The Quizbowl Resource Center

Gonzagapuma1

Hello! The well-received tournament that UMD wrote for our spring tournament is available for mirrors in the fall. If you want a tournament that was described by two people as, "a great set and a great end to my high school quizbowl career," then this set is for you! Mirror fees are $8 for...

Gonzagapuma1

The MAQT will host practices in Jimenez Hall from 5-ish to 8-ish on Tuesdays and Thursdays starting next week. All are welcome!

Gonzagapuma1

Since I assume stats will never be posted, the Nutter/Coates/Nediger/Puma team is claiming victory.

Gonzagapuma1

I should be able to bring a buzzer.

Gonzagapuma1

Can I please see the tossups on Cormac McCarthy, the Blackshirts, and American invasions of Mexico? A character created by this author saves men from being butchered by fashioning gunpowder out of nearby volcanic rocks. The title character of one of this author’s novels meets a man in a work camp a...

Gonzagapuma1

May I please see the 1984 tossup? Thanks. The final chapter of this novel is set at the Chestnut Tree Cafe, where a song featuring the lyrics “I sold you and you sold me” often plays. While living at Mr. Charrington’s, the protagonist reads a book on Oligarchical Collectivism to his lover, a member...

Gonzagapuma1

I can't believe I forgot to thank the many people who helped out at this tournament including Sam Bailey, Evan Nagler, and Victor Prieto. Thanks so much; we couldn't have done it without you!

Gonzagapuma1

I would like to start out by saying that I had a great time playing so many skilled teams. I am curious as to the distribution of the set, because it seemed that there was a little more science and lit. Also the history seemed a little "non-standard at times." This might just be my incorr...

Gonzagapuma1

Sorry for being greedy- van Gogh Durer NMR spec England (art) The Devil and Daniel Webster elephant (lit) Henry IV of France I enjoyed the set. It seemed like a lot of school-assigned literature was in it, too! Thanks This artist wrote “I don’t know if I’ll be able to paint the postman as I feel hi...

Gonzagapuma1

40th Day after death wrote:I feel like it would have been better to write a tossup on Ginsburg's other stuff (Kaddish, Wichita Vortex Sutra, the billion other poems he did)

Yeah, although it was a good tossup it doesn't seem to have played very well.

Gonzagapuma1

Could I please see the following tossups: Predation Solvents Hydrogen Ravel (this may have been a bonus?) Donizetti The high polarity of the monomers of nylon allow this interaction to occur frequently within itself. This interaction occurs between every four residues of a standard alpha helix, as ...

Gonzagapuma1

Could I please see the following tossups: Predation Solvents Hydrogen Ravel (this may have been a bonus?) Donizetti The DRM model suggests this behavior is partially governed by the accumulation of materials like chitin or cellulose in certain organisms. Handling and search times govern this behavi...

Gonzagapuma1

Hello, May I see the 'Borjes' and 'Tolstoy' questions? The early clues seemed harder than the other lit questions, while the tossup on Howl caused a buzzer race with "Holy!" in the first line. 19. One story by this author ends “Glory to him who does die” and describes an Arabian king who ...

Gonzagapuma1

Post here with any question specific comments/questions!

Gonzagapuma1

Post here with any general comments about the set!

Gonzagapuma1

The subforum has been set up thanks to Rob, so please join it by going to the Control Panel, selecting Usergroups, finding "Maryland Spring 2014 discussion" and hitting "Join selected". We look forward to any and all comments!

Gonzagapuma1

Oh, we also made $90 from our lunch fundraiser for the MD NASAT team! Thanks to everyone who participated.

Gonzagapuma1

Congrats to our winners Oakland Mills, who overcame a one game Centennial advantage and won two straight games to claim victory! Thanks to everyone for coming out; we were all super impressed by this field. You guys are awesome. We're going to get a discussion subforum set up to discuss the set, so ...

Gonzagapuma1

QOHS wrote:Quince Orchard is only bringing one team. I e-mailed a few days ago to indicate that, but I see we're still listed as bringing two, and it looks like that wasn't factored into the total...

You are absolutely correct and the field is now closed at 16 teams.

Gonzagapuma1

So, we just had a team drop. We'd love to have 18 and not 17, so please let us know if it's possible for you to bring a (extra) team!

Gonzagapuma1

The field is full at 18 teams. If any additional teams register they will be placed on the waitlist.

EDIT: Also, we would love if registered teams could bring more buzzers to have plenty of backups.

Gonzagapuma1

zachary_yan wrote:Well one difference here is that at pyramidal tournaments teams pay over $50 or so and commit an nearly an entire day just to get creamed. At least on It's Academic (not sure about other shows) it's essentially free and takes a fraction of the time.

YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT

Gonzagapuma1

I thought this tournament was really fantastic. Although Saturday ran really late, it was awesome to get home at a reasonable time on Sunday. The questions on the whole were terrific; they did a great job of sticking to important things while also discerning who knew more about the topic. I'll comme...

Gonzagapuma1

I realize this is absurdly early, but UMD is going to claim 9/20/14 for our fall tournament next year. Set is TBA.

Gonzagapuma1

Also, we are going to have a fundraiser for the Maryland NASAT team during lunch. We will be selling slices of pizza for $2.00 and cans of soda for $1.00. If you and/or your team would like to participate in this please e-mail me at danjpuma at gmail.com, so I can get a handle on how much pizza and ...

