The Quizbowl Resource Center

Boston Latin School is proud to present the very first States Prep Invitational Tournament (SPIT) I. This tournament will take place on Saturday, March 24, 2018, and will use GSAC XXV, the 2018 housewrite of Maggie Walker Governor's School. Boston Latin School is located at 78 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA 02115.

This tournament qualifies as a Platinum Qualifier. This means the top 25% of teams competing will be eligible to qualify for the National Scholastic Championship, hosted by Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence, during the weekend of June 2-3, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Reston outside of Washington, D.C.

Registration
REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED.

The field is capped at 30 teams.

Fees and payment
The fee structure for the tournament is:
$85 base fee per team
-$5 per working buzzer system
-$10 per staffer/moderator
-$10 per 100 miles traveled one-way
-$25 for teams that have not attended a pyramidal quizbowl tournament in the past year
Minimum fee per school: $60 ($35 for new to pyramidal schools)

Cash or check is acceptable. Checks shall be made payable to “Boston Latin School Association” and may be brought the day of the tournament.

Note: If you sign up to bring a buzzer system and drop that less than 3 days before the tournament, or forget it on the day of, your fee will not include a deduction for buzzers and will additionally be increased by $10.

Question Set
Past GSAC sets can be found at quizbowlpackets.com. Mirrors have been hosted and will be hosted after the tournament. If you have any comments on the set, please keep them within the private forum for the set. The question distribution is below:
4/4 Literature (1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 1/1 World, Ancient, or Miscellaneous)
4/4 Science (1/1 Biology, 1/1 Chemistry, 1/1 Physics, 1/1 Other [Math, Astronomy, Compsci, etc])
4/4 History (1/1 American, 1/1 European, 1/1 World, 1/1 Ancient/Modern [post-1945])
3/3 Fine Arts (1/1 Visual, 1/1 Auditory, 1/1 Misc [film, architecture, musicals, etc.])
1.5/1.5 Religion and Mythology (0.75/0.75 each)
1/1 Philosophy and Social Science
1/1 Geography
0.5/0.5 Current Events
1/1 Pop Culture, Sports, and Other Trash

Tournament Format
Teams may have up 6 players total with at most 4 playing at any one point. Substitutions may be made at the half. Tournament games will follow standard ACF rules of untimed rounds consisting of 20 tossups and 20 three-part, 30 point bonuses (without bouncebacks). Ties will be broken by tiebreaker tossups. The set will be marked with 15 point powers, and there will also be -5 negs before the end of the tossup (but no double negs).

The tournament itself will consist of bracketed round-robin prelims and rebracketed round-robin playoffs, the details of which will be decided and announced after the field is determined. Each team will play at least 9 games and teams should expect to have between 9 and 12 rounds depending on the field size and the to-be-determined playoff structure. There will be trophies for top teams, as well as candy bar prizes for top scorers (let's face it, no one reads the books anyway).

Please note that all teams who are new to pyramidal (haven't attended a pyramidal tournament this season) will be placed in (a) separate division(s) to ease those teams into the pyramidal format. They will be rebracketed like all other teams for playoffs.

Schedule
Registration will be from 8:00 a.m. to 8:45 a.m., and the first round will begin at approximately 9:00 a.m. There will be a scorekeeper/moderator's meeting at 8:30 am. The tournament will end between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., leaning towards 4. Lunch will be an hour break from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.

You are welcome to park in the school parking lot, but space is not guaranteed.

Food
We'll have some refreshments for sale in the morning. Lunch will be a one hour break. We'll have large pizzas from Bertucci for sale for $17 each. Please note that we are selling food to raise money to send a team to HSNCT. There is also a food court nearby with a variety of options available within walking distance, such as Subway, Mcdonalds, Starbucks, Sakura Japan, b.good, and Bertucci’s.

We look forward to hosting you!

Current field (teams/buzzers/staffers):
Boston Latin School (2/2/0)
Acton-Boxborough (1/0/0)
Phillips Academy (2/3/0)
Lexington (1/1/0)
Plymouth (1/1/1)
AMSA (3/2/1)
Belmont (1/1/0)
Northmont (1/1/0)
Andover (1/1/0)
Brookline (2/1/1)
Framingham (1/2/0)
Lincoln-Sudbury (1/1/0)
Thayer Academy (1/0/0)
Hingham (1/0/1)
Barrington (1/0/0)

New Teams in the Field
Thayer Academy
AMSA C
Barrington
Boston Latin B
Brookline B

Total (20/16/4)

Will the cap of twelve be raised? Or is this a definite limit?

Thiccasso's Guernthicca wrote:Will the cap of twelve be raised? Or is this a definite limit?

Raised :)

Please note that we have added lots of new information to this post, particularly in regards to tournament format.

We've received updated information about the tournament qualification: "This tournament qualifies as a Platinum Qualifier." This means the top 25% of teams competing will be eligible to qualify for the National Scholastic Championship, hosted by Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence, during the weekend of June 2-3, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Reston outside of Washington, D.C.

