The Quizbowl Resource Center

I have your consolation bracket:

First Round:
Byes: East Brunswick A, Half Hollow Hills West A
(17) Caesar Rodney A defeated (16) Georgetown Day School B
(24) Kellenberg B defeated (9) Charter H
(8) Bloomfield A defeated (25) Woodbridge
(5) TJ B defeated (28) Octorara A
(12) Charter E defeated (21) Charter G
(13) Stuyvesant B defeated (20) Half Hollow Hills West B
(4) Charter C defeated (29) Kellenberg C
(3) Ransom Everglades A defeated (30) Octorara B
(14) Newark A defeated (19) Charter F
(11) East Brunswick B defeated (22) Ursuline
(6) Charter D defeated (27) Newark B
(7) Ransom Everglades B defeated (26) Colonia
(10) Mercersberg defeated (23) Cocalico
(15) Haverford defeated (18) Caesar Rodney B

Octos:
(1) East Brunswick A defeated (17) Caesar Rodney A
(24) Kellenberg B defeated (8) Bloomfield A
(5) TJ B defeated (12) Charter E
(4) Charter C defeated (13) Stuyvesant B
(14) Newark A defeated (3) Ransom Everglades A
(11) East Brunswick B defeated (6) Charter D
(10) Mercersberg defeated (7) Ransom Everglades B
(2) Half Hollow Hills A defeated (15) Haverford

Quarters:
(1) East Brunswick A defeated (24) Kellenberg B
(4) Charter C defeated (5) TJ B
(11) East Brunswick B defeated (14) Newark A
(2) Half Hollow Hills A defeated (10) Mercersberg

Semis:
(4) Charter C defeated (1) East Brunswick A
(2) Half Hollow Hills West A defeated (11) East Brunswick B

Final:
(2) Half Hollow Hills West A defeated (4) Charter C


There was a lot of good about this tournament. We were especially grateful that we only had a 45 minute drive since we've grown a bit accustomed to 2+ hours. So please do this again.

For any future iterations, please correct:

The 90 minute playoff wait. Attendees of past Pennding Bowls will be glad to know that the waiting tradition continues. And this was after a 60+ minute lunch! This was most certainly caused by the individual statistics since it couldn't possibly take ninety minutes to calculate win-loss records. I personally volunteer to be your statistician next year if it will help the number crunching start before 12:45.

The lack of hard bonus material. In the State College A / Charter A match, 500 out of 570 possible bonus points were converted. If you discount the bageled trash bonus, 50 out of 54 academic questions were answered correctly. That differentiates nothing. (I heard the finals packet was better.)

The brackets were a bit unbalanced. This wasn't too bad, but cmon: Charter H shouldn't be one tossup away from going 4-1 while other brackets have 2-3 excellent teams in them. (as evidenced by their early exit above)

Thanks for a good event.

Bad Boy Bill wrote:I have your consolation bracket:

First Round:
Byes: East Brunswick A, Half Hollow Hills West A
(17) Caesar Rodney A defeated (16) Georgetown Day School B
(24) Kellenberg B defeated (9) Charter H
(8) Bloomfield A defeated (25) Woodbridge
(5) TJ B defeated Octorara A
(12) Charter E defeated (21) Charter G
(13) Stuyvesant B defeated (20) Half Hollow Hills West B
(4) Charter C defeated (29) Kellenberg C
(3) Ransom Everglades A defeated (30) Octorara B
(14) Newark A defeated (19) Charter F
(11) East Brunswick B defeated (22) Ursuline
(6) Charter D defeated (27) Newark B
(7) Ransom Everglades B defeated (26) Colonia
(10) Mercersberg defeated (23) Cocalico
(15) Haverford defeated (18) Caesar Rodney B

Octos:
(1) East Brunswick A defeated (17) Caesar Rodney A
(24) Kellenberg B defeated (8) Bloomfield A
(5) TJ B defeated (12) Charter E
(4) Charter C defeated (13) Stuyvesant B
(14) Newark A defeated (3) Ransom Everglades A
(11) East Brunswick B defeated (6) Charter D
(10) Mercersberg defeated (7) Ransom Everglades B
(2) Half Hollow Hills A defeated (15) Haverford

