The Quizbowl Resource Center

This is an official announcement for TRIUMVIR: Tournament Running IMSANITY Under Metea Valley's Immense Roof, to be held at Metea Valley High School in Aurora, IL.

The tournament will be run on the IMSANITY set, written and edited by the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy scholastic bowl team in mACF format. Play will be 4 v. 4. The structure of the tournament will feature some sort of bracketed round robin system, depending on the number of teams.

Play will start at 9 am, with a coaches meeting at 8:30. Each team will be guaranteed 10 matches.

The cost will be $65 for the first team from each school and $55 for subsequent teams. There will be a $10 discount for each functional buzzer system and for each experienced moderator a school brings.

Please contact me with any questions or concerns at nprince @ imsa . edu.

The acronyms are getting a little out of hand . . .

It's really exciting to see Metea Valley host a first tournament. I don't know what relation the IMSA team and Dr. Prince will have with this mirror, but as someone who recently hosted a first tournament, I'd like to stress the importance of asking for help and starting things as early as possible. There's also a "How to run/organize a high school tournament" article on the quizbowl wiki which is helpful as a checklist.

Lisle will send one team, possibly two. We'll send the registration forms within the week.

Hey this is actually pretty close to me! If you need a staffer let me know.

Bonito wrote:I don't know what relation the IMSA team and Dr. Prince will have with this mirror...

IMSA will be providing support in the running of the tournament. We will provide TD and manage the logistics, for example. I'm not yet sure how IMSA will split its resources, since we will also be sending some people to help run BMI in Bloomington that day. However, BMI is looking like it will be a smaller tournament; it's certainly not going to be the 36-team bounceback-using juggernaut that GHOST became.

Edward Elric wrote:Hey this is actually pretty close to me! If you need a staffer let me know.

We need staffers. I forgot to mention that unless moderators come through, we'll be keeping this tournament on the smaller side. We're still looking into how many moderators we already have.

Dominator wrote:...it's certainly not going to be the 36-team bounceback-using juggernaut that GHOST became.

Does this mean I can do stats again?

If you happen to need another mod for this, there's a good chance I might be able to get over to Aurora that day. Let me know and I'll see if I can.

Not sure if my team is available, but if I can get a ride to Aurora then I can probably moderate if needed.

This post reserved for updates:

Field:

Fenton (1 team, 1 buzzer, 1 moderator, paid)
New Trier
Metea Valley HS (2 teams, ? buzzers, ? moderators)
Waubonsie Valley HS (3 teams, 1 buzzer, 0 moderators)
Somonauk (1 team, 1 buzzer, 0 moderators)
Latin (2 teams, ? buzzers, ? moderators)
Lisle (1 team, ? buzzers, ? moderators)

Expressed Interest:

Chicago Christian HS

Moderators:

Mike Laudermith
Caleb Robbins
Mike P (on stats?)
BJ Houlding
David Riley, possibly
Rao & Son

Hey so I can do stats for this unless someone else is insistent.

I can moderate this...hopefully more teams will be attending.

Somonauk High School can attend.

Hey Folks,

Since there are 2 mirrors of IMSANITY on the 15th, IMSA has decided to split forces. Dr. Prince will lead the efforts at BMI while I will be Co-Tournament Directing with Mr. Brzykcy, the coach at Metea Valley. Just a few notes for TRIUMVIR:

- Teams that have already registered and paid: Thank you for your promptness. I will be seeing you on the 15th.

- Teams that have not registered or paid: Please send all registration forms and payments to Dr. Prince at IMSA. It is easier for us if the registrations are centrally located. The last day to register is Saturday, January 8th. Please send me an email (to me and Dr. Prince) so that we can account for your team.

- Staffers: I will be contacting you throughout this week to check on your availability and once I get a better view of the field I will let you know if your services are required. Thank you so much for volunteering!

I will be happy to answer questions posted in the thread or sent via email.

Hope to see you at TRIUMVIR!

Currently I have 12 teams registered. This means that I have a workable number for a tournament field. I will begin a wait list for teams who sign up now. If I get another 4 teams and 2 more moderators, I would be happy to expand the field.

I will consider moderating this if you need warm bodies to read packets.

Geringer wrote:I will consider moderating this if you need warm bodies to read packets.

Excellent! Your help is greatly appreciated.

On another note, the field is now closed. I will send a confirmation email to teams by the end of tomorrow. Staffers, I will send an email to you tomorrow evening as well.

This event happened. Lisle ended up beating New Trier in an advantaged final. I believe that Latin got 3rd and Fenton 4th. Overall the set had some issues with clue placement and some answers weren't filled in but overall it was a good housewritten set.