As of right now, the only team in the new to quizbowl division is Lincoln Sudbury. More experienced schools with multiple teams may request at most one spot in the division. This is meant for teams composed entirely or mostly of fairly new players. Please do not try to put freshmen prodigies on such "new" teams.

Can Acton-Boxborough move a team down to the "New to QuizBowl" division?
Thanks,
Prat

Plymouth will also have one team as "newbies".

I may have made a mistake when signing up. Lincoln-Sudbury has competed in Quiz Bowl competitions in the past year so we should not be in the new to quiz bowl division. Please move us to the main division. Thanks.

PHegde wrote:Can Acton-Boxborough move a team down to the "New to QuizBowl" division?
Thanks,
Prat

troyharris wrote:Plymouth will also have one team as "newbies".

Sure. To clarify, the newbie team will be your C team, right?

I would assume that will be the way we will arrange it, yes.

Important change! Please make checks payable to “Boston Latin School Association.” Sorry for any inconvenience.

Hi there,
Are teams required to bring a coach/adult with them to this tournament? Thanks.

No, that is not required.

Thank you so much to everyone that came to SPIT I, especially all the wonderful staffers. We know that we had some pretty bad hiccups in the morning due to scheduling errors and some connectivity issues as well. We really appreciate everyone's patience and want to sincerely apologize about all the issues. Because the schedule had to be pushed back, we unfortunately did not have time to hold an advantaged finals before the building closed. The winner of SPIT I is Phillips Academy A who cleared the field and went 9-0. Lexington came second and Northmont came third. Props to Northmont who came all the way from Ohio and Barrington from Rhode Island who are competing at only their 2nd ever tournament.

Stats are posted here: https://stats.neg5.org/t/SJ-MR0TKf/spit ... -standings (two prelim games are missing due to a saving error but the result did not affect placement or book prizes). We would really appreciate if all of you could fill out this survey as this is our first tournament and we really want your feedback: https://goo.gl/forms/xbOXNOoti1V70E9J3.

I would also like to encourage everyone to go the Massachusetts State Championships at Phillips Academy now that you're all prepped. More info here: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewto ... =1&t=20912.

About the packets, I expect many of you have feedback. I'll locate the private discussion and link you as soon as I can find it.

Thanks again to everyone and a big special mention to our TD Nicholas Weiske, who relinquished his spot on the team to take care of all the issues that came up.

Hi Everyone,
A complaint I've received is about confusion around the playoff structure and byes in the morning. I just wanted to clear this up.

The byes in the morning were required to have the 4 by 5 prelims with the new division separate. Any other numbering would have made it very difficult to have a new division. We were considering running scrimmages during byes because we were overstaffed but decided against it for simplicity's sake. We ended up having 10 rooms in the afternoon anyway so the byes were purely meant to accommodate the 4 by 5 structure with the new division.

As for playoffs, we took the top 2 teams by record from each division into the upper brackets. To reduce bracketing advantages and end of game misfortune, we took the last two seeds by ppb from the remaining teams. The 10 selected teams were then ranked by ppb and split into two cross bracket divisions (1,4,5,8,9 and 2,3,6,7,10). The same was down with the bottom 10 teams. We did not want to rank purely off record due to some divisions being (rather unexpectedly) much stronger than others especially with the new division during prelims.

At the end of 9 rounds, Phillips Academy A had cleared the field by 1 game. This would have resulted in an advantaged final if we could have stayed in the building.
Thanks,
Christy

cthewolf wrote:Hi Everyone,
The byes in the morning were required to have the 4 by 5 prelims with the new division separate. Any other numbering would have made it very difficult to have a new division. We were considering running scrimmages during byes because we were overstaffed but decided against it for simplicity's sake. We ended up having 10 rooms in the afternoon anyway so the byes were purely meant to accommodate the 4 by 5 structure with the new division.

As for playoffs, we took the top 2 teams by record from each division into the upper brackets. To reduce bracketing advantages and end of game misfortune, we took the last two seeds by ppb from the remaining teams. The 10 selected teams were then ranked by ppb and split into two cross bracket divisions (1,4,5,8,9 and 2,3,6,7,10). The same was down with the bottom 10 teams. We did not want to rank purely off record due to some divisions being (rather unexpectedly) much stronger than others especially with the new division during prelims.

At the end of 9 rounds, Phillips Academy A had cleared the field by 1 game. This would have resulted in an advantaged final if we could have stayed in the building.
Thanks,
Christy

Uh, a new-to-quizbowl division probably isn't necessary for such a tournament, and it isn't worth the trade-off to the tournament as a whole (also, maybe I'm misunderstanding your post, but it definitely shouldn't be "unexpected" that a prelim bracket specifically for new teams would be weaker than the other brackets).

Also, what happened with the "if we could have stayed in the building"?