Quarters:
(1) East Brunswick A defeated (24) Kellenberg B
(4) Charter C defeated (5) TJ B
(11) East Brunswick B defeated (14) Newark A
(2) Half Hollow Hills A defeated (10) Mercersberg C

Semis:
(4) Charter C defeated (1) East Brunswick A
(2) Half Hollow Hills West A defeated (11) East Brunswick B

Final:
(2) Half Hollow Hills West A defeated (4) Charter C


There was a lot of good about this tournament. We were especially grateful that we only had a 45 minute drive since we've grown a bit accustomed to 2+ hours. So please do this again.

For any future iterations, please correct:

The 90 minute playoff wait. Attendees of past Pennding Bowls will be glad that the waiting conditions continue. And this was after a 60+ minute lunch! This was most certainly caused by the individual statistics since it couldn't possibly take ninety minutes to calculate win-loss records. I personally volunteer to be your statistician next year if it will help the number crunching start before 12:45.

The lack of hard bonus material. In the State College A / Charter A match, 500 out of 570 possible bonus points were converted. If you discount the bageled trash bonus, 50 out of 54 academic questions were answered correctly. That differentiates nothing. (I heard the finals packet was better.)

The brackets were a bit unbalanced. This wasn't too bad, but cmon: Charter H shouldn't be one tossup away from going 4-1 while other brackets have 2-3 good teams in them. (as evidenced by their early exit above)

Thanks for a good event.

Yeah, the Stanley bracket made no sense in the way it ended up, which was a 3 way tie for 2nd with Bloomfield beating Charter H, Charter H beating TJ B, and TJ B beating us. That shouldn't happen the way it did if the packets were balanced. I'll also piggy back and say I loved the tournament as well, with my only gripe being the reader in 203, which Bill knows all about.

I thought this tournament was pretty solid. UPenn people should probably explain what happened with the question source issue, since most people I've talked to were taken aback by the fact that you guys announced the change just two days before the tournament. With that said, although I would have been rather upset if the questions weren't good, I thought it was fairly well-edited. The set was pretty easy, but I guess it was fine for a high school tournament.
The delay after lunch was not good. It's not that hard to enter stats.

Gov looked pretty strong today. The only potential threat to their national title in 2010 is a Kuo-Kai-led WJ.

Are we cleared to talk about the set?

Also, I now have a new favorite Greek playwright.

aestheteboy wrote:Gov looked pretty strong today. The only potential threat to their national title in 2010 is a Kuo-Kai-led WJ.

Naw, first we gotta see how seriously Lily takes her pledge to get good for Gaddis 2, duh.

hwhite wrote:Are we cleared to talk about the set?

Go for it, dude.

RAMAN SCATTERING STRIKES AGAIN

Yeah, so about that "Penn-ding Bowl-eque" delay:

That was a combined screwup between Mehdi and I; Mehdi thought we didn't have enough staff and so decided he'd read a room and leave all the stats entry until lunch. (Of course, we *did* have the necessary staff, as it turns out.) By itself this would have only caused a delay of 20 to 30 minutes. But then I had to spell him during stats entry for a brief period during lunch, and somehow managed to not enter about 15 games that I thought I had entered. This virtuoso display of incompetence compounded the problem rather severely, and we've learned our lesson and it won't happen next time. There *will* be a dedicated stats person *no matter what*, and it will *not* be me.

I'll let Mehdi answer about the questions about the question source, since he was the one handling it; I only came in during the final editing. We're well aware that the playoff packets ought to have been more difficult, and again that's something to fix for next time.

Considering I can only get Katy Perry and House toss-ups =_="

Prelim stats are now up here. Playoff stats were on Simon's computer. I'll have him upload them ASAP.

