The Quizbowl Resource Center

naan/steak-holding toll

I plan on writing a packet of an undetermined number of extremely difficult "Will Alston vanity" questions about "the ancient world" (loosely defined) at some point within the next few months. Expect me to care substantially less about conversion rates than I did for my Barbarian...

naan/steak-holding toll

I think I said something like "depiction of the Battle of Issus at Pompeii" when asked for more information. I didn't realize the word "mosaic" might be needed until after I was negged and I certainly never thought "Alexander" might be needed since Alexander was, obviou...

naan/steak-holding toll

It's been a month and there haven't been any major updates on the tournament schedule. I guess we should wait for VCU Open to happen to discuss this more in depth, but are there any plans for some sort of fourth fall tournament? Maybe one that utilizes packet submission?

naan/steak-holding toll

I figured it would make sense to have a discussion of what people thought about the format of RILKE. It generally seems to be agreed that this format is not particularly great for people who get stuck near the bottom, as you don't only just end up playing the same people over and over again, but the...

naan/steak-holding toll

I don't personally mind Nationals difficulty as is but clearly I feel perfectly at home at CO-level difficulty, so I'm not much one to speak. What does bother me is that we are attempting to reach so many new teams at Nationals yet not moderating difficulty accordingly. Tossups don't really need to...

naan/steak-holding toll

I don't personally mind Nationals difficulty as is but clearly I feel perfectly at home at CO-level difficulty, so I'm not much one to speak. What does bother me is that we are attempting to reach so many new teams at Nationals yet not moderating difficulty accordingly. Tossups don't really need to ...

naan/steak-holding toll

I didn't like regular difficulty quizbowl until I spent my freshman winter trying to get a reasonable grip on the canon of subjects I cared about (history and religion at the time) - after that I was able to start getting a few solid buzzes and had a good understanding of what I needed to know in or...

naan/steak-holding toll

Well, one could argue that the decision was pretty much inevitable. Regardless, I'm sure it will show up in some form, though not necessarily as an answerline.

naan/steak-holding toll

Yeah, I agree with Mike about trash. This is probably biased by me being an utterly abysmal trash player, but trash in quizbowl already can suffer from a bit of a vanity problem. At least in the other COs I played, trash questions often prompted the most negative reactions - I recall my team and Mag...

naan/steak-holding toll

Since I can't make it out to this site for medical reasons, I would love for somebody to record the games of SHEIKH in their room so I can hear how the set Jordan and I have worked on plays out. I don't mind if it's audio or video - either works for me.

naan/steak-holding toll

I'll also offer the anecdotal evidence that people who have read some of the important but under-asked works that Nick mentions were able to get those common-link tossups quite early. Richard Yu, for example, tells me he's read a bunch of old Chinese literature and he was able to power the tossup on...

naan/steak-holding toll

I didn't play this tournament and I'm not a good literature player at all, but while reading this tournament I was impressed by (thought not particularly surprised by) the sheer amount of canon-expansion in the non-Western literature distribution. Like other parts of this tournament, the way in whic...

naan/steak-holding toll

The fee is $10 per person.

naan/steak-holding toll

To be entirely honest I would prefer to write or edit a myth/religion ("Theology and Beliefs") tournament next year but I don't know that I'm qualified to do such a side event for the premier open tournament of the year. Hence, I would like to try my hand at a subject that it's clear I kno...

naan/steak-holding toll

On an irrelevant side note, I've spoken with Jordan and he seems agreeable to the idea of writing next year's edition of this tournament with me. Are there any major objections to this?

naan/steak-holding toll

Since this topic seems to come up a lot of the time (including last night at dinner after CO History) I figured it would be worthwhile to make a proper discussion thread for it. Put simply, college quizbowl above the ACF Fall level isn't easy by any means and hasn't really shown any signs of getting...

naan/steak-holding toll

I buzzed in very early on the Peruvian election and said "the election where Fujimori won and defeated Vargas Llosa." I feel like that should have been acceptable at that point. I'm not sure if it would have been a good idea to say something like "year required." It's been quizb...

