The Quizbowl Resource Center

cvdwightw

Trust me dude, they need all the dedicated people they can get if we want to restore Caltech to quizbowl greatness :) All I can say is that Caltech is going to have one heck of a scary Div II team next year, adding this group to a group of players that performed well at D2 sectionals but not well e...

cvdwightw

With two teams in the top five, should the west coast start to get some respect? I say we wait and see if it lasts a few years first. Quickly, a list of the top-finishing teams from the West Coast at HSNCT: 2000: 12, 23 (out of 52) 2001: T5, 14 (out of 40) 2002: T5, 13 (out of 54) 2003: T8, 35 (out...

cvdwightw

I appreciate the props, but we played horribly at the NAQT state tournament this year. Hopefully HSNCT won't be too rough for us. Hey, my senior year, we finished a very distant tied for third at NAQT state (out of 14), but were literally one question away from top 7 at HSNCT. Just write it off as ...

cvdwightw

Since, like Noah Mink, I am the only active board member from my school (actually, with the retirement of Steve, from my entire area), I'll try to answer from my high school experience. 1. We had at most 3 practices a week, for about 30 minutes each. My senior year we had two additional 2-hour pract...

cvdwightw

I would expect Mission San Jose A and maybe Santa Monica to make the playoffs. Mission San Jose returns their best player from a playoff team last year. Santa Monica has been blowing away the competition down here for the past couple of years. They're not going to dominate anyone with huge power num...

cvdwightw

Wrong: Jennifer Garner Right: Henrietta Leavitt This was a completely unjustifiable neg and by far the worst I have ever committed at a tournament, considering that, even though I buzzed after the first clue, it was a clue that uniquely identified the answer as someone other than the answer I gave. ...

cvdwightw

Also at the ICT: Wrong: Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the communist party? Right: Is it because I'm a lesbian? After hearing the entire text of that question, Steve buzzed in with "At long last, sir, have you left no sense of decency?" (or something very similar) Not that an...

cvdwightw

2004 NAQT West SCT (26 tossups with powers):
Berkeley "Funky See, Funky Do" 765
Berkeley "Krustophenia" 215

Yes, that's 980 combined points.

cvdwightw

zwtipp wrote:Also, is there anyone on here from the USC (Southern Cal) quiz bowl team?

Not that I know of. You'd be wise to send something to quizbowl at usc dot edu and hopefully someone there will get back to you.

cvdwightw

Also from ICT:

Wrong: Ferris Wheel
Right: Field Museum of Natural History

This is possibly the most off I've ever been on a neg.

cvdwightw

solonqb wrote:To further add to the litany of contact requests, how do I get in touch with the Caltech quizbowl people?

I'm pretty sure that either quizbowl at caltech dot edu or qb at caltech dot edu is a functional e-mail address, and is checked on at least an occasional basis by relevant contacts.

cvdwightw

I think that the simplest answer, in this case ln (3/2), should be deemed the correct answer and if (ln 3) - (ln 2) is given, the moderator should prompt. This makes sense to me. Correct answers should demonstrate clear, unambiguous knowledge of the answer. Therefore the moderator must rule that th...

cvdwightw

When we play we use a variety of question styles. So the team has played pyrmiad style along with hose and even different formats than most teams play...It is difficult for us to play against many other teams. Many times we end up playing against an all-star team of faculty. I find this difficult t...

cvdwightw

I'm not sure if you heard a different version of the packet than I read. The lead-in states "According to Islamic tradition," which makes it less debatable whether Abraham is acceptable. Azar is mentioned in the middle of the question but I see no clues about Terah.

cvdwightw

Georgetown College was at ICT last year in D2. Eric Smith of Stanford gave out fliers to every team at Region 15 with an advertisement for a West Coast Quiz Bowl E-mail list and an announcement of a novice tournament held at Berkeley. We'll see how things work out. One of the things that I've notice...

cvdwightw

I made a spreadsheet from the seven sectionals I have stats for (I'm not counting NW since I don't know which ones were D2; it's irrelevant since none of them received a D2 bid), but I'm not going to post it online anywhere. Breakdown by sectional (excluding CCs): North: Carleton, Grinnell, Macalest...

cvdwightw

between the two teams I saw playing on it the question became a buzzer race on that clue. It's not pyramidal at all, and hence bad. Having played in the game Jerry is referring to, I decided to look up that entire packet. (Round 13 packet if anyone wants to likewise look it up) It seemed like there...

cvdwightw

ANY tournament will, inevitably, result in some absolute blowouts. The key is to minimize those blowouts, and rebracketing does a decent job of this. For the 2004 SoCal NAQT State Championship we ran essentially a modified version of NAQT ICT, splitting teams up into arbitrary divisions and then hav...

cvdwightw

Besides, if you're valedictorian, you will get in anywhere you apply, most of the time with a full ride. I have never heard of this blanket statement. I doubt admissions/financial aid counselors have either. (If this were AHAN this paragraph would include "brains" and a rough equivalent o...