Congrats to Mike Wong for doing a good job TDing (his first time ever!). I assume he'll have staaaaaats up later.

This tournament didn't suck.

Bonito wrote:This tournament didn't suck.

Thank you, sir! In fact, I would like to thank all teams in attendance for making the journey to Metea Valley. It was an honor for me to direct under their immense roof. I hope all teams enjoyed the day of competition and IMSA's first housewrite.

At this time, I would like to thank my moderators (Mike Laudermith, Kristin Strey, Brad Fischer, Mike Perovanovic, Caleb Robbins & Saieesh Rao) for their quality work. And, thank you to my fellow IMSA staffers for staffing in various capacities. Without them, this tournament would have not been worth the praise it has received.

I have sent the stats files to Jonah, they'll be online soon.

Edward Elric wrote:...some answers weren't filled in...

You mean alternate answers, right? It would be rather unfortunate if some of the questions didn't have answers.

Charbroil wrote:

Edward Elric wrote:...some answers weren't filled in...

You mean alternate answers, right? It would be rather unfortunate if some of the questions didn't have answers.

"FTP, name the first pink elephant elected president of the United States."

No, actually, due to formatting answers very long names of works were cut off of the page in a few instances, and the answer lines of a few other questions did not appear in the PDF files. As far as I know, this did not cause any problems. All of the moderators either knew the correct answer or took a replacement question.

Stats: prelims, playoffs, overall

Yes, by my count (and I only read Rounds 1-9), there were two missing answer lines on bonus parts. I'm still not sure why they didn't appear. The appearance of alternate answer lines was inconsistent. At BMI, I just rounded up the moderators when I found a problem and told them what should have appeared. I sincerely apologize to the readers at TRIUMVIR who had to make do; you are all certified pr0s for making it work.

Congratulations to Lisle, and thank you to all of the teams who supported our efforts on IMSANITY. I cannot overemphasize how much we have learned in this process. Before we were out of the parking lot at BMI, my players were already discussing how they intended to make next year's tournament much better.

Bonito wrote:This tournament didn't suck.

Thanks! That's what we were hoping for.

Dominator wrote: I sincerely apologize to the readers at TRIUMVIR who had to make do; you are all certified pr0s for making it work.

This is very true, I've been doing conversion stats based on the scoresheets and I've seen maybe 2-3 tossups at most replaced over 62 matches. I didn't even have to administer any replacement tossups from the replacement packet. Hopefully the next iteration of IMSANITY will have better quality control.

My thanks to IMSA and Metea Valley for hosting this tournament yesterday. The tournament ran very smoothly with good moderators in every room. We got out of there around 5:30 after having played 12 rounds, and that's with first-time hosts/directors.

The questions overall were good. Considering that this was a new group of writers and editors, it would have been foolish to expect anything better than what we got, and it would have been eminently reasonable to expect worse. Other than the two missing bonus part answers, which were minor inconveniences in the matches my team played in, here were some of the other problems with the set:

* Some of the answers were just bad ideas for answers. This happened about once a match or so.

* The bonus difficulty varied quite a bit. Each bonus had an easy part, a medium part, and a hard part relative to that bonus, but the easy parts of some bonuses were as hard as the hard parts of others. It's always difficult to judge this, but I'm pretty sure this is not just my personal judgment.

* The tossups also varied a lot. They pretty much all got answered, but some of them had leadins that were too easy, and some of them had middle clues that were too difficult. I don't know whether or not it was by design, but it seemed like in the first few rounds in particular that my team was answering a lot of tossups either at the beginning or at the end.

Send me the questions if you want a more in depth assessment. As I said, this tournament had many good questions--many of the faults I just listed can be found to varying degrees in all sets. My team enjoyed it, and we probably will be back next year. If somebody is looking for a set to mirror, consider this set. It won't be the best set you every heard, but it won't make you violent.

Also, none of this is excuses or sour grapes. We had good matches with Lisle, and the better team won.

I'd also like to thank IMSA and Metea Valley for putting on a fine tournament. Mike Wong did a great job and my team had a lot of fun.

Westwon wrote:The tossups also varied a lot. They pretty much all got answered, but some of them had leadins that were too easy, and some of them had middle clues that were too difficult. I don't know whether or not it was by design, but it seemed like in the first few rounds in particular that my team was answering a lot of tossups either at the beginning or at the end.

This was the biggest problem I found with the set, but for a first effort at writing a tournament it was very good.

I just found out that this tournament received PACE affiliation. Congratulations to Lisle and New Trier for qualifying at this tournament.