The Quizbowl Resource Center

Stegosaurus Bowl will be a quizbowl tournament at Lisgar Collegiate in Ottawa, on December 5, 2015. It will be run by ONQBA and Lisgar.

Schedule

Teams should be at Lisgar by 8:30 AM to register and pay. We will start at 9:00 AM, and teams may miss their first rounds if they arrive late. We will finish by 5:00 PM. We intend to play 10 rounds of quizbowl, though we may shorten the event if time is running out.

There will be a one-hour lunch break. Teams should bring a lunch, or they should get fast food on Elgin Street (three blocks west of the tournament).

Fees

It will cost a base fee of $60 for a school's first team, with these discounts:

-$10 for subsequent teams (i.e., if a school sends three teams, their second and third teams both get this discount)
-$20 for new teams to quizbowl (i.e., has only played Reach or History Bee and Bowl since 2014)
-$10 for each scorekeeper you register and bring (anyone can do this job, but I will need scorekeeper contact info ahead of time)
-$5 for each working buzzer set your bring
-$10 for teams of only one or two players

The minimum fee for a team is $30. We can take cash or cheques written to "Lisgar Collegiate -- Reach."

Format -- Different This Time

If this tournament ends up with 7 to 12 teams, we intend to run it with a ladder-style match schedule. Instead of assigning rooms and opponents before the tournament, we'd play some configuration of "win and move up a room, lose and move down a room."

I want to try this format to get more close matchups and to make sure the competition is meaningful to the lower-scoring half of the field.

If the tournament gets under 7 teams, we'll run a traditional round-robin + playoff split. If it gets over 12 teams, we'll use a bracketed round-robin or poll coaches about splitting into two divisions.

Questions

This tournament will use a Canadian edition of the BASK set. Teams are encouraged to practice on LIST 2014 and 2013.

Registration

Please email me (Brendan) at [email protected]. Please include the number of teams, number of buzzers, and names and emails of any volunteers you are bringing.

Is there a stegosaurus?

Of course there is a stegosaurus. The winning team will get a trophy and get custody of the stegosaurus pictured above. Top scorers will get book prizes.

Visit our websites

A version of this announcement was also posted to the ONQBA blog. Teams are encouraged to keep up with tournaments by checking our Upcoming Schedule page and joining the Ontario Quizbowl group on Facebook.

Field
Lisgar (3 or 4)
Colonel By (3)
Merivale (1)

Details of Ladder Format

This will be similar to a tennis ladder -- win and move up a room, lose and move down a room. So after a round in Room 2, the winning team would advance to Room 1 for their next round, and the losing team would move back to Room 3.

We'll do standings (and decide a winner) on a points system. Wins will be worth more points in the higher rooms. Specifically, in the bottom two rooms, a win will be worth 1 point. Then a win in the next room up would be worth 2 points, and then the room above that would be worth 4 points, and then doubling after that. We think this points / standings system is the best way to make sure that no team has an incentive to lose a game. We'll only do a final if two teams are tied for first place at the end of the regular rounds.

We'll need an even number of teams to play a ladder format. Lisgar will provide a small standby team, which will either play or staff the tournament depending on numbers.

We'll start the tournament with a seeding round or rounds. Patrick and I have argued a bit about the appropriate way to do this. Seeding rounds won't count for the standings, but they'll determine teams' starting rooms for the regular rounds.

So Colonel By just dropped 3 of the 8 teams in this field, so the format is up in the air now. The current plan is dividing/combining Lisgar teams to either make a 4 or 6 team field and running a double/triple round robin plus finals. If the teams present want to use some other format, we would respect that. Because of the sudden reduction in field size and diversity, the Canadian content prepared for the set will instead be saved for a future tournament. Emails with further details have been sent out to ONQBA's Lisgar and Merivale contacts.

This is now being run as a doubles/triples tournament. Stats will be uploaded after the conclusion of the tournament.

Sheena's Lisgar team (I forget the designation) quickly got to the top ladder room and stayed there undefeated. Either Colin's Lisgar team or Merivale A was second, depending on how the final points got awarded.

The SQBS report for this will look a little strange when it comes out. The format was different partly to fill the CB absence.

The Lisgar Dragons, Sheena, Nadia and Katriona, won Stegosaurus Bowl, winning both of their seeding matches and going undefeated in the top room. As far as I know, this is the first time that an all-female quizbowl team won a quizbowl event in Canada. Because of the uneven number of post-seeding matches, second place will likely be decided based on PPG in the top room, since both the Lisgar Shamrocks (Colin and Thomas) and Merivale A (Thilini and Swagat) only played the Lisgar Dragons in the top room.

Classic stats are here or here. All my announcements described doing the standings by a 4-2-1-1 points system, so I'll go by that system and say that Lisgar Shamrocks officially came second. This grid gives more info about the teams' performances. Teams' paths up and down the ladder are shown in this exciting diagram.

The ladder system did what I wanted, which is that it made the games close. I thought that was important, so I implemented it, and it worked. Main drawbacks of the ladder schedule were gridlock in the top rooms, a "ships passing in the night" thing where teams of similar strength didn't meet, and that players had less variety of rooms and opponents.

I mostly regret splitting the field into 8 teams. We scrambled around a bit after our cancellations (and after a surprise team arrived), and we set and 8-team schedule -- we felt free to juggle teams because 75% of the players were from Lisgar anyway. Splitting into 8 teams (rather than 6) was more ladder-friendly and it let people score more individual PPG, but I think it made the rooms quieter and blocked people from seeing their friends a bit.

I was impressed, as always, with how much the teams knew. I was in the bottom room for most rounds, and I saw plenty of early buzzes on clues I didn't know. I was also pleased that our new team from Cairine Wilson kept up with the competition so well.

I handed out player polls to do feedback and a few superlatives. Patrick collected those and probably we can post exciting data soon.