The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hello! I assist in running a yearly quiz event for college students for a professional organization. We've historically used a Quizco 4-team lockout buzzer system for our games, but this year the moderator's controller came up missing and I had to improvise with a cell-phone app. After doing what d...

Minor thing - the statistics seem to be counting tiebreaker games as full games for PPG purposes (i.e. Columbia 2019 is counted as playing 17 games, but it played only 16 games worth of tossups). This has been fixed. I also noticed that for some recent nationals, WUSTL is treated as equivalent to W...

Hi Folks! The tournament date is about one month out, so an update on set production is probably due. The NASAT set is currently at 81% completion, with literature, art, and a few minor categories completely finished. A list of writers who've contributed one question or more, in order of total contr...

Progcon wrote: ↑
Fri May 17, 2019 5:21 pm
Please send out an email to teams with the Discord link. I'd like this tournament to start as smoothly as possible. Thanks.

Echoing Harris, can we get a start time on this?

Could you include these teams'Nats and ICT placement in this thread? Thanks for doing this!

On another note, people should remember that Johns Hopkins was playing without their top scorer at Nats, so their placement there seems misleading as to their actual strength.

I don't bring this up to expose Ramapriya, rather, I bring this up to illustrate the absurdity of the witch-hunt culture that Jakob's post may lead us to. Yes, cheating is bad. Don't do it. But don't call out people who happen to have had suspicious stats at a tournament which is no longer relevant...

Given the lack of personal contact between reader and the person being read to online, it's no secret that it's easier to cheat on online packet readings than real-life ones. That doesn't mean, however, that cheating is ok if it happens online or that it isn't detectable. Just by way of review, chea...

This sounds cool. I'm very much looking forward to playing it!

It's not for everyone, but I don't see the issue with playing around with the distro like this. I find it very weird that 1/1 myth (or "legends", as people now call it, as if this actually changes anything) is basically enshrined into the distribution at almost every tournament. That hasn't been st...

frasier wrote: ↑
Thu May 02, 2019 2:17 pm
We also cut myth entirely and replaced it with thought

Muriel Axon wrote: ↑
Thu May 02, 2019 2:20 pm
wait, what?

excuse you both maps of Chicago say I'm from there

https://imgur.com/a/22wNbeV

After having playtested this set, I hope I'm not spoiling anything to say that, while hard as hell in places, this set was an absolute delight to hear, even in categories that I'm not very good at. I highly recommend playing this if you can and look forward to seeing what the writers and editors of ...

As many of you already know, there was a conspicuous scoring irregularity involving a house team player during a tournament hosted by Okemos High School this past Saturday. A security protocol had been in place to prevent any of the participating Okemos players from having access to the question pa...

Tim Morrison is the best math player (sorry Samir and Naomi, you're a close second/third) and also the best film player. His generalist skills can't be doubted either, leading a Chicago B team to top-of-second bracket finishes at both nationals. I would like to ditto tim morrison stanning if you ha...

Ok doing this demonstrates that you've learned nothing from what we said earlier about using questions from the packet archive. The next time more experienced people give you good faith advice, please take it.

I'm told that Joseph Chung had access to the packets from this set beforehand, put up this statline https://stats.neg5.org/t/Q_hAp-noJ/okemos-spring-invitational/player-full#player_43951300-6172-11e9-9e43-e13877ab411f, which is not comparable to anything he's done before, and offered the excuse to t...

https://imgur.com/a/1ZeARt3 This was posted in the moderation chat before I left the moderation team. Ameya, even with "editing" and the fact that this tournament didn't charge anything, passing off someone else's work as your own and dishonestly promoting it as such is highly unethical, and this a...

Besides the above 25 people, here are a few others I think deserve your consideration and have entered play or gotten really good since last year (note that this is by no means an exhaustive list, and some picks are more intended to draw attention to underrated players than to indicate what my ballo...

MaestroExtraordinaire98 wrote: ↑
Fri Apr 19, 2019 10:59 am
This tournament has been cancelled due to a lack of interest.

Would fielding a house team not bring this to a viable field size?

As far as I can remember, this is the only quibble I had with the actual content of a history question, which happened to have a major effect on the outcome of one game and consequently our weekend - the question on Denmark in WW2, specifically the line about the White Buses, which iirc said someth...

My spicy hot take is that some of the pull towards greater accessibility for non-western auditory art went a bit too far -- I felt as if some of these bonuses were easy 20s or 30s even for those without much musical knowledge. The Ewe music bonus seems like a good example. I'll re-evaluate this cla...

Unrelated to this incident, I found the questions in this tournament to be irredeemably miserable. I don't know if this is the fault of the editors or whether this is merely a symptom of the difficulty, but listening to thousands of impossibly difficult clues, many of which seemed quite unimportant...

Speaking purely schedule-wise, I think Sunday was a good length and one that accommodates teams the best because it isn't always possible to get later flights at a good price point. I do not think it is wise to have the rounds for most of the teams end past 12:00 PM, which means you can only ever o...

This was quite possibly my favorite set I've ever played. The categories I knew about were almost uniformly well-written, fair tests of knowledge that showed that quite a lot of attention was paid to representation and difficulty control, and the categories I didn't were at least interesting to list...