Bonus conversion was absurdly higher than desired. Also, as you can see my lack of knowledge about teams from the area ended up in arbitrarily assigning some teams to brackets, which ended up with people ending up a lot higher than they should've been. Apologies to those teams this visibly affected, like Ransom Everglades A and HHH West A, who were both probably good enough for the top bracket. Also sorry about having a bracket with no Charters. Actual bracket and schedule assembly, with some advice from me, was one thing I delegated to someone else, and things like 1 vs. x staying in the same room all day (despite my catching it and asking it be fixed beforehand) ended up on the final schedule anyway. Further, consolation rankings got kind of messed up (despite Mr. C. from Caesar Rodney pointing things out), but at this point we were delayed over an hour and stats were correct for the top 20 or so teams, which was the most important thing since it determined who made the top bracket and who didn't.

What Chris said was on the nose about the stats. Going into things, we had just enough staffers due to some people deciding to change their minds after I'd already announced the field expansion. I spent over a week frantically searching for people to fill in. Thankfully, several coaches stepped up that morning. However, I wanted to make sure there were enough good moderators to keep things running smoothly, which ended up being true, but then some good moderators ended up scorekeeping too. Then, there were only a handful of people I trusted to work SQBS, and those people were also on my good mods list. I tried to take on the jobs of editor, TD, mod, and stat enterer. I should've known this was a dumb idea. Once it was clear that my TD duties were overtaking my stats entering time, I figured we'd have enough time to enter stats during lunch and we pretty much did, but what I've found with SQBS is that you need additional time to fix little things like SQBS eating games, which of course is what happened. Then, a couple of score sheets went missing and were later found. This will be rectified in the future. I will probably just take care of stats and TDing myself in the future.

On the questions, I had stockpiled several questions but was still counting on some Penn people who told me they had 4+ years of playing good hs quiz bowl behind them writing good questions. I sent around a short list of things to do and not to do in writing good questions. However, I still ended up with terribly written tossups, one-line bonuses, and a bunch of unusable answers, something I probably should've foreseen and planned for. So I figured rather than having to edit what I got, write a whole lot more, and assemble packets, it would be a better idea to take a set of already assembled, already decently written packets, and edit them to make them better.

To make things clear, I also had the opportunity to use an HSAPQ 4-quarters set, but I was pretty set on it being a bad idea to both change the set and format on teams that may have been preparing on 20 tu/b the whole time. The final set used here consisted mostly of what was in the original DB set with some by JSRCC, Evan, myself and Chris, and several of the ones I already edited from Penn people.

Agreed that bonus material should've been harder. We had a limited time to fix a lot of things, and it showed in the difficulty of the playoff rounds. Plus, it's too hard these days to write for the elite teams while still making things accessible for others, and I think HFT's strategy of differents sets for playoffs should be used wherever possible.

If I'm missing any explanations let me know. Thanks to all teams, especially those coming from afar. Hope you had a good time despite the delays. A big thanks to everyone who came and helped staff, including Andrew from Caesar Rodney, Stephanie from GDS, Bro. Nigel, Bill from Charter, Jason from DCC, Steve from Ransom Everglades, and all others in a list that was too long for me to remember.

EDIT: finished some sentences

Our teams and I really enjoyed this. Well-worth the flight, even though we were down two players. In Miami, our closest tournaments are at least 5-hour drives, so flying-out was our only way to get to a competition this fall before Thanksgiving. For a debut tournament of this size, this was great -- even with the stats delay. The consolation bracket worked well, and it was better than just cutting everyone loose. Advice we can agree upon: even if the crew is stretched thinly at an untimed tournament, the TD and statistician should make an oath to wear no additional hats, then have the most veteran/comfortable moderators also handle the scorekeeping. But well done!

Also, packets will be up soon. I'll have to fix some formatting errors first.

Congrats to TJ B for an impressive 1,265 points per tossup

And Ian Eppler, I owe you a neg prize. My biochem solutions manual was looking forward to its new home. Completely forgot in all the craziness.