cvdwightw

Most tournaments I've heard of are run using some kind of prelim rounds followed by playoff format, so I'm going to assume that's the case where you are. If you can't get tournament directors to even consider Swiss-pair style tournaments, I would urge you to look into evening out prelim brackets and...

cvdwightw

Of course, if the tournament is bracketed or has varsity and jv divisions, then it could be an issue and it's quite reasonable to ban it. Bracketed round robin tournaments, if run correctly, should not have an issue with this so-called sandbagging. Most of the tournaments I have attended or helped ...

cvdwightw

I would like some clarification as to what the actual problem with NAQT IS College Tournaments is. Is it: 1) That they are taking the place of established packet-submission tournaments because of schedule conflicts and other considerations? 2) That new packet-submission tournaments and question writ...

cvdwightw

There are really two theories as to what's the most important to learn. The first is to learn whatever your team's the weakest in, as people have already pointed out. Some formats place more emphasis on computational math than others (there's almost none at the college level), but having someone str...

cvdwightw

Two major problems with that are strength of the tournament field and difficulty/style of the questions. For example, using that formula, a whole lot of teams would be unfairly placed due to participation at this year's Cavalier Classic, which I understand had several of the top teams in the nation....

cvdwightw

...only the best readers would be able to read through these questions without stopping or saying something nonsensical. Rarely are there enough readers at tournament I attend of sufficient quality to be able to effectively read through these mistakes, and as a high school coach, the most I see at ...

cvdwightw

B) I doubt it. He also started rambling about some quiz bowl love story from 25 or so years ago that ended with the "Babe Ruth of College Bowl" losing the championship game to WU-STL because the love of his life, a WU-STL player he had met at the tournament, broke her arm inner tubing the ...

cvdwightw

With the talk of the Vanderbilt tournament's playoff format, I thought it was time for people to argue about which playoff format is the best. For the poll question above, assume that the tournament is a mid-sized tournament or division (15-30 teams), and that between 5 and 9 preliminary rounds were...

cvdwightw

Nerd-Basher wrote:Does anyone know whether any of the following colleges have quizbowl teams: ...Occidental (Cali.) College...

Occidental has had a team in the past, though I haven't seen it in about two years; therefore I suspect that the person keeping the team afloat graduated or moved somewhere else.

cvdwightw

I may be misreading StPickrell's post, but it appears to me that there are quite a few Virginia teams that would rather play 5 or 6 games than 11 or 12. Though Southern California is by no means the most hardcore region in the country, every team that shows up to tournaments is perfectly fine with t...

cvdwightw

Even pairing into quarters (top 2 vs top 2, bottom 2 vs bottom 2, 3-4 vs 3-4, 5-6 vs 5-6) at the end can be okay, and usually gives little deviation from expected finish if the divisions are relatively similar. UCI ran a 16 team tournament this way Feb. 28. Four of the top five teams made the top br...

cvdwightw

I think the thing here is that literature contains exactly that, science contains exactly that, but social science contains history, geography, and actual social science (psychology, sociology, etc.). Many tournaments lump all the literature together and all the science together, but leave separate ...

cvdwightw

Auburn-Montgomery is bad? This year CBI Regionals Section 15 is being held at UC Davis, which I just found out reserved 6 rooms for a 17-team tournament. Why? Because there's an ACUI-affiliated billiards tournament there the same day!

Draw conclusions where you see fit.

cvdwightw

The study would be hard for two reasons: 1) The top ten senior scorers at any given national tournament are not the top ten senior players in the country. Some may be, but there are some that are at the top of the ppg lists because they are by far the best player on a mediocre team, not a very good ...

cvdwightw

The NAQT people have a better time of it, for sure. Having been to maybe four non-NAQT events in my high school career, I can't say that I had a much better time adjusting to college bowl than someone used to less pyramidal tossups. Speaking from experience as someone currently making the transitio...

cvdwightw

OK, I am putting my "Linguistic Nerd" Hat on, so please do not judge me by these comments, the combination of my not-so-thorough last-five-minutes research and the linguistics class I took last summer. Bonus came into the English language sometime around the 1770s, borrowed directly from L...

cvdwightw

We all (or at least most of us) know that the BCS does absolutely nothing for football except to make it more confusing for all of us. However, I think a BCS-type poll would be theoretically feasible here. First of all, I like solon qb's idea of the two separate polls. Teams should not be penalized ...

cvdwightw

You bring up a good point. Not every good team is in Michigan or near the East Coast. For anyone who's counting, California has the fifth place (or T-5th) team in the last two NAQT championships. Since we (Capistrano Valley) are the only CA team going to NAQT this year, I guess we have the pressure ...

The Quizbowl Resource Center

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West Coast Respect

Re: Quizbowl Team Structure

Southern California

What exactly is the problem here (Asking for clarification)?

Various Playoff Systems

5 or 6 games?

To settle to correctness question once and for all!

Polling Considerations

California Teams