The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hello all,

Michigan Academic Competitions will be mirroring VCU Open / Trash.

WHERE: Detroit Catholic Central High School
27225 Wixom Rd
Novi, MI 48374

WHEN: August 6-7, 2011(Weekend after CO). The academic tournament will run on Saturday, and trash on Sunday.

We realize we are announcing this a bit late, but we had to wait for DCC to confirm we can use the building. We are choosing to host this at DCC because it is very difficult (and expensive) to book rooms in the summer at U of M. We are choosing to mirror this on the earlier weekend because that is the only weekend we could get at DCC. We are sorry if this prevents any teams from coming.

Entry fees will be announced in the next few days. They should be comparable to last year’s fees.

Please post in this thread about team sign-ups / formations and also use this Google spreadsheet: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl= ... l=en#gid=2

(One for Trash: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key ... uBRw#gid=1)

If you have any questions, please post in this thread or send us an email at [email protected]

Original VCU Open announcement: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11522

Original VCU Trash announcement: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=11525

I'm a free agent for this at the moment, possibly for trash as well.

EDIT: not for trash

I'm a free agent for the main tournament, and could probably read for trash.

I'm playing the main tournament and obviously able to staff the trash tournament.

I'll probably get a hotel room in Novi if any out of towners wants to share, too.

I'd do this with anyone driving in from Ontario.

bmcke wrote:I'd do this with anyone driving in from Ontario.

I think that McMaster was planning to have Moon Pie + COLT at this time.

free agent for both.

Auroni and I are now playing the academic tournament together and still looking for other teammates.

I'd like to play the academic tournament, so I guess I'm a free agent until I find some folks.

I'm a free agent for the academic one and plan on reading for the trash.

I'll be playing this, and looking for teammates. Would be available to staff trash if I don't have anything better to do (which is almost certainly the case).

Mike and I are now playing with Kurtis.

Anyone in the Cleveland area willing to give me a ride? If so, I'm a free agent for this. Possibly for trash as well.

Edit: grammar

As long as I can catch (or organize) a ride, I'm looking for teammates.

There is a slight possibility I could be going to this mirror, but given the inferior date to the main site, I'm not sure. I'll keep you posted.

Need two teammates for this (academic)

Biology is my only strong point, really. I suck most at history. Sound like a good fit? Any takers for this poor soul?

At least a couple Country Day people, and possibly Neil Gurram, will be there on Saturday.

In an attempt to promote my own financial interest in VCUO, I will urge those on the fence to play Sunday. I think it's a pretty fun and accessible trash set, and there is 1/1 various academia.

Olmsted Falls HS is considering playing the academic portion of this, and I and some old teammates may enter as well.

Hey, sorry to keep posting on this, but here goes:

*It's a little more than a month away, but there are very few teams signed up for the trash portion of the tournament. I would like to run the tournament obviously with a number of teams, so please sign up. However, I plan on being at DCC on the 7th regardless and would be willing to run the tournament as a doubles/singles/shootout format (with obviously revised prices if necessary). Since this site is the week before the main site, I would then treat this site almost like an extended playtest (with perhaps even cheaper prices for like warm bodies who would only be interested in hearing specific topics).

The trash tournament is now completely finished, edited, and more or less proofread.

It's about two weeks or so until the trash tournament. I'll get a confirmation from Bryan at some point, but looking at the sheet, I see three teams registered and enough free agents to form a fourth team. If we get four teams, I will run a round robin of various rounds (a triple round robin might work best, with nine rounds/tiebreakers/finals) followed by perhaps reading leftover packets in a shootout packet open to all. I'm not sure what Michigan was planning on charging, but with this sort of field and format, I would expect cheaper fees than the main site for sure.

I probably will need a couple of buzzers and staffers (at this rate, probably no more than 2-3 buzzers and staffers).

Hello all,

I would like to make some announcements as the tournaments draw closer.

