The Quizbowl Resource Center

I'm not sure if many MN highschoolers are on this site, but I do remember that Chris Carter and Sam Peterson did post pretty frequently and MN has a wealth of college quizbowlers.

Season kicks off Oct. 31st if we don't have another Ubu Roi this year. I'm excited.

Gaurav and I are on here from EP, as well. I'm glad somebody finally started this thread.

As far as I'm concerned, the quiz bowl season starts at EFT tomorrow, and it looks like you'll be there as well. Good luck!

Yeah, I come here sometimes too. Anyways, it seems like Eden Prarie is clearly the team to beat this year.

Good to see two high schools at EFT yesterday. Eden Prairie has especially strong Megashark knowledge.

Cheynem wrote:Good to see two high schools at EFT yesterday. Eden Prairie has especially strong Megashark knowledge.

Megashark vs. Giant Octopus?

Inkana7 wrote:

Cheynem wrote:Good to see two high schools at EFT yesterday. Eden Prairie has especially strong Megashark knowledge.

Megashark vs. Giant Octopus?

Yessir.

Sir Thopas wrote:

Inkana7 wrote:

Cheynem wrote:Good to see two high schools at EFT yesterday. Eden Prairie has especially strong Megashark knowledge.

Megashark vs. Giant Octopus?

Yessir.

That's brilliant. If you wrote that, props to you.

Inkana7 wrote:

Sir Thopas wrote:

Inkana7 wrote:

Cheynem wrote:Good to see two high schools at EFT yesterday. Eden Prairie has especially strong Megashark knowledge.

Megashark vs. Giant Octopus?

Yessir.

That's brilliant. If you wrote that, props to you.

Thanks!

You're now on my hitlist, Guy.

Cheynem wrote:Robin Heinonen has especially strong Megashark knowledge.

Fixed.

As far as SOCIAL goes, EP's real A team (Tony/Robin/Neil/me) won't be there, as we'll be playing ACF Fall at the U, but EP will probably field 2-3 other teams at SOCIAL. That said, I think St. Paul Central will win it, and I expect Minnetonka, Wayzata, Hopkins, and EP (hopefully!) to make up the rest of the top 5 teams.

I am pretty sure Jordan and Trevor from the 08-09 Chaska A are seniors this year, and I am sure Chaska will have solid stats. I don't know if the recent opening of Chanhassen HS will have any impact on their team.

St. Thomas is returning Will Rock and a few other people, and they did pretty well at the few tournaments they attended last year - I certainly hope to see them at more this year.

I'm also excited to see how things play out at EP's mirror of FNT (which people should come to!); it will be fun to see which teams have strong young(er) players.

Gaurav Kandlikar

Well, SOCIAL was today and it was on A-level questions, which seemed a lot shorter/easier than they did last year, but that was probably just me. Anyways, after prelims the top seeds in order I think, were Central, Chaska, Minnetonka, Wayzata, DeLaSalle, with sme other teams roudning up the top 8. In semifinals, Central got a bad packet/ Charlie from DaLeSalle had a really good round as they beat us badly and scored a ton of points, but then lost to Chaska in the final. Then, Central ended up beating Minnetonka in the third place match. The packets seemed to have a lot of variance as in our two games against Minnetonka we won one by like 30 on the last toss up and the other by well over 200 and this did not seem to be unique as apparently a similar thing happened with Wayzata's games with DaLaSalle. Also I think harder questions even a regular invitational series would make the tournament and games a lot better as a lot of the games developed into frequent buzzer races. Another improvement would be to scrap single elimination and go to double round robin like GINVIT. It'll be good to see how things develop as more matches are played as the season progresses.

Max.... You managed to spell "DeLaSalle" three different ways in the course of that paragraph.
East division of the league is meeting on Thursday.... we'll have to see how that goes.

gaurav.kandlikar wrote:

Cheynem wrote:Robin Heinonen has especially strong Megashark knowledge.

I'm pretty sure Jordan and Trevor from the 08-09 Chaska A are seniors this year, and I am sure Chaska will have solid stats. I don't know if the recent opening of Chanhassen HS will have any impact on their team.

