The Quizbowl Resource Center

Always asking for directed answers is nice in theory, but it really wears you down when literally no answer is being taken without being explicitly directed. I was overall happy with the moderating at the tournament, but there's no reason it couldn't be improved at future events. As one of the mode...

Another issue is that whenever a tournament I attend over Zoom, it crashes at least twice over the course of the day. This never happens on discord and tournaments on Zoom I've attended suggest to me that this isn't an uncommon problem.

I'd like to take a moment to public apologize to Oli and other moderators for my frustration over a protest resolution that effectively decided this tournament, no doubt aggravated because this was my last event with my beloved teammates Harrison and Rafael. There was a very unfortunate situation w...

While I don't agree with its main prescription, Harris's post has another issue with trash writing that I'd like to highlight: the disconnect between the age of trash writers and the age of their audiences. For other categories this isn't much of an issue, but pop-cultural tastes evolve dramatically...

If I were ACF I would simply say "no thank you" to the global pandemic that is currently unfolding. I am astonished that no one has thought of this simple solution yet

This tournament ran pretty successfully; Harvard A and Harvard B mutually agreed to let the results of the playoffs stand, so congratulations to Harvard A on their victory! Stats are here https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/6454/stats/combined/. I'd like to thank Arjun Nageswaran, Sadie Britton, O...

As with Open 'SHOP, I intend to close the field and make a server and schedule after this Thursday at 6:00 PM eastern. Any team withdrawing their registration after that time will be assessed a fee. With two more registrations we will reach our field cap anyway, so if you're considering playing, sig...

Thanks to everyone who turned out! This tournament ended in a 5 (!) way tie for first that, it being late, we decided against breaking. Congratulations to co-champions The Velvet Underground and Neekolul (Dylan Minarik, Taylor Harvey, Alex Shaw, and Tracy Mirkin), Yale-ish B (Stephen Eltinge, Daniel...

Is this Tossups + Bonuses or Tossups only? I assume the former, since nothing in particular has been said, but just wanted to make sure. I was also wondering how many rounds might be used/how long this tournament will take. Yes, the former is the case. Plan on 10ish rounds, potentially + a couple d...

AdiyaSivakuma wrote: ↑
Mon Apr 13, 2020 8:16 pm
I was wondering, could one sign up to moderate on both days?

Yeah, that's fine, although I should note that we're almost at the level at which we can provide every room a reader and scorekeeper, at which point we'll close staff signup.

In the current ethical morass in which we find ourselves in which no real solutions have been offered, here's a common-sense actionable policy change that likely would possibly improve the situation. This is a good idea and should definitely be implemented. Community Discussion strikes me as a good...

Given that with the free agent list, the number of signups already exceeds the number of field spaces, I have decided to expand the field for this tournament to 14, with potential further expansion contingent on demand and staff. I will give priority for remaining spots in the field to teams made up...

This was cool. Thanks for putting it on, everyone who was involved in putting it on!

A Dim-Witted Saboteur wrote: ↑
Fri Apr 03, 2020 4:02 pm
The field for this mirror is now full, but we intend to expand it to 14 or 16 if we can find another couple staffers. If you're available to read, please sign up!

We have expanded the field to 14 now.

EDIT: as our spreadsheet suggests, the field cap is now 16.

The field for this mirror is now full, but we intend to expand it to 14 or 16 if we can find another couple staffers. If you're available to read, please sign up!

Frankly I think you'd get very, very few sign ups for anything resembling this idea, including from my team. The whole point of nationals is to play against other people in real time. Your suggested format would allow for none of that. Also with regards to national organizations saving their sets f...

By my estimation, neither Will Alston nor I have reached the level of 3rd-year Matt Bollinger or Jordan Brownstein, or 4th-year Matt Jackson. Judging from the trendlines, I wouldn't even expect either of us to be there next year. There is plenty of room for a Jakob Myers-type (how does he fit into ...

Can this thread get pinned?

Hi everyone! Given the cancellation of several of our in-person mirrors, we on the WORKSHOP team are announcing a second round of online mirrors, one closed and one open. The following announcement covers the OPEN mirror, which will happen on April 25, 2020. Any 4 players, as long as they have not p...

Hi everyone! Given the cancellation of several of our in-person mirrors, we on the WORKSHOP team are announcing a second round of online mirrors, one open and one closed. The following announcement covers the closed mirror, which will happen on May 2, 2020. As a closed mirror, this tournament will b...

They are creating a new generation of quiz bowl that is not restricted to elite academics. What is this supposed to mean Young players are not going to accept the dogma that quiz bowl has to be intellectually and financially inaccessible. Who is saying this Also, fam you're arguing against maintain...

Given the potential cancellation of in-person mirrors (and, selfishly, my own desire to play the set despite not having been able to play my local mirror or the closed online mirror), is there any consideration being given to running an open online mirror at some point? Would you be open to such a ...

Thank you to everyone who came out! The 4-team field that resulted from a late drop and the resulting combination of Washington and Oregon was cleared by University of Muri; we hope everyone had a great time!

Stats are here:
https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/6 ... und-robin/

Our final field is as follows: The Triumverate (Plano West) Oregon Washington Hong, Kumar, Orbis Tertius (Saratoga) North Carolina University of Muri (pseudonym) We need another staffer reasonably urgently; I am willing to negotiate rises in the rate of pay for such a staffer should they arise. If y...

Not to contradict Harris too directly, but I don't think the 1.5/1.5 world for Spartan Housewrite generated too much adverse commentary on the difficulty of that segment of history in particular, and nothing about the experience of editing a distribution with that specific change suggested to me tha...

Hi! I will be closing the field and sending out logistics information Thursday, so if you plan to register, please do so by then! Thanks!

Hi everyone! I am pleased to announce a Discord mirror of WORKSHOP for March 7. Given the availability of discord playtesting sessions and to encourage graduates to staff other mirrors of this tournament, this mirror will be CLOSED . High school and collegiate teams are both welcome to sign up as lo...

Smuttynose Island wrote: ↑
Wed Jan 29, 2020 11:10 pm
Are there any plans for an online mirror?

Yes. An announcement for a closed online mirror is forthcoming.

Hello, my name is Karan Menon. I am a freshman and President of USC Quiz Bowl. Our members have high school quiz bowl experience and we have gone to two ACF tournaments so far, but are finding ACF questions very difficult. What is the best way to prepare for ACF level literature, philosophy, and sc...

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...

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