Congrats to Charter for winning, and to Gov for being absolutely awesome yet again! I thought the questions were pretty good, although the bonuses were rather easy to 30 (and if not 30, 20). That being said, there was a question on "coagulation" which particularly irked me, because I answered "clotting" pretty early and was not prompted (for the record, the last line was "the process by which blood clots"). As far as TJ's performance goes, we repeated our time-honored tradition of this year of losing to Gov within a one-tossup margin, and much to the dismay of Joe the Plumber, we "spread the wealth around" points-wise; my teammates contributed quite a bit to our finish this time. A sign of things to come? I surely hope so.

Having had tournaments at TJ with similarly awkward numbers of teams, I won't be too hard on the people at Penn for the bracketing. That being said, our bracket (Toby, I believe) had two top teams in Maggie Walker and us, while the other brackets seemed a little more weighted towards the top team. Ransom Everglades also put up a rather impressive performance against us and against Gov. Therefore the stats like average score, margin, etc. were pulled down a little unrepresentatively in the Toby bracket compared to others.

I'm glad we were able to make it yesterday, and kudos to Mehdi, the people at Penn, and all the teams in attendance for a wonderful tournament, even if it did run a bit late.

The same thing happened to Quint on coagulation when we were playing Hunter. We protested, but it ended up not mattering. Hopefully it didn't affect your game... Thanks, also, Naren, for the kind words. We always look forward to playing you guys.

Thanks to Mehdi et al. for a great tournament. Despite RIOT being 10 minutes from us on what turned out to be the same questions, this level of competition was awesome.

Yeah I have no excuse on the coagulation question. I accepted clotting in my room and anyone protesting should've and would've surely been granted the points. Also, I was quite a bit worried about the math/science in general in Ahmad's final, so I ended up replacing much of it. I think there were originally tossups on the Wolff-Kishner reduction and Gibbs paradox, though I'm told at least some people know about the latter (coughNarencough).

closesesame wrote: As far as TJ's performance goes, we repeated our time-honored tradition of this year of losing to Gov within a one-tossup margin, and much to the dismay of Joe the Plumber, we "spread the wealth around" points-wise; my teammates contributed quite a bit to our finish this time. A sign of things to come? I surely hope so.

Wait, aren't you vegetarian?

MLWGS-Gir wrote:Despite RIOT being 10 minutes from us on what turned out to be the same questions, this level of competition was awesome.

Yeah, my original plan was just for Chris and I to edit things from DB and then run the set at Penn, but George and Dan wanted in on it too.

I felt that the bonus difficulty was fairly good for the prelims, but I felt that in later rounds as elite teams were playing each other and the lower-ranking teams were being eliminated, the bonuses could have been harder.

wowitsquinthaha wrote:

closesesame wrote: As far as TJ's performance goes, we repeated our time-honored tradition of this year of losing to Gov within a one-tossup margin, and much to the dismay of Joe the Plumber, we "spread the wealth around" points-wise; my teammates contributed quite a bit to our finish this time. A sign of things to come? I surely hope so.

Wait, aren't you vegetarian?

Okay, now you're stretching it.

Who won the final playoff games? What were the final rankings?

I was pleased by how well our team did against what was undoubtedly the strongest field we have faced all year. Our team was really firing on all cylinders with a balanced scoring performance. Losing that heartbreaker to Charter in the finals was tough,especially having led the entire game until question 20. But, as my wife pointed out, if the questions had been played in reverse order, Charter would have led from start to finish.

It was good to finally play Hunter, even if they were not at full strength. We were a little disappointed that we did not get to play State College, though. Once again, this tournament further shows how much parity we have in high school quizbowl this year. I don't believe I have ever seen so much balance among so many top teams.

I agree with Naren that we were in a tough prelim bracket. But, with the number of quality teams present, you could only spread the wealth so much. Bonuses were a bit easy for the top teams as evidenced by the number of teams averaging in the area of 25+
bonus points/TU. But, for a regular season high school tournament, the questions seemed fine overall.

Kudos to Mehdi for hosting an excellent tournament. Good competition. Good readers. Interesting venue. And the delay wasn't really all that terrible - certainly within the realm of a normal tournament snafu.

We were in a *tougher* prelim bracket than some of the others, so our prelim stats like average points and margin don't mean a whole lot if you are trying to make some comparison with the massive scores posted by Charter/Gonzaga/State College/WJ et al.