Well, they did win SOCIAL, so kudos to them! Chanhassen didn't seem to affect Chaska at all....
Also, St. Louis Park is a team to watch for, although they only seem to participate in the League....

http://www.qunlimited.com/minnes.htm
Don't go to this.

Well, given my spelling I think I'll stay far clear of any of Question Unlimited's spelling questions or any of their other questions for that matter.

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:http://www.qunlimited.com/minnes.htm
Don't go to this.

Oh, goddamn it.

I think it's time to email the new Chan coach...

Ukonvasara wrote:

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:http://www.qunlimited.com/minnes.htm
Don't go to this.

Oh, goddamn it.

I think it's time to email the new Chan coach...

I was relieved when I checked the regional schedule and they didn't have one for MN... must have missed it....
It's fitting that a new school is hosting this tourney....

I'm sure I'll get a chance to talk to the coach at Chanhassen at some point (she was actually my math teacher back in tenth grade). She is completely new to coaching academic competition, so she almost certainly doesn't know about the history of Chip's tournaments.

Can we organize a picketing/boycott? Perhaps get Walter Mondale on board?

theMoMA wrote:I'm sure I'll get a chance to talk to the coach at Chanhassen at some point (she was actually my math teacher back in tenth grade). She is completely new to coaching academic competition, so she almost certainly doesn't know about the history of Chip's tournaments.

At a second glance, I may be confused about who is the new Chaska coach and who is the Chanhassen coach.

Hi I'm Austin from Chanhassen. I noticed a lot of comments about our team and I thought I should probably address them. For starters our coach is Krista Hammann she has been the assistant coach at Chaska since Mr. Lenius started coaching. Andrew I am assuming you were thinking our coach was Mrs. Stone but she is now coaching at Chaska. However I do not think that Mrs. Hammann knows much about Questions Unlimited except for what she was told when they contacted her. I am guessing its too late to cancel but if anyone wants to email her it would be easier to explain to her. As for Chan high school affecting Chaska, it should show in the future but because all of the seniors stayed there it won't hinder them this year.

Hey Minnesota (and surrounding states) quiz bowl teams.

On Saturday 2/27/10 Armstrong Quiz Bowl will be hosting a pop culture tournament. Details to follow soon, but I wanted to get the date out there for everybody's planning purposes. Hope you can come.

-Matt Quinn

Saint Thomas will be there; we were hoping that someone would host a pop culture tournament.

So, GINVIT was yesterday and Eden Prarie won pretty easily making them still the team to beat. St. Thomas did surprsingly well finishing third and beating out Chaska, who seemed to be struggle with harder questions without Sam Peterson losing to both St. Thomas and Chanhassen, despite beating Central. Eden Prarie's B team also did impressively well finishing fourth I think.

mtimmons wrote:St. Thomas did surprsingly well finishing third.

I wasn't too surprised

Keep an eye out for Chanhassen.

Yeah, like St. Thomas is clearly good and it's not that it was a fluke or something, but they just weren't on the radar for a lot of people, including based on the prelim bracketing as they were in the same bracket as Eden Prarie A. Hopefully, they will come to more tournaments too. Also, speaking of bracketing at GINVIT the top 4 teams came from two prelim brackets, which seems less than ideal. It looks like the next tournament will be the rebranded TOMCAT, which will hopefully feature such things as a distribution and a sensical point system this year.

Seeding for early-season tournaments is always difficult. Before GINVIT, we could only go off of stats and observations from one round of league play and Fall Novice. Even with that info, rosters aren't always consistent enough to make it work. We also didn't know how Greater Sioux Falls was coming in, and they turned out to be really good. St. Thomas B was also a very solid team that exceeded our seeding of them. This tournament will hopefully give everyone a good idea of where the various teams are at to make seeding for future tournaments more accurate.

On the whole, I was really impressed with the overall quality of play at the tournament. The Minnesota circuit has always had very solid top teams, but this year's field is much more knowledgeable from top to bottom than I can ever remember.

theMoMA wrote:Seeding for early-season tournaments is always difficult. Before GINVIT, we could only go off of stats and observations from one round of league play and Fall Novice. Even with that info, rosters aren't always consistent enough to make it work. We also didn't know how Greater Sioux Falls was coming in, and they turned out to be really good. St. Thomas B was also a very solid team that exceeded our seeding of them. This tournament will hopefully give everyone a good idea of where the various teams are at to make seeding for future tournaments more accurate.

