BLAST Online (Powered by Groger Ranks)

[Berniecrat]

Groger Ranks is pleased to announce that we are running our online mirror of the BLAST set on April 11, 2020! This is an HS Regs+ set, so it should be good prep for teams planning to nationals or who just want to have fun playing on a harder difficulty set. More information about the set can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=109&t=22818

This tournament will be a closed high school mirror, meaning that every team must be made up of players who attend the same high school. This tournament, unlike the ILLIAC mirror last year, will not allow chimeras for any reason. Like the other online tournaments we have run, this will be run on Discord, so we would ask that every team makes sure that all the players have Discord accounts before the tournament.

In terms of cost, the tournament fee is $60 per team. Solo teams have a discounted fee of $40. If there is any particular financial issue that makes it hard for your team to pay the tournament fee, email us at [email protected] and we will try to find a solution that works out.

The tentative field cap is at 12 teams. If there is sufficient interest and we can secure the commitments necessary from moderators, we will increase this to 16 teams. If the waitlist for the tournament exceeds 8 teams, we will look into scheduling a second online mirror to ensure that as many teams as possible have access to play this fantastic set.

The link to sign up is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

[Berniecrat]

The field has been expanded to 16 teams and a waitlist has opened. If 8 or more teams sign up on the waitlist, we will try to arrange a second online mirror of BLAST on a day that works for all the teams

[Berniecrat]

Instead of hosting an overflow mirror, we will expand the field for this tournament to 24 teams. We are taking measures to ensure that this tournament runs smoothly, and so will be splitting this across servers. We will explain more to registered teams as the tournament gets closer.

In the meantime, we will ask that teams who have already registered give an email address and Discord profile for a member of the team to contact.

[zxc]

Thank you everyone for attending! 24 team tournaments are logistically difficult by themselves without even taking into consideration the fact that it's on Discord, but we managed to make things work out in the end. This was a very strong field and we are very happy with the results.

Special thanks go out to our moderators: Ethan Strombeck, Steven Liu, Dylan Bowman, Walter Zhang, Katherine Lei, Govind Prabhakar, Michael Li, Dean Ah Now, Shawn Zhao, Keaton Martin, Aadi Karthik, Shahar Schwartz, and Avinash Iyer. Without them, this tournament would not have been possible.

Full statistics for the tournament can be found here:https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/6439/

If anyone is interested in hearing the remaining unheard packets tomorrow, we can organize some scrimmages on them tomorrow. Otherwise, we will send the pDF files soon.

Please remember to pay for the tournament over Venmo or PayPal if you haven't already.

Thanks so much for making BLAST Online a success and we wish you a safe and relaxing rest of the year!
- The Groger Ranks Team