My Delta Burke set was used for QuAC and RIOT by request of their respective TDs, as all know by now. I've created a separate thread in the HS discussion section to ask for further (and specific) reactions to the questions. Thanks to those who've made some of their thoughts known here.

Please keep in mind that the set was not written to differentiate among top-flight HS teams who regularly play on tough college questions. It was written for CC players in Florida, almost none of whom have HS playing experience and a majority of which were playing in their first or second tournament in their careers. FWIW, many of the regular rounds were very challenging for that field, and only one team beat 20 in bonus conversion, with most falling under 15.

My quick look at the #s from JSR CC shows that in the college field only 2-3 teams crested 20 in bonus conversion, with a bunch of teams between 13 and 18, which to me seems about right. But I can imagine that they didn't push the top teams in the playoffs at QuAC.

PS--Mehdi, please don't post the set as you edited/used it to the Stanford Archive, as I'd like to continue having the DB as played at Valencia there (since so many previous iterations are already there). If you'd like to archive it at Mr. Carter's HS site, that's fine; I won't ask him to put my version there.

In response to Dr. Barnes's question:

1) Charter A
2) Maggie Walker
3) State College
4) Walter Johnson
5) TJ A
6) Gonzaga

...and that's where my knowledge of the final rankings ends.

11 Kellenberg A
12 Charter B

7) GDS
8) DCC
9-10) Stuyvesant and Hunter, don't remember who won

Hunter won.

ValenciaQBowl wrote:PS--Mehdi, please don't post the set as you edited/used it to the Stanford Archive, as I'd like to continue having the DB as played at Valencia there (since so many previous iterations are already there). If you'd like to archive it at Mr. Carter's HS site, that's fine; I won't ask him to put my version there.

I would love to host either, or both of these sets. If I receive both I will clearly designate that QuAC was based on DB but was edited (much like I plan to do with the UTC sets when I complete my information of which sets shared with which).

Lapego1 wrote:Further, consolation rankings got kind of messed up (despite Mr. C. from Caesar Rodney pointing things out), but at this point we were delayed over an hour and stats were correct for the top 20 or so teams, which was the most important thing since it determined who made the top bracket and who didn't.

The error (or at least, one of them), for those that don't know, was that our A team was listed as going 2-4 somehow (along with at least one other team whose name has slipped my mind), which is why we were inexplicably ranked one spot lower than our B team. They both went 2-3, and at first we thought "okay it's just the bonus conversion thing tiebreaker, a little fluke." Well that was bunk, as you can see by the stats now, A team went 15.81/B (i think it might be our best ever, despite as i mentioned last night not having one or or top two players) and B team went just 7.39/B.

Therefore, probably at least 6-10 of the consolation seedings technically were wrong.

So, anyway, we still ended up winning that first consolation round game (A team, that is) but having to face the number 1 consolation seed wasn't a lot of fun for the next game. If the 2-4 snafu hadn't happened, i guess anything could have changed. But really i'm probably now forced to say, well, we should have just played better anyway. So, not a big deal.

I'm not letting that ruin what was still a pretty decent day, and worth the trip.

I would love to host either, or both of these sets. If I receive both I will clearly designate that QuAC was based on DB but was edited (much like I plan to do with the UTC sets when I complete my information of which sets shared with which).

Oh, okay: I guess I was thinking that one wouldn't want two sets with such major overlap there, but if you're okay with it, so am I. It will be instructive to be able to see what kinds of things the Penn/JSR CC folks did, too. I'll send the DB set to you before Thanksgiving.

Could someone recheck my 17 neg total in the game against Hunter

I swear I saw playoff stats on scobo earlier today. Am I hallucinating?

closesesame wrote:I swear I saw playoff stats on scobo earlier today. Am I hallucinating?

No, I saw them too.

In posting playoff stats, Simon decided to override the prelims. So I put prelims back up and playoffs should go up soon. OR you were all just hallucinating .

