The Quizbowl Resource Center

Jason Cheng

This is a non-obvious one of which I’m a huge offender: it’s extremely demoralizing to other players in the room (at practice, in tournaments, on your team, on the opposing team) when you consistently buzz on something before anyone else does and proceed to say something like “Wow what a bad buzz” o...

Jason Cheng

EDIT: This also seems to me to be further reinforcement of the "negs are really bad" theory of quizbowl. Obviously it's hard to quantify aggression unless we are able to quantify player certainty about an answer (no way in hell for now) but if three fewer negs per tournament makes that bi...

Jason Cheng

Something something subtweeting the TDs stats from yesterday are up congratulations to Berkeley A for winning

Jason Cheng

Will's comments about literature got to the heart of what bugged me about this set when I played it about a month ago--much of the cluing/answer line selection (esp. in bonuses) actively excludes people who don't play a lot of quiz bowl, except at the regular difficulty level, which is the absolute ...

Jason Cheng

The tournament will probably be ready by early fall, but we’ll let it be mirrored for as long as demand exists until, say, early winter 2019 We’ll have a firm date for the online open mirror (which will precede all physical mirrors) at some point further along the production timelin, likely at the e...

Jason Cheng

This is the global announcement for Sun God Invitational , a regular difficulty tournament set to be mirrored in Fall 2018. We will be aiming for the controlled end of ACF Regionals/something like Terrapin 2016, with an overarching goal to make questions as accessible as reasonably possible. The tou...

Jason Cheng

Could I see the bonus part on “alcohols”? I am aware that the pKa of an alcohol was given, but I’m pretty sure the Williamson synthesis uses an alkoxide, which wasn’t accepted. I agree--this threw me off too, since the SN2 of alcohols to alkyl halides occurs in basic conditions. Of the three clues ...

Jason Cheng

I forgot to say something in the team Slack before this thread got posted, but Will Alston helped me out a lot on the myth I edited with difficulty/playability/general advice, which was very useful since myth was a new category for me

Jason Cheng

After playing at, listening to a bunch of complaints about, and then getting shanghai'd into helping out with the UCSD EFT 2 site yesterday, I can't say the system is particularly hard to use even for staffers who didn't bother reading any of the instructions given to them (which I guarantee is most...

Jason Cheng

Stats posted here

Jason Cheng

I've been given access to the scoresheets and will have stats up in about an hour or so

Jason Cheng

Unfortunately, due to lack of confirmed teams throughout our canvassing over the last two weeks (turns out it's hard when half the schools in the circuit, including us, are on the quarter system), it looks like I'll have to cancel this--hopefully, we can get it hosted at some point in April. I'll be...

Jason Cheng

Field (# of teams/staffers/buzzers):

TOTAL:

Jason Cheng

San Diego Quizbowl is pleased to announce a last-minute mirror of (This) Tournament is a Crime at UC San Diego on Sunday, April 23, 2017 . Information about the set can be found here . Apologies for the late announcement, but we've only just now determined that there would be a playable turnout for ...

Jason Cheng

[...] There was only one round at SoCal that had twenty or more tossups converted (with exactly 20), and Amherst never broke 18 converted or 19 read (and I doubt anyone else in DI did either). Amherst had rounds where we heard 12 questions (12!!) out of literally twenty four tossups. We heard fewer...

Jason Cheng

Minor correction, though I agree in broad strokes with what Kevin is saying--the D1 site of SCT at UCSD had a minimum of 19.25 tossups heard per round for a team and 20.9 TUH per round for D2. I do agree that the timer does have a drastic effect on fields that aren't powering as much, to the tune of...

Jason Cheng

As clarification, there may be chimera teams in attendance and I've gotten wind of open teams (some high school players) planning to play at this site. Obviously, at this point, it's too late to submit a packet, and it wouldn't do to turn them away at what may already a pretty small field since half...

Jason Cheng

I don't remember where the source was, but maybe said first play to be translated into English then--in any case, I admitted that bonus part was written mostly because I was in a rush at that point and I apologize for the mistake. I didn't include that tidbit itself in the question for that reason, ...

Jason Cheng

I did try to control difficulty as one of my two main goals while editing the literature--I also wrote on answers such as The Age of Innocence and Madame Bovary , for example. I was worried about this tournament turning into a death march overall given the rushed nature of the production process, so...