naan/steak-holding toll

I had a blast playing this tournament. Despite my inclination to stylistically favor well controlled sets with good tossups on accessible answers, I enjoyed the super-hard material at this tournament, including a bunch of stuff I thought I would NEVER see tossed up (Burebista! Peruvian elections! Th...

naan/steak-holding toll

Thanks to my teammates for putting up with me at this tournament. I had a great time and the guerilla style ended up a lot more enjoyable and entertaining than I had anticipated. Thanks to everyone else for submitting a bunch of classics content that I was good at, too!

naan/steak-holding toll

I liked the set a lot and also appreciated how it definitely felt more controlled than previous iterations of CO (though even the team with two Matts on it could not break 20 PPB!) This was great and if it's Jerry's last work, it's definitely an excellent note to go out on. Thanks should go to Andre...

naan/steak-holding toll

I'll echo Daniel's sentiment - even though I'm substantially better at history than visual arts and had a great time at CO History, this tournament was my favorite to play on Sunday. It did a great job of balancing accessibility with introducing new material and was an absolutely perfect side event ...

naan/steak-holding toll

Practice is at the usual time tomorrow, right?

naan/steak-holding toll

As a side note, yeah that Egyptian burial tossup at MFT was mega dumb. Admittedly I am probably biased because I got the tossup early, but I don't understand how that question was "mega dumb" at all. People who knew things about Egyptian funerary practices and how they are notably differe...

naan/steak-holding toll

If this happens later in the year, I might consider writing a packet for it (in collaboration with some unknown people and/or possibly my teammates from school) to work on my science writing. It would probably need some editing in the end.

naan/steak-holding toll

I assume we're counting on people who aren't playing to staff this thing. A lot of people may be heading out in the evening, though, so that should probably be arranged ahead of time. We have Ashvin, Jeff, Shan, and John so presumably we only need one more staffer.

naan/steak-holding toll

I would agree, but I think the reasons it played poorly had absolutely nothing to do with how it was written, its content, or even its difficulty - those are all famous works of anthropology and history you are talking about in that question (which I think was interesting and well-written). You coul...

naan/steak-holding toll

Whoops, it looks like I really screwed up here. This was actually the most negged tossup in the entire HSNCT- it was negged in a whopping 71% of rooms where it was heard. I'm not sure how this is a screw-up in terms of writing because all of those clues apply unambiguously to New Guinea. I think pe...

naan/steak-holding toll

Since there are now only 10 teams, is there going to be a change in format from what's previously been stated, or will this just be figured out at a later date?

naan/steak-holding toll

3. "Heteronormativity doesn't exist" - As much as I wish you were right about this, that's unfortunately not the case. Maybe you defy the conventional laws of society and do things like going up to women in bars and making sure they're not lesbians before you hit on them, but the rest of ...

naan/steak-holding toll

This will probably be my last post in this thread. I want to say that my main concern is about quizbowl becoming politicized. I feel like this discussion has weirdly gone in a way that could make it seem like I just don't want to hear about gay people in quizbowl. I won't claim to be a fiercely act...

naan/steak-holding toll

I'm inclined to agree with Raynor here. Sure, there are lots of cases where it doesn't hurt to add additional information if it's actually relevant to the person's most important work. However, to me it sounds rather trivializing to just drop information about people's status as part of a minority/m...

naan/steak-holding toll

As an economics person, I'll echo the sentiment that statistics is an Important Subject that could use more questions.

naan/steak-holding toll

I maintain my vote for CO Visual Art. I would be up for this myself. I'd rather not, I'd prefer We Have Never Been Modern (or maybe SHEIK or Tricon but I honestly don't know what those are) SHEIKH is an all-history tournament of difficulty somewhat higher than the advertised difficulty of VCU Open.

naan/steak-holding toll

Considering that a lot of people really don't get much exposure to the fine arts in real life, that seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a set meant to serve an introductory purpose to do.