Yeah I'll withdraw my complaint about McGill's seeding; with the data available where they were seeded is definitely fine.

I know NASAT has been run as a summer open in the past; that should likely be included as an option.

Considering the inherent variability with NAQT format Because teams don't split rounds when they play in other formats and see the result swing 330 points in their favor the second time around. If the results are supposed to exactly follow the seedings, then why bother to play the matches? While in...

That being said, I really don't like the ingratitude of the tone on display here. The ICT took a lot of extra work to put together this year specifically so it could have enough tiebreaker packets available - and it seems like these tiebreakers generally shook out in favor of the better teams. Extr...

I agree with this post. I would also add that the sheer number of tiebreakers it was necessary to play after prelims indicates that the number of prelim rounds currently on offer does not have sufficient resolving power to fairly sort teams into brackets. More transparency on a seeding method that p...

Part of this is on the staffer's end: introducing yourself to the teams you're reading for if they don't know you is a good habit to get into. However, I strongly agree that staffers need more recognition, especially when they're not from the school that's hosting. If you don't already, thank your m...

Is the set now clear? Were the Wright State and Discord (closed) mirrors the last ones? This set is still being used for various states' NASAT trials, and there will be a high school mirror at TJ on May 4, so public discussion is a bad idea, but for collegiate teams, yes. Contact me if you want a c...

This happened (mostly) successfully! Stats are here. Congratulations to Maryland B (Jack Lewis, Vishwa Shanmugam, Jason Shi) for defeating Maryland A (Caleb Kendrick, Weijia Cheng, Graham Reid, and Justin Hawkins) in a thrilling one-game final! Congratulations are also due to this tournament's top s...

Our field is currently sitting at 5 teams, so I'll wait a bit longer to close the field in hopes that another will sign up. Please do so quickly if you're on the fence!

Edit: field closed

As a youth, I enjoy hearing stories about quiz bowl in the 1990s (and, to a lesser extent, the early 2000s) a lot. I can gather some things from reading QBWiki and old threads, but I think a thread specifically about it might be interesting and beneficial. If you were around in the 90s, what was pla...

I would strongly prefer this being in August, but I realize I'm likely close to the only one

Update: This is in 5 days, and we'd like to see as many teams as possible register. Please do so by Friday morning; I plan to close the field then.

I was 13 when this happened. I don't know why continuing to commemorate Watkins is necessary, especially in this weirdly celebratory tone. Cheating is bad, but I'm sure people are aware of this and that doesn't strike me as a terribly valid excuse to post. If this is just a Guy Remembering exercise...

I was 13 when this happened. I don't know why continuing to commemorate Watkins is necessary, especially in this weirdly celebratory tone. Cheating is bad, but I'm sure people are aware of this and that doesn't strike me as a terribly valid excuse to post. If this is just a Guy Remembering exercise,...

Given multiple mirror cancellations, our team felt it was fair to offer a second online mirror of Spartan Housewrite for March 30. The fee structure will be $100 per team, payable via venmo (strongly preferred) to Jakob Myers or by a check written to the MSU Academic Competition club (once again, co...

A quick update: Jakob has offered to run a closed Discord mirror on March 30th. I am staffing a high school tournament that day. Him and I want at least 8 closed HS or college teams to sign up. Please email me and cc him to do so. If we get eight teams in the next week or so, I will allow this mirr...

x-post from the matchmaking thread:

I made a team formation spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
If you have formed a team, please register that information therein.

I made a team formation spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
If you have formed a team, please register that information therein.

A fairly common trend in quizbowl is to tag some of the harder questions for the finals of a tournament. If I recall, this got some discussion at one point and there was some pushback against doing it, but I don't remember if that went anywhere. This isn't related to any specific tournament, but I'...

Habitat_Against_Humanity wrote: ↑
Sat Mar 16, 2019 12:16 am

An Economic Ignoramus wrote: ↑
Fri Mar 15, 2019 11:49 pm
Shill time: NASAT is notably available for mirroring as a summer open and is not terribly difficult!

I honestly didn't know that. Where 'bouts?

Keep your eyes peeled in the coming months for a mirror site near you!

Shill time: NASAT is notably available for mirroring as a summer open and is not terribly difficult!

I'll have more thoughts later on, but for now, here are a few extremely scattershot observations that hopefully other people can build on: I honestly couldn't imagine something like that Tricon Kirk Jing question happening today. References to QB "notables" in questions for academic tournaments is s...

This is about the time of year I posted this thread last year. If you're a current high school senior, post here once you know what your plans are!

iarehavethestupid wrote: ↑
Tue Mar 05, 2019 1:27 pm
Are all/most of Norman Davies's books good for quizbowl?

Yes. Europe and Vanished Kingdoms (in addition to the aforementioned God's Playground) are both pretty good reads and very clue-dense. Highly recommend.

In light of the recent kerfuffle surrounding tournaments geared for newer players, I would like to issue an addendum to the eligibility of players for this tournament, whose purpose is, per the editors, "to provide an accessible tournament for new college quiz bowl players that will still be engagi...

a) http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=21943 for the additional reason that if you don't, teams that do not belong at your novice-oriented tournament will attend it and put up >25 ppb against clubs that acted in good faith and sent actual less experienced players (Chicago, etc.) b) If y...

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