Jason Cheng

As far as I know as a WAO editor, Will wasn't behind the decision to not post an announcement re: a mirror hosted at Columbia, so I'm not entirely sure where that's coming from, Jerry. Anyway, for my part, I'll post here to confirm that the WAO mirror at Caltech is, as it says in the first post in t...

Jason Cheng

Along with the biology (which, aside from writing the replacement/editor's questions and providing feedback, was mostly Jonathan Luck, so credit should go where it's due), I edited/wrote the majority of the American, Euro, and World/Other lit, with assistance on the rest from Will. I tried to mainta...

Jason Cheng

Quiz Bowl at UCSD is pleased to announce the Southwest site of the NAQT Sectional Championship Tournament on February 4, 2017 . Location: This tournament will take place at UC San Diego, most likely in either the Humanities and Social Sciences or Center Hall buildings as usual. Explicit confirmation...

Jason Cheng

I'm surprised to learn of this confusion, Hidehiro, and I definitely should've been less laissez-faire about letting people handle communication about their attendance and letting people say things because I found them amusing--I apologize for the miscommunication. If you want to talk about anything...

Jason Cheng

Finally, I understand that the people running the Terrapin mirror in SoCal wanted to help out the circuit. Fine, and that's a great goal. We do need more teams in not just SoCal, but quizbowl in general. But we don't need to bend the eligibility rules to do so, especially because it'll look very ba...

Jason Cheng

Did UCSD have 8 students attend, and relegate two of them to a two-man C team because Will and Eddie wanted to play with UCSD A? If so, that's kind of destructive to one of the prime purposes of closed tournaments, which is to provide an outlet for university clubs to play together. I support limit...

Jason Cheng

I'd like to clarify again that nothing about the individual situations you described within SoCal was secret, and in the three years or so that I've been organizing/involved with the circuit, we've used the relaxation of eligibility rules for pretty much universal common good. Some examples: -Berkel...

Jason Cheng

Some clarification: Eddie Kim regularly plays with UCSD under the name Klaus Fuchs as a joke, and has been for the last two years, and I am not aware of any club in Southern California expressing negative feedback or unhappiness re: his attendance and membership on our rosters and within the circuit...

Jason Cheng

Even if it shouldn't have been a surprise, the fact that a large number of people committed to completing a sizeable portion of a large project over the course of half a year and proceeded to do (apparently) almost none of is pretty rantworthy. Should the writers have trusted the people mentioned he...

Jason Cheng

I'm on my phone right now, so I'll try to elaborate more later, but I have a preliminary comment to make: future iterations of this set needs to pay more attention to answer lines. This manifested in obvious things (like all the Lorca answers requiring _Garcia Lorca_, despite Lorca being his most co...

Jason Cheng

Without intending to speak for the other writers, I think most of what we did was to try to write the most forgiving possible questions you'd see pop up at an archetypal regular difficulty set. Personally, my goal was to "introduce" new members to what collegiate regular difficulty was lik...

Jason Cheng

About your comment on the Tyrone family specifically, I did consider making that a tossup on the play itself, but I figured people would start getting bored of all the very standard tossups on authors that I filled the set with (variety is the spice of life and all that), and I didn't think there wa...

Jason Cheng

UCLA A cleared the field yesterday by going undefeated during the 9 game round robin prelim and then winning all 3 playoff games for 1st place. Westview got second with a 9-3 record. Final standings: 1st) UCLA A 2nd) Westview t-3rd) Caltech t-3rd) Arcadia 5th) USC 6th) UCSD Alpha 7th) UC Irvine 8th)...

Jason Cheng

I agreed with a good amount of your complaints in about the non-leadin parts of the tossup and have edited the tossup to its current form for mirrors tomorrow (this is more of a band-aid, since replacing it is still totally in the books): 12. In one stage of this process, high levels of inhibin cont...

Jason Cheng

12. In one stage of this process, high levels of inhibin lead to selection of a single Graafian structure as the “dominant” type. High levels of prolactin production suppresses a hypothalamic hormone responsible for this process. This cycle sees a brief spike of basal body temperature by about 0.5 ...