VCU Open (Saturday)
As of now, we have 9 teams signed up (technically 10, but I'm assuming Joe Wells is going to join some other team). Please finalize your teams in the upcoming days. The link to the sign-up sheet can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/3rbzac8

We currently also only have 4 staffers (myself, Saul Hankin, Surya Sabhapathy, and Libo Zeng), with myself probably doing stats / tournament director-y things. So if we keep the 9 team format, we will have people read during their bye rounds. If for some reason we only have 8 teams, then we will need to do something else. We can always use more staffers, so please sign up if you have nothing better to do.

We are happy to announce that the cost of playing VCU Open at the Michigan site is now only $40 per team!! House teams (i.e. DCC guys) play for free, as we are using their building. Because of the super low costs, we are not having any sort of travel or buzzer discounts. Between Michigan's and DCC's buzzers, should have enough to cover all the teams.

VCU Trash (Sunday)
Mike has already said a lot about this, so see his posts. The fee for this will also be $40 per team or perhaps even lower.

Logistics
Detroit Catholic Central High School is located at 27225 Wixom Rd, Novi, MI 48274. Parking is free. Go in through either the main entrance or the eastern entrance (it has a blue awning).

Both tournaments will start at 9 AM, with registration starting at 8:30 AM.

If you have any other questions please email me at bryanbe AT umich DOT edu. If you get lost or something, my phone number is (248) 310-0634

I've been told by Joe Wells that he's actually coming with a team.

The trash field remains anemic and has actually gotten worse.

Options:

1. With 1-2 more teams, we have a mildly viable field which can support an actual round robin type schedule. I'd again implore/request people to play if they're thinking about it, and if need be, I'd be willing to allow people to play for free or very low fees in order to round out a field.

2. Some sort of bastard shootout format, maybe with like rotating teams or something so that we can do bonuses.

As I said, I'm going to be there regardless, so people who show up will have something to play, but the more players means a better experience.

There appears to be some time issues with DCC staff this yea, mainly that it seems likely that we could get kicked out at 5PM. We've considered what to do about this and have come up with the following solutions. Let us know which one is the best for the most people either by posting here or emailing Bryan at [email protected]
1. We start the tournament early, say 8AM, and (assuming team # at 8 teams stays constant), play an 8 team round robin followed by a rebracketing and another 4 team round robin and finals as needed. This would be 10 rounds (with possible 2 game finals) and including lunch we feel we can reasonably finish the tournament by 5PM considering we have a small number of/some inexperienced staffers.

2. We squat at some rooms at UoM and can hopefully play through the games without too many issues. Problem is obviously since we're squatting, we could get kicked out of rooms etc.

Option 2 works best for me and Joe Nutter since we were planning on driving up Saturday morning.

Ringil wrote:There appears to be some time issues with DCC staff this yea, mainly that it seems likely that we could get kicked out at 5PM. We've considered what to do about this and have come up with the following solutions. Let us know which one is the best for the most people either by posting here or emailing Bryan at [email protected]
1. We start the tournament early, say 8AM, and (assuming team # at 8 teams stays constant), play an 8 team round robin followed by a rebracketing and another 4 team round robin and finals as needed. This would be 10 rounds (with possible 2 game finals) and including lunch we feel we can reasonably finish the tournament by 5PM considering we have a small number of/some inexperienced staffers.

2. We squat at some rooms at UoM and can hopefully play through the games without too many issues. Problem is obviously since we're squatting, we could get kicked out of rooms etc.

I suppose I'm fine with either option as long as I can get a ride from the Greyhound station downtown.

However, option 2 concerns me because as you said, we could be kicked out of rooms at any moment. It would be quite a hassle to move the tournament to another venue altogether if this happens.

If the tournament has to be moved to UM, is there no chance of officially reserving rooms for this day?

I'd prefer to have option 1. I really think the tournament can get done with at 5 PM, as the plan Libo put out should be fine.

I'd strongly prefer the first option as well; my dad would probably be pretty upset if he had to drive me to U of M as opposed to DCC, likely even to the point where I wouldn't be able to go at all.

EDIT: Pronouns are hard to use properly

Actually that's something I didn't think about. Moving the tournament site at this point would probably throw a wrench in many travel plans.

It's probably best to leave the tournament at DCC. As long as no one is egregiously late, an 8 AM start time should solve the issue.

The lunch break can also be shortened if food is delivered to the tournament site.

Yeah, moving the tournament site would highly displease me. If we start at 8 AM, run quickly, and maybe order food for lunch, we should be okay or at least get in a good chunk of games (for instance, I don't think anyone will complain too much if we can only do a one-game final or something).

Also, what's up regarding Sunday? We have rooms, right? If we can only stay 'til 5, that's no big deal, but we do need a room or two.

Ringil wrote: assuming team # at 8 teams stays constant

It looks like we have 10 teams now.

mhayes wrote:

Ringil wrote: assuming team # at 8 teams stays constant

It looks like we have 10 teams now.

That's even better, really. I think we could easily get in a full round robin plus finals, assuming we start at 8 AM. We could then run a shootout on the remaining questions until the building closes.

I can coordinate a pizza order to help move the tournament along faster, and we had access to the vending machines last year. If you're strongly opposed to this, please let me know. Otherwise, if you don't want pizza, please plan to pack a lunch; or there's some fast food nearby that you could bring back.

Finally, is anyone else willing to staff the trash tournament? So far we just have Mike Cheyne on the sheet. Mike's suggested teams of 3 if the current field stands, probably followed by a shootout on the remaining packets. I imagine we can probably start at 9 or even 10 AM.

EDIT: I forgot about one Kurtosis Droge, and about Libo, so I guess we're okay on staff for Sunday.

Well, considering the anemic field for Trash, we could always continue the academic tourney on Sunday, couldn't we?

I assume that we're not going to want to play too long on the trash questions if the field has some five people.

No Rules Westbrook wrote:Well, considering the anemic field for Trash, we could always continue the academic tourney on Sunday, couldn't we?

I assume that we're not going to want to play too long on the trash questions if the field has some five people.

My (and those I am driving's) travel plans involved leaving after the tournament Saturday, so this would be sub-optimal for me.

Two of my teammates were also planning on leaving Saturday night.

Regarding trash and its anemic field (although 4 other folks just entered the field), I'm not sure what the format will be on Sunday--if you can form teams, fine; if not, I'm okay with running a shootout or adopting the format we used at Minnesota one time to play Illinois Open with like seven people. Michael Hausinger also volunteered to staff Sunday if necessary.

Cheynem wrote:Two of my teammates were also planning on leaving Saturday night.

Regarding trash and its anemic field (although 4 other folks just entered the field), I'm not sure what the format will be on Sunday--if you can form teams, fine; if not, I'm okay with running a shootout or adopting the format we used at Minnesota one time to play Illinois Open with like seven people. Michael Hausinger also volunteered to staff Sunday if necessary.

I'm not sure what format this is, but we had some fun splitting 8 total people into 4 teams of 2 and then having each team get paired with one other team playing the two remaining teams each round. You can look at the UW COLT mirror stats for info on how this worked in more detail.

I'm strongly in favor of starting at 8 (or maybe 8:30), then doing a full RR plus finals.

yes, for the record, I'm pro-let's start as early as we can. I was just throwing it out there, if things happen to run long.

Hello all,

So I called DCC today. I talked to maintenance (who will be letting us into the building) and they said they could get us in as early as 7:30, so an 8:00 start time would be possible. Also, the head of maintenance was not aware of kicking us out by 5 PM. Perhaps the chain of command hasn't gotten to maintenance yet, but it looks like we can be there as long as need be. Hooray!

I am closing the field at 5 PM tomorrow, August 3rd, so please make all changes to teams by then. As of now we have 10 teams signed up. We have enough staff to run 5 rooms, but I would prefer to see the two short-handed teams be combined into one and run a 9 team RR with byes. This would speed up things by allowing moderators to have scorekeepers and there would be fewer rounds.

In the spirit of closing fields, as it stands, VCU trash can more or less sport 4 teams. Thus, I'll need one other staffer and two buzzers. We will run some sort of round robin (double or triple depending on interest) and then shootout on the rest of the packets. I will coordinate the staffer and buzzer on Saturday.

I suggest we still do the pizza thing for lunch on Saturday.

From what I've heard, Olmsted Falls won't be attending, so we currently have 9 teams.

It seems like 8 teams with a full RR and then a rebracket into upper/lower halves is better than 9 teams with a full RR and a bye, so if Olmstead Falls isn't coming, combining the two teams of two would still probably be a good idea.

One of those teams of 2 is now a team of 3 with me on it.

A team led by Steve Traicoff is now registered for trash. This give us four teams with enough free agents to fill out the teams, so the round robin schedule is on. The fee is ten dollars per person.

Nalin: Are you still playing trash?

kdroge wrote:It seems like 8 teams with a full RR and then a rebracket into upper/lower halves is better than 9 teams with a full RR and a bye, so if Olmstead Falls isn't coming, combining the two teams of two would still probably be a good idea.

This is assuming we don't get kicked out at 5 PM. I'm optimistic that we can stay there past then, but I don't think we are out of the woods just yet...

Looks like our fourth player decided to drop out, so we're a 3 person team as well as of right now.

Hello all,

The tournament is in two days. We currently have the following teams:

1) Matt Lafer, Ryan Westbrook, Jacob Durst, Michael Hausinger
2) Jarret Greene, Jasper Lee, Saajid Moyen, Ashvin Srivatsa
3) Mike Cheyne, Auroni Gupta, Kurtis Droge, Matt Hayes
4) Siddhant Dogra, John Bernabei, Neil Gurram
5) Jason Loy, Caleb Robbins, Charlie Dees
6) Asanka Nanayakkara, Nandan Gokhale, Max Bucher, Joe Nutter
7) Joe Wells, Drew Scheeler
8) Connor Teevens, Matt Messana, Chris Wolfe, Dave Ciccarelli
9) Kyle Schafer, Tim Ditto, Bryan Smith, [Unnamed 4th Player]

The way I see it, we have two options with regards to schedule:
A) Keep nine teams and do a RR with byes (8 games). We then re-bracket into an upper 4 and a lower 5 and RR again. Finals will be played on packets 12 and 13.
B) Put team 7's players into the empty spots teams 4 and 5, then do an 8-team RR without byes (7 games). We then split into and upper and lower 4 teams and RR again. Finals on packets 11 and 12.

I think that most people would want to go with option B, but if teams don't want to split / merge we can do option A as well. I've sent an email to Joe Wells, Neil Gurram, and Charlie Dees about merging. Or one of the team members can post their thoughts here. Either works.

I'm calling Catholic Central tomorrow to see if we can stay there past 5 PM (which I'm staying optimistic about); I will post the final word tomorrow in the early afternoon. In the off chance we are getting kicked out, it is imperative that everyone show up on time. We should be able to get into the building by 7:30, so plan to start rounds at 8:15. Again, don't be late.

For trash, I currently have:

Lafer/Westbrook/Freeburn/Garnett
Hankin/Hopkins/Mirsky
Schafer/Ditto/Smith/?
Traicoff team

The three free agents are Bryan, Surya, and Nalin. I haven't heard if Nalin is coming still. One of those free agents can play on Saul Hankin's team, and I'm okay if we need to make a few teams of five in order to make the schedule work. If more people suddenly join, we can have six teams.

Format: Double or triple round robin depending on interest, followed by shootout on leftover packets until interest wanes or we get kicked out.

We'll probably start at 9:00, registration starting at 8:30.