On the whole, I was really impressed with the overall quality of play at the tournament. The Minnesota circuit has always had very solid top teams, but this year's field is much more knowledgeable from top to bottom than I can ever remember.

Why don't more early tournaments just use the card system for 6-7 rounds like HSNCT does for that whole first day?

Dr. Isaac Yankem, DDS wrote:Why don't more early tournaments just use the card system for 6-7 rounds like HSNCT does for that whole first day?

Because the card system is a crapshoot that should not be used except when you have absolutely no other option. Trying to do something with 200 teams and a 10-game, 4-bye system where you only have to generally sort out the teams (because you're taking 60 to the playoffs) counts as "no other option." A regular season tournament that does not have 25 total rounds to work with needs a more workable format for its goals.

Matt Weiner wrote:Because the card system is a crapshoot that should not be used except when you have absolutely no other option. Trying to do something with 200 teams and a 10-game, 4-bye system where you only have to generally sort out the teams (because you're taking 60 to the playoffs) counts as "no other option." A regular season tournament that does not have 25 total rounds to work with needs a more workable format for its goals.

While the card system does not handle every situation well, it handles many situations better than round robin divisions. This is especially true when it is difficult to seed teams and/or for large tournaments.

After reading the current NAQT IS discussion thread, I was glad to see that MN had some (what seem like) high scoring games compared to the national average. In addition, 5(?) teams scored above 17PPB, and EP scored around 21(?). The bonuses were noticeably harder, but I really enjoyed the depth of some of the tossups and was surprised about how few went dead in the final rounds of the top playoff bracket.

The score in the final was a respectable 230-385, while our lowest scoring game was vs. Chaska with a score of 200-270 (but bonus conversion wasn't top-notch).

I'm quite excited for Rebranded TOMCAT.... it's always a lot of buzzer-racing fun.(!)

Below is the formal announcement for the ACRONYM III tournament that I sent to coaches. Players, feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the tournament as well. (matt_quinn at rdale.org)

I am happy to announce the third ACRONYM (Armstrong’s Conceivably Regular Or Nearly Yearly Meet) tournament or ACRONYM III. This year the tournament will feature pop culture questions, house written by former Armstrong Quiz Bowlers, me, and various other contributors.

Date/Time: Sat. 2/27/10- 9:00 am-4:00pm

Place: Armstrong High School 10635 36th ave. N, Plymouth, MN 55441

The format will be 20 toss-ups/bonuses per round. The toss-up questions will not be power marked, every correct answer is 10 points. There will be -5 penalties on incorrect answers that interrupt a toss-up. Correctly answered toss ups earn teams the chance at a potential 30 points of bonus questions. Generally speaking, the conventions of most Minnesota quiz bowl tournaments will be followed.

The brackets and numbers of rounds will be determined by registration and your feedback. I would be interested in your opinion as to how many guaranteed rounds coaches and players would like to have offered. The two basic options are: 1-to have six rounds before lunch and single elimination playoffs after lunch. 2- to have four or five rounds before lunch and re-seed for four or five more after lunch, followed by the top four teams competing in playoff rounds. What would you prefer?

We will have novelty trophies for the top 4 teams and top 8 players

Registration- reply to register, $80 per team, $5 discount per buzzer system. $20 discount for bringing a qualified moderator. Please register by 2/20/10. Checks made payable to Armstrong High School.

Feel free to contact me via e-mail with any further questions regarding this tournament.

I hope to see you and your team there.

-Matt Quinn
-Armstrong Quiz Bowl Coach

Just signed up representing DLS qb, just wanted to let you all know that we are expecting big things this year for our A team

DLSqb10 wrote:Just signed up representing DLS qb, just wanted to let you all know that we are expecting big things this year for our A team

Yeah, I certainly look forward to see you guys at more tournaments this year. Hopefully, you guys can make it to things like SnowCAT and any other tournaments in MN.

mtimmons wrote:It looks like the next tournament will be the rebranded TOMCAT, which will hopefully feature such things as a distribution and a sensical point system this year.