Jason Cheng

Re: Menstrual cycle-- 1) Hilariously, I realized process was a much better pronoun immediately after pasting it up thread and made that edit 2) The tossup is on every phase of the menstrual cycle, not just menstruation--I should've caught the folliculogenesis thing and added it to the answer line in...

Jason Cheng

Thanks for the kind words, Brad! I was a little worried that not enough of my bonuses went deep into singular core works, but I'm glad you think I made the right decision on the tradeoff (not giving inexperienced teams a sad 0/10 if they've never read/watched the work) by abusing common themes and e...

Jason Cheng

I think the perception of "South Asia-heavy" might also have to do with the decent amount of East Asian religion in the set, which might easily be mixed up with myth on the day of a tournament by any number of players--in any case, I definitely agree with Will and Eddie on their subdistrib...

Jason Cheng

I've edited this question pretty heavily since the time of discussion, but here it is in its current form: 12. In one stage of this event, high levels of inhibin lead to selection of a single structure known as its Graafian type. High levels of prolactin production suppresses a hypothalamic hormone ...

Jason Cheng

Irreligion in Bangladesh wrote:I was on the basal temperature increase clue. Good to hear that ovulation is in the answer line.

Oh yeah, I didn't realize that; poor wording on my part. Thanks for the catch!

Jason Cheng

I see your point about flags, and I'm considering changing it to a flag salute tossup. That said, I do think there are a lot of things "free speech object" could be, and In general I tried not to be too worried about transparency since I figured the target EFT audience would have less expe...

Jason Cheng

Could you post the tossup on menstruation? I had a sentence-two buzz with pregnancy on a clue that seemed applicable to either (or, better yet, to ovulation, which is what I would have said if given 30 seconds to think instead of 5), so it's probably worth it to check the specifics of that for futu...

Jason Cheng

I wrote a little over half the literature in this set and I'm curious to hear what people thought about it, so (please) post any thoughts you have about it here. The American and the majority of Euro lit was written by me, and I had a hand in a bunch of the rest of it. Contra Will in the general dis...

Jason Cheng

I was almost there

Jason Cheng

I'm really proud of what we ended up with, and it's good to hear from the people who played the Skype mirror yesterday that what I had in mind for this set mostly played out--very accessible, regs-minus, high quality and consistent, and "fresh feeling" (i.e., still interesting and fun/&quo...

Jason Cheng

FIELD (Teams/Buzzers/Staffers):

UCSD (2/1/4)
Claremont (1/2/0)
USC (1/0/0)
Westview (1/2/0)
UCLA (2/2/0)
Arcadia (1/1/1)
Caltech (1/1/0)
UCI (1/1/0)

TOTAL: (10/10/5)

Jason Cheng

Quiz Bowl at UCSD is happy to announce a site of Early Fall Tournament (EFT) on October 8th, 2016 . The target difficulty of the set is "somewhat easier than collegiate regular," which is to say, "if ACF Fall is a 3 and ACF Regs is a 6, most questions should hover around 4.5-5." ...

Jason Cheng

Stats. Congratulations to Battle Arena Toshinden 3 (Will Alston, Chris Manners, and Jason Thompson) for winning a one game final against Shreve and the Capacious Bags (Nick Collins, Caleb Kendrick, and Evan Pandya) and finishing 1st with an 8-2 record!

Jason Cheng

Mik read us about three rounds of this over Phil's BBQ after the Side Events at UCSD. I don't have any stats, but let it be known that 1) the questions were super fun and a great addition to delicious barbecue (100% true) and 2) I absolutely murdered Justin Nghiem (significantly less true). I am di...

Jason Cheng

Mik read us about three rounds of this over Phil's BBQ after the Side Events at UCSD. I don't have any stats, but let it be known that 1) the questions were super fun and a great addition to delicious barbecue (100% true) and 2) I absolutely murdered Justin Nghiem (significantly less true).

Jason Cheng

We played five rounds of this today at UCSD as a shootout. Here are the stats to the best of my scorekeeping ability: Rd. 1 Michel Chen 0/0/0 Kevin Wang 1/3/3 Corry Wang 1/1/1 Griffin Stamp 0/1/1 Jason Cheng 0/1/1 Jonathan Luck 1/5/0 Mik Larsen 1/6/0 Rd. 2 Michel Chen 1/1/1 Kevin Wang 0/4/5 Corry Wa...

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