Playoff stats now up here. Again, I concede that PPB was higher than it should've been, but I hope that didn't detract from the experience. The crossover scoresheets are in my office and I'll be there tonight, so I'll post as soon as things are in hand.

You're welcome to make the argument that bonus difficult was uneven, but I don't think some of the best teams in the country getting close to 25 points per bonus at a regular season tournament is a bad thing.

Will consolation stats be posted?

Caesar Rodney HS wrote:Will consolation stats be posted?

We'll see, but probably not. I'm insanely busy until after finals.

Well, i would just hope that those records are submitted for rankings, etc.... if the individual stats are too much, at least the team results would be beneficial.

Caesar Rodney HS wrote:Well, i would just hope that those records are submitted for rankings, etc.... if the individual stats are too much, at least the team results would be beneficial.

Yeah, on second thought, I could probably just do the games.

Caesar Rodney HS wrote:Well, i would just hope that those records are submitted for rankings, etc.... if the individual stats are too much, at least the team results would be beneficial.

Just point out to Bykowski that I listed them above. He'll put them into the computer from there.

It would be nice to get the top bracket's matchups if possible.

Bad Boy Bill wrote:

Caesar Rodney HS wrote:Well, i would just hope that those records are submitted for rankings, etc.... if the individual stats are too much, at least the team results would be beneficial.

Just point out to Bykowski that I listed them above. He'll put them into the computer from there.

I have indeed noticed. The way things have been going lately, I may be all caught up in about two weeks--we'll see. Thanks for the info.

Sorry again for the delay folks. Exams are hitting me like the plague. Here were the final scores and official standings in the top bracket:
1. Charter A 285
2. Maggie Walker 270

3. State College 350
4. Walter Johnson 255

5. TJ A 375
6. Gonzaga 210

7. GDS A 270
8. DCC 205

9. Hunter 345
10. Stuyvesant A 135

11. Kellenberg A 215
12. Charter B 105

I was hoping to put consolations in an SQBS file to track PPB, but that doesn't seem like it's going to materialize, so I've just typed the scores below. Thanks to Bill for saving me some typing.

First Round:
Byes: East Brunswick A, Half Hollow Hills West A
(17) Caesar Rodney A defeated (16) Georgetown Day School B 220-60
(24) Kellenberg B defeated (9) Charter H 150-105
(8) Bloomfield A defeated (25) Woodbridge 85-25
(5) TJ B defeated (28) Octorara A 320-20
(12) Charter E defeated (21) Charter G 240-75
(13) Stuyvesant B defeated (20) Half Hollow Hills West B 195-90
(4) Charter C defeated (29) Kellenberg C 425-20
(3) Ransom Everglades A defeated (30) Octorara B 430-0
(14) Newark A defeated (19) Charter F 155-80
(11) East Brunswick B defeated (22) Ursuline 195-90
(6) Charter D defeated (27) Newark B 360-55
(7) Ransom Everglades B defeated (26) Colonia 110-90
(10) Mercersberg defeated (23) Cocalico 190-40
(15) Haverford defeated (18) Caesar Rodney B 155-110

Octos:
(1) East Brunswick A defeated (17) Caesar Rodney A 295-85
(24) Kellenberg B defeated (8) Bloomfield A 200-70
(5) TJ B defeated (12) Charter E 250-205
(4) Charter C defeated (13) Stuyvesant B 295-145
(14) Newark A defeated (3) Ransom Everglades A 240-195
(11) East Brunswick B defeated (6) Charter D 185-155
(10) Mercersberg defeated (7) Ransom Everglades B 185-120
(2) Half Hollow Hills A defeated (15) Haverford 475-0

Quarters:
(1) East Brunswick A defeated (24) Kellenberg B 220-60
(4) Charter C defeated (5) TJ B 300-90
(11) East Brunswick B defeated (14) Newark A 175-65
(2) Half Hollow Hills A defeated (10) Mercersberg 385-0

Semis:
(4) Charter C defeated (1) East Brunswick A 260-60
(2) Half Hollow Hills West A defeated (11) East Brunswick B 510-15

Final:
(2) Half Hollow Hills West A defeated (4) Charter C 340-75