As far as I know, Eden Prairie isn't sending any teams to this; there are too many conflicts with Science Olympiad and ACF Winter at the U (other teams should try to make it to this too, it promises to be challenging and fun!) that day.

It looks like Chaska doesn't seem to scale up too well with difficulty, though I am sure that they're going to get better at this stuff. Chanhassen is also a very exciting team; they have no seniors on their squad this year and have been doing well at the past tournaments. Wayzata did well at GINVIT too, winning all of their prelim games and losing two games to EP A and B in the playoffs. Obviously, both SPC and St. Thomas are strong teams with good knowledge.

Also, on a side note, how much interest is there in MN for NASAT (http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7719)? SPC seems to be interested, as is EP. It looks like HSAPQ is producing a tryout set for that, and I am sure that someone can host it (I can look into the possibility of EP hosting it, though we'd need outside help with readers, obviously), or maybe the U qb team can host it.

Speaking as a member of the U's team with no real authority, I can say that the team would be happy to run such a tryout, provided scheduling works out. There are a number of outstanding Minnesota quizbowlers, so I think a tryout would be a capital idea. Perhaps involving defeating Brendan Byrne in a solo match or some other feats of strength.

I'd definitely be interested in NASAT.

Chanhassen also won't be attending the rebranded TOMCAT because we have to go to a KB meet in Hibbing.

GeneVan wrote:Chanhassen also won't be attending the rebranded TOMCAT because we have to go to a KB meet in Hibbing.

Ouch.

Ya, I know.

I'd definitely also be interested in NASAT, but my number one concern is funding....

So, TOMCAT at Roseville happened today. Central won by defeating St. Thomas Academy 400-285 in the final. De La Salle and Blake rounded out the top 4. Eden Prairie and Chaska were absent. Congrats to all the top teams. While the tournament was well run there were some problems with the format. First, the questions were extremely short which caused a huge number of buzzer races in the top games. The distribution was simply terrible with almost no social science or philsophy. But the worst problem with the format had to be the messed up scoring system. There is no reason why a team should answer more tossups and then lose a game because their tossups were earlier in the game. Example, in round 7 we only beat Hopkins, a good team but not a championship contender by 5 points despite getting 5 more tossups than them. Also single elimination playoffs are bad. So are cross bracket point per game comparions. So are the few number of games for teams, most only got six or seven very short games. The tournament could have also gone past 2 giving teams more games.

mtimmons wrote: There is no reason why a team should answer more tossups and then lose a game because their tossups were earlier in the game.

How is this possible?

mtimmons wrote:The distribution was simply terrible with almost no social science or philsophy.

Of 528 tossups in the set:

5 philosophy.

14 social science, distributed among the usual subcategories.

I don't really know anything about the format of this event, so I'll pass those along to others at NAQT.

In the TOMCAT format, the first ten tossups are 10 points, the next ten are 15 points, the next ten are 20, and the last ten are 25 despite uniform difficulty .Also there are no bonuses. So because our 20 tossups were earlier in the game we got 310 points, while they got 15 tossups and 305 points. Needless to say, it's a terrible format. And for the philosophy and social science that seems a little low espically for philosophy. Like in the new PACE distribution there'd be 26 of each and even under the regular NAQT there'd be like 11 philosophy and slight more social science though that might be because with some many tossups you get more canon exhaustion in those categories. By the way what was the distribution for TOMCAT? Thanks.

mtimmons wrote:what was the distribution for TOMCAT? Thanks.

