sic] and rudely annoying teams like mid-2000s Santa Monica would drive people away from quizbowl regardless of the price of tournaments.

I'm pretty sure that quizbowl in Southern California is broken; certainly not irreparably broken, but starting to show some very noticeable cracks. However, I'm not sure anyone else on the "college people who have TDed" side agrees with me, and I don't want to be the crazy old grad student harping on nonexistent problems. But I do feel that the path towards healing the circuit starts by reducing tournament costs, and that lowering tournament fees reduces a barrier to entry for teams considering adding quizbowl programs, and that if those teams start adding quizbowl programs, then tournament revenue increases, which makes everyone happy. In short, combined with a decent outreach program, tournament costs need to be lowered to keep extant teams that may be self-sustaining and bring in teams that may now be interested.

[ihavenoidea]

To all the college teams who don't want to pay out of pocket, our school gives us no funding whatsoever. We pay for every tournament out of pocket, including nationals. I know of several other prominent SoCal schools who get little to no funding. Keeping the price the way it is will only exacerbate the problem. It also does not help expand the circuit, seeing as how teams who have no pyramidal quizbowl experience will be unlikely to participate if they must pay for something as compared to playing Academic League, which is school funded.

[Kaisuopai]

Hmm...I would like to see the stats too. Especially since we actually lost more games at TWAIN this year than last year, but still made it into top 3 - I want to figure out what exactly was going on. D:

Regarding funding - I'm essentially new at this, so this is the first time I've heard that tournaments aren't actually supposed to cost $110 per team. But I agree with Zhao - while our school agrees to sponsor our tournament play, we generally start running out of funds after 2-3 tournaments of two teams each, and then have to rely on parent donations - which are, apparently, supposed to be used to fund Academic League. Our adviser is in charge of the financial details, though.

-Kai

[cvdwightw]

Yeah, tournaments in California aren't supposed to cost more than $100/team, and everyone else in the quizbowl community thinks that even this standard is ridiculous because California tournaments aren't twice as good as $50 tournaments elsewhere, especially if they use the same questions.

To partially make up for our exorbitant base fee we will be providing a set of IS-79 to every school in attendance at our tournament, all five of them.

If you know of other area schools that are either paying out of pocket for everything or paying out of pocket once a small (like under $1000) tournament-related budget is used up, please either post here or contact me (dpwynne at gmail dot com). My club does not believe me when I tell them that a significant number of area high schools are paying for tournaments out of pocket. I would very much like to get to a point where a team with a buzzer pays $75-$80, which is still high compared to everywhere else but is much more reasonable than $110-$125. Again, I believe that doing this allows more teams to participate in more tournaments, reduces barriers to entry for teams new to pyramidal quizbowl, and will ultimately make tournament hosts more money once these newer schools start participating, all of which are good things.

[hellogoodbye]

Where are the results posted?

[ihavenoidea]

This is the third time I have asked for the question set/stats. I wish they could be emailed/posted as soon as possible.

[ClemsonQB]

So, everyone payed almost twice as much as they would have at any other tournament and still don't have stats or questions. Good job, UCLA.

[Kaisuopai]

I must agree with the two before me...last year we received the stats barely two days after the tournament, and the questions in a comparable time. It has now been two weeks...will someone please at least tell us what the delay could be due to? The stats were certainly already calculated by the end of the tournament.

-Kai

[tracyclee]

It's been over two weeks since the tournament and I'm at this point just shocked that there's been no word on question sets or results. Stats were up going into awards, so I don't really understand what's causing the delay. All I know is it would be really great to see where the new members are standing for future reference and team arrangement.

[Joe Romersa]

if most of the stats were up at lunch, whys it taking...err...16 days? to put up the rest?
everyone wants to know how they did,
and like tracy said, we dont really know how strong everyone is, other than derek&zhao > rest of us

[Joe Romersa]

seriously, no stats yet? wtf...
its been almost 3 weeks...
unless you lost the usb drive with the stats (like us 2 years ago)... is there a legit reason?

[Crazy Andy Watkins]

Claim: the more expensive the tournament, the more interested it is in your money and the less interested it is in providing you with services.

[cvdwightw]

Claim: the more expensive the tournament, the more interested it is in your money and the less interested it is in providing you with services.

Claim disproven: CBCT, noted most expensive non-national I've ever seen, ran smoothly once we got the police to come unlock our rooms, gave schools a full copy of the packet set, had stats up the day of the tournament, and ran 10 rounds with 1 re-bracketing and had everyone out by 4:30.

[Crazy Andy Watkins]

Revision to claim: Dwight Wynne being associated with anything ("seeing" counts) makes it better.

[Joe Romersa]

then can dwight go see UCLA?

[cvdwightw]

then can dwight go see UCLA?

Dwight ran UCLA's club for two years. Dwight will go see UCLA on Sunday and bug them to post stats.

[ak47]

Seriously, this is pretty ridiculous how terribly late and delayed the distribution of packets and the posting of statistics are taking. I hope this is just an aberration that will be corrected in the future, because I've enjoyed many of the UCLA tournaments I've been to in the past.

[Joe Romersa]

alex is wondering why dwight is talking in third person...

[tracyclee]

We should all give thanks for people like Dwight, who make tourney direction less painful and more efficient.

On a side note, if another school wants the packets, I have them, so you can email me [with your school name] and I'll get them to you. However, I am not a magical genie and I cannot summon up STATS the same way.

[ihavenoidea]

Dwight, anything from UCLA?

[ihavenoidea]

Stats can be found here: http://quizbowl.bol.ucla.edu/results/TW ... dings.html

Thanks Dwight

[jarredmihalik]

ditto

[Kaisuopai]

WTF no, we did not lose to RB B twice...

And thanks, Dwight :D

-Kai