Gonzagapuma1

Quick Results:
1. RIchard Montgomery
2. Centennial
3. Quince Orchard
4. Oakland Mills

Thanks to everyone for coming out! It was exciting to see so many good teams play.

Gonzagapuma1

We're going to put an initial field cap at 24 due to both buzzer and staff limitations. Get those registrations in ASAP!

Gonzagapuma1

I would add that the seeding this year seems to give a disincentive for teams to host SCT, since they may get screwed like Harvard did.

Gonzagapuma1

The Joseph Cornell bonus part was really awesome. He's a pretty important guy who I've never heard come up.

Gonzagapuma1

Whoops.

Gonzagapuma1

A team was selected! Thanks everyone for coming out, we were impressed by every player who showed up. The team is:

Sameen Belal from Walter Johnson
Gabe Guedes from Richard Montgomery
Isaac Kirk-Davidoff from Oakland Mills
Lawrence Simon from Quince Orchard
Gary Tse from Centennial

Gonzagapuma1

3) Strange questions: Stuff like cars and Santa Maria seemed to play very poorly. There was a lot of rather "cute" ideas that probably didn't work out too well in practice. I would include the tossups on Gaius Grachus and Newreels in this category as well. That said, I thought this tourna...

Gonzagapuma1

Tryouts are happening March 9th at 1 pm in Jimenez Hall. I encourage anyone at all interested in joining the team to come out! Email me at [email protected] if you have questions.

Gonzagapuma1

Ukonvasara wrote:Yeah, I'm thinking the actual cliff for most people there is at Kid A.

Especially because that description of the album cover is pretty much unbuzzable even for people who know that cover.
I would also add that it seems the Bon Iver bonus lacks a hard part.

Gonzagapuma1

Whoops.

Gonzagapuma1

Here are the questions I wrote or edited. Asterisks denote editing only. DI TUs: hammers in pop culture, Toby Keith, Allman Brothers, eating people in myth, Alice Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook, New England Patriots, Adventure Time, Raidohead*, Kanye West* Bonuses: Jack London, Boucher, men associ...

Gonzagapuma1

Round-robin plus bracketed playoffs in Division I, round-robin in Division II. Finals if needed. Yup. That's what Harry and I worked out at practice tonight. If staffing permits, we'll likely add a house team to Div 2 so that we don't have a bye. So for D1, a round robin and then a split into five ...

Gonzagapuma1

Would one of the editors post the Zinoviev/NKVD/Molotov bonus and the TU on Chronicle of a Death Foretold? I think the wording for the NKVD part was slightly weird, but that just might have been exhaustion. In this novel, one character deals with the pain of “pissing ground glass” after contracting...

Gonzagapuma1

Who's interested in going? We can host tryouts after our spring tournament on 5/3 if there's enough interest. Sameen set up a facebook group. I think people were thinking tryouts after the state championships thing, but I think having them on 5/3 would work as well. OK, either way works, just let u...

Gonzagapuma1

Perhaps by design, this set also had a greater-than-average number of military history questions, including lots of battle formation/tactics clues of questionable buzzability. I'm glad to admit this as a weak point of mine if other people were actually buzzing on clues such as "infantry line a...

Gonzagapuma1

gamegeek2 wrote:
RyuAqua wrote:As far as I can tell, this set was free of meta, as all sets should be.
True, but there was the delightful bonus about Chris Ray and Arun Chonai using an Edgeworth box to determine how to split up candy.

I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Gonzagapuma1

Who's interested in going? We can host tryouts after our spring tournament on 5/3 if there's enough interest.

Gonzagapuma1

Here's the tu: 9. This organization’s close association with the Tenth Credit Cooperative led to scandal after that bank’s collapse. This party imprisoned eight opposition party members following a protest on Human Rights Day in the Kaohsiung Incident. This party’s monopoly on goods like cigarettes ...

Gonzagapuma1

This may not be the best question ever, I haven't seen it. But discussing "quizbowl meta" seems particularly ill conceived--if anything, it may or may not be a misplaced clue. I initially suspected that it was a mere misplaced clue, but Dan's defense/justification of the reasons that I ju...

Gonzagapuma1

Many players may not be totally fine if a question by intentional design rewards knowledge of the quizbowl meta (aka. what difficulty is this tournament and what answers could be conceivably tossed up at the difficulty level I know this tournament is being run at) over actual knowledge of the subje...

Gonzagapuma1

Are you really that okay with easy geography-based (or hell, language-based) fraud? This seems like a really, really low standard of knowledge in order to get power at a regular difficulty tournament. Egregiously misplaced clues like this remove a lot of the advantages that people who've studied Ta...

Gonzagapuma1

The KMT question said a Chinese word in the second clue, which seems like a bad idea because it radically condenses the answerspace. According to Matt Jackson and Jacob Reed, the particular Chinese word was an important place in Taiwan, which makes this even more ill-conceived. I am totally fine if...

Gonzagapuma1

kroeajueluo wrote:T
3. No World History Tossup + Peru bonus based on dictatorship stuff

Thutmose III isn't world history? I mean, I guess he's ancient, but he's also from Egypt, so....

Gonzagapuma1

To clarify, games will start at 9, which means teams should be in Jimenez by 8:45 at the latest.

Gonzagapuma1

Apparently part of the fun of quizbowl is having to pay attention on questions for the right pronoun, so to answer your question, no. Otherwise giving the answer as "Shakespeare" on a hard Hamlet answer line tossup shows "real knowledge". Some questions are intentionally written...

Search found 430 matches