naan/steak-holding toll

Speaking with regards to the community's reaction to the Modern World Tournament, I'd actually cite that as (apart from the rather hateful vitriol that people proceeded to spit at my friend, which sank to rather appalling depths) one of the experiences that bolstered my faith in the quizbowl communi...

naan/steak-holding toll

My prediction: We beat Jacob Reed's team because he negs three music tossups in a single round: one on classical music, one on jazz, and one on K-Pop. We swoop in, convert all three questions, and proceed to chuckle with glee for the rest of the day. EDIT: See Andrew's necessary correction to my pos...

naan/steak-holding toll

I guess I don't have much experience with regards to high school arts questions since I didn't really start paying attention to arts questions until this year (my junior year of college) and knew very little about arts in high school. In a few months, though, I managed to go from getting almost noth...

naan/steak-holding toll

I'll also endorse rather broad-based survey books as a way of gaining the most important baseline knowledge you need when playing on history questions - senses of place and chronology. Figuring out the "when" and "where" in a history question gets you to the "who" and &...

naan/steak-holding toll

I think the best solution is to have a sort of "gentleman's agreement" whereby the stronger teams don't take on additional players and the weaker teams can have more people. This doesn't precisely jive with Stephen's original plan for this to be a doubles tournament, but it does give every...

naan/steak-holding toll

The tournament is half completed. I've updated the OP to reflect some time-related specifications we've made with the distribution.

naan/steak-holding toll

Hey guys, Since a lot of people aren't going to get to play any of the main VCU Open sites, Jordan and I figured that it would make sense to organize an online mirror of our set ( details here ) to give even more strong players an opportunity to play it. We'll run this as a standard Skype tournament...

naan/steak-holding toll

I suppose that's correct. My general point is that the year's schedule could probably reasonably fit one easier-ish event, or at least another regular-difficulty tournament that's consciously aiming at a difficulty mark ala MAGNI/DRAGOON/PADAWAN (which is our general intention with MO, for what it's...

naan/steak-holding toll

Would like to play and should be able to. Looking for a team and can drive up from DC area. As per usual, I'd especially like to play with teammates who know literature and science.

naan/steak-holding toll

Now that we've got three regular-difficulty tournaments announced, plus SCT and ACF Regionals, I think there's some room in the calendar for some events of other difficulties to be announced. Does anybody have plans for another fall or spring tournament, besides Stanford's planned CRR/Minnesota Open...

naan/steak-holding toll

For scheduling purposes, I should make it clear: we're trying to have Missouri Open run after Penn Bowl, in the early to mid November slot, though we're open to the idea of a late-October mirror as well. Historically, the November slot has worked out well for open tournaments (as DEES ended up being...

naan/steak-holding toll

Since Jordan's written a convenient script to count how much we've written, I'll update the OP occasionally about how complete the tournament is. We're just under two months out and the set is 30% complete thus far. You can almost certainly expect on-time completion now that Jordan's clear of his ot...

naan/steak-holding toll

Is it just me, or did the answer lines for a fair amount of the questions have a more general answer? I.e., the answer lines for some of the questions were flowers, soldiers, or mazes. It just seemed that there was a larger amount of these general answer lines than there would be in a regular seaso...

naan/steak-holding toll

Friedman is well known by many current events enthusiasts as an economic scholar well versed in [anything] Um... Apparently talking about random airports you get paid thousands to fly first-class to and summarizing everything about a country in three boring, barely-relevant points and/or anecdotes ...

naan/steak-holding toll

I will have to respectfully disagree about the Battle of the Zab not being "basic knowledge". It is the battle that ended the Umayyad Caliphate and allowed for the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate The particular battles that start and end dynasties, caliphates, what-have-you aren't really th...

naan/steak-holding toll

Ok so I understand the basics of how to study (read packets and write down or card the things you don't know) but what techniques to the top teams use to study that differentiates from the rest of the teams at national competitions. A big one is looking at collegiate tournaments. Stuff that's "...

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