Classical myth 7
Norse myth 1
Nonclassical myth 2
Religious literature (Christian) 3
Religious literature (non-Christian) 2
American literature 29
British literature 28
European literature 17
World literature 5
Miscellaneous literature 5
Physics 23
Astronomy 7
Biology (anatomy/medicine) 6
Biology (cell/molecular) 6
Biology (organismal/population) 6
Biology (miscellaneous) 5
Chemistry 23
Math (non-computational) 11
Computation 24
Computer science 4
Earth science 5
Technology 5
Miscellaneous science 11
Painting 9
Architecture 3
Sculpture 3
Music 11
Opera 4
Miscellaneous fine arts 3
US history (military) 6
US history (government/politics) 16
US history (other) 11
US history (miscellaneous) 4
British history 9
French history 4
Russian history 3
German history 3
Italian history 2
European history (miscellaneous) 4
Asian history 7
African history 2
South American history 2
North American history (not US) 5
Non-western history (miscellaneous) 2
Ancient Greek history 2
Ancient Roman history 3
Ancient history (non-classical) 2
Religious history 4
Exploration history 4
History (miscellaneous) 4
North American geography 12
European geography 7
Asian geography 8
African geography 6
South American geography 3
World geography (miscellaneous) 4
Baseball 2
Football 2
Basketball, Hockey, Soccer 1 each
Sports (minor) 3
Sports (miscellaneous) 3
TV 5
Popular music 5
Movies 5
Other pop culture 10
Social science 14 (3 each anthro, econ, psych; the rest miscellaneous)
Religion 4
Philosophy 5
CE (business) 2
CE (science) 3
CE (US politics) 7
CE (US other) 5
CE (US miscellaneous) 4
CE (world politics) 8
CE (world other) 3
CE (world miscellaneous) 5
Foreign language 2
Mixed academic 9
Mixed (may contain pop culture) 7
Mixed or general knowledge 5

TOTAL 528

mtimmons wrote:for the philosophy and social science that seems a little low especially for philosophy. Like in the new PACE distribution there'd be 26 of each and even under the regular NAQT there'd be like 11 philosophy and slight more social science though that might be because with so many tossups you get more canon exhaustion in those categories.

The biggest reason we ask very limited amounts of philosophy in our easiest sets is that it's difficult to write large (or even moderate) numbers of philosophy tossups that are answerable in regular season high school play. Philosophy consistently places second (behind only computational math) in our accounting of least-answered categories, and this despite the fact that our philosophy questions are strongly canonical (focusing on the best-known philosophers).

Hey, first off, congrats to Central and St. Thomas for doing well at TOMCAT.

Now, I am kind of confused as to why some teams like Central or St. Thomas chose to attend this event. TOMCAT has been run in MN for at least the past three years, and all of them have featured questions that were too easy for top level teams, and I am sure that all of the playoff games have been decided mostly by frustrating buzzer races. You guys knew this going into the tournament, and what you got should have been no surprise.
For the past three years, Macalester QB was kind enough to sponsor the tournament, and there had been no entry fee to the tournament. This year, however, the entry fee was a surprising $80 per team, and it seems like a bad deal for most top teams to pay that amount to play 6 or 7 rounds (as Max says) of one to two line questions that are written primarily for teams new to quizbowl.

Moreover, TOMCAT this year conflicted with ACF Winter at the U of M. Any highschool team would have had to pay $70 ($120-50 for the high school discount, and this is assuming no packet is submitted), and would get to play a guaranteed 11 rounds of excellent quizbowl at this tournament. I acknowledge that Winter was a challenging tournament, but it was really fun to play the set and face off against various Minnesota quizbowl luminaries. In my experience, it is always much better to have fun playing a well written, challenging set than a speedcheck set geared towards younger teams and then complain about the set and the format.

I realize that this is over, but I sincerely hope teams take this into account when deciding which tournaments to attend in the future.

Also, SNOWCat is coming up, and EP is probably sending 3 or 4 teams to it. Our B team will be missing a few people who are scheduled to take the SATs that day, but other than that, our lineup should stay pretty much the same.

Gaurav

Note: Just as I was about to submit this, I came across http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9233 in a different section.

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure why we went to TOMCAT instead of ACF Winter. Personally, I would have preferred to go to ACF Winter. I think the entry fee for TOMCAT was only $50 though http://www.naqt.com/mqba/tomcat/2010/announcement.html so it wasn't quite as bad Gaurav painted it. But some members of our team wanted to win a tournament or were new. Like one of the players are on team had never been to a quiz bowl tournament before and probably wouldn't of had as much fun and wouldn't have come if we went to ACF Winter. Obviously, this isn't a problem if you have multiple teams but Central doesn't. I imagine it will be similar for Central next year as I will be the only experienced player. We'll go to some more college tournaments this year though.

Some teams, like DLS, probably attended this tournament and not ACF winter in order to qualify multiple teams for HSNCT.

The fact that NAQT allows speed check tournaments to be qualifiers for the HSNCT is something NAQT should be embarrassed about.