The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hello!

I am pleased to announce the Great Lakes site of ACF Fall 2014, to be held at the Ohio State University on Saturday, 8 November 2014. ACF Fall is the year's premier introductory-level collegiate quizbowl tournament, and we do hope that you join us at this event. We will have exact details about time and location as the tournament date approaches, but we tentatively plan to begin tournament play at 9:00 am in the Enarson Classrooms building with registration starting around 8:15.

Registration
Registration for this event has two steps:
First, please write to us at ohiostatequizbowl[at]gmail[dot]com with team name, number, and buzzer/staffer information.
Second, fill out the central ACF Fall registration form at this site with all relevant information.

Fees
Base fee: $120 for one team from a school, $240 for two teams from a school, etc.
Buzzer systems*: -$5 each
Staffers: -$10 each No maximum.
Laptop: -$5 each Maximum 1 per team.
Travel: -$10 per 200 miles traveled one way
International**: -$20
New to ACF teams***: -$25
New quizbowl teams****: -$75

* No discount for broken buzzers; no maximum.
** For teams representing schools located in a different country than the tournament host.
*** For schools which haven't played an ACF tournament between September 2012 and August 2014, and have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school.
**** For schools which did not send a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament since September 2012, and have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school. May be combined with new ACF team discount for a total new-team discount of $100.

Packet Discounts/Penalties
Any team with at least one person on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament prior to September 1, 2013 is required to submit a packet. High school players are included in this definition and are subject to the same discounts and penalties as college teams.

Please reference this flowchart for the packet-submission guidelines. The links in the diagram are clickable. If you have questions on the submission guidelines, email them to [email protected] and they'll clarify.

Please submit packets to [email protected] and use “ACF Fall 2014: [Team Name]” in the subject line.

Submission schedule
Please refer to the below submission schedule:


Payment
Payment for ACF Fall will be processed through the ACF treasurer, Jerry Vinokurov. He will get in touch with you about how much your team owes, how to pay for the tournament, etc. Please contact Jerry with any questions regarding payment.

Note Regarding High School Teams
High school teams are welcome to play this tournament, though they should keep in mind that while this may be a lower difficulty tournament, it is nevertheless a collegiate event and significantly more difficult than many high school tournaments. There will be no further discounts for things like playing short-handed or being new to ACF or quizbowl, which applies only to new college teams. Furthermore, high school teams must abide by the packet requirements if any of its members played a college tournament prior to the 2013-2014 competition season.

For more information, refer to the Global Announcement of ACF Fall 2014 or email the editors at [email protected].

Field (updated 11/3/14):
Cedarville (1)
Louisville (2)
Sidney (1)
Kentucky (4)
Ohio State (1)
Carnegie Mellon (2)
Kenyon (2)
Wright State (2)
Northmont (1)
Buffalo (1)
Rochester (1)
MSU (3)
Case Western (1)


The official ACF-registered field can be found here.

We apologize for the late notice but are pleased to announce that we will be holding an open mirror of the COTTAGE Bowl trash tournament after ACF Fall. Details.

Who ended up winning things here?

Northmont beat Michigan State A in the second game of a final where Northmont had had the advantage going into the final.

Do you have stats for this?

Arch Stanton wrote:Do you have stats for this?

I'm working on getting the files from the person who was doing stats.

Thanks to everybody who came out for ACF Fall yesterday, TDs Tyler Friesen/Allison Salach, and all the staffers who made the tournament happen.

Stats can be found here.

Would it be possible to correct the brackets for the prelim stats?

First of all, thanks to OSU for running this, and congrats to Northmont and MSU.

I'd like to second Rama's point; people should see which bracket each team was actually in for the prelims. It might be hard to see from the way the stats are displayed now, but the prelim brackets were very uneven, hurting several teams. Less importantly, the half packet play-off games (MSU-OSU and MSU-Kenyon A) are currently listed having 20 TUH; fixing that would be nice as well.

Edit: fixed confusing words

a bird wrote: I'd like to second Rama's point, people should see which bracket teams were actually in for the prelims. It might be hard to see from the way the stats are displayed now, but the prelim brackets were very uneven, hurting several teams.

Yes, we need to talk about this. "Very uneven" is an understatement. The top three teams were clearly MSU A, Northmont, and Kenyon A. These three all went in separate brackets. But after that, I literally have no clue what you did. I knew it was a bad sign when I could tell from the start that our B team had a much better chance of making the top playoff bracket than our A team (which is exactly what happened).

Kenyon A's bracket had CMU A, Louisville A, Kentucky A, and Sidney. It should have been clear that all four of these teams were stronger than all of Cedarville, Louisville B, Kentucky B, Kentucky C, CMU B, and Buffalo --- which was the rest of MSU A's bracket. I mean, they're the respective B and C teams of the teams in the first bracket! The prelim PPB figures confirm this. By PPB, five of the top nine teams were in Kenyon A's bracket, whereas one of the top nine was in MSU A's bracket. I think it's also telling that the teams from Kenyon A's bracket went a combined 13-3 against teams from other brackets in the consolation rounds.

If your understanding of teams' strength is this poor, you need to get rosters before the day of the tournament. I would gladly have sent you our rosters, as would most teams.

Also, a correction: on CMU A, it's Srishti, not Srishei.

a bird wrote:First of all, thanks to OSU for running this, and congrats to Northmont and MSU.

I'd like to second Rama's point; people should see which bracket each team was actually in for the prelims. It might be hard to see from the way the stats are displayed now, but the prelim brackets were very uneven, hurting several teams. Less importantly, the half packet play-off games (MSU-OSU and MSU-Kenyon A) are currently listed having 20 TUH; fixing that would be nice as well.

Edit: fixed confusing words

I thought I already fixed the brackets, but both of these have now been fixed.

Ndg wrote:

a bird wrote: I'd like to second Rama's point, people should see which bracket teams were actually in for the prelims. It might be hard to see from the way the stats are displayed now, but the prelim brackets were very uneven, hurting several teams.

Yes, we need to talk about this. "Very uneven" is an understatement. The top three teams, were clearly MSU A, Northmont, and Kenyon A. These three all went in separate brackets. But after that, I literally have no clue what you did. I knew it was a bad sign when I could tell from the start that our B team had a much better chance of making the top playoff bracket than our A team (which is exactly what happened).

Kenyon A's bracket had CMU A, Louisville A, Kentucky A, and Sidney. It should have been clear that all four of these teams were stronger than all of Cedarville, Louisville B, Kentucky B, Kentucky C, CMU B, and Buffalo --- which was the rest of MSU A's bracket. I mean, they're the respective B and C teams of the teams in the first bracket! The prelim PPB figures confirm this. By PPB, five of the top nine teams were in Kenyon A's bracket, whereas one of the top nine was in MUS A's bracket. I think it's also telling that the teams from Kenyon A's bracket went a combined 13-3 against teams from other brackets in the consolation rounds.

If your understanding of teams' strength is this poor, you need to get rosters before the day of the tournament. I would gladly have sent you our rosters, as would most teams.

Also, a correction: on CMU A, it's Srishti, not Srishei.

Because I was playing, I was not involved in the scheduling process, so I don't know how the teams were seeded. Fall brackets are never going to be perfect, but you (among other teams) definitely got screwed over and I apologize for the seeding issues. We will strive to be more rigorous about our seeding process in the future.

tintinnabulation wrote: Because I was playing

Thanks for bringing up the other thing that annoyed me. Why was there a house team playing? I ask for two reasons.

First, the whole field received an email the week of the tournament begging teams to bring staffers. It read, in part, "[A] few extra staffers would make a big difference in helping the tournament run smoothly." Well, there's your few extra staffers. Perhaps then I wouldn't have had to teach a scorekeeper how to keep score halfway through round 1.

Second, keeping the house team committed you to a schedule that necessarily required cross-bracket statistical tiebreakers. No one likes statistical tiebreakers. No one likes schedules with multiple byes, either. I understand that Kentucky D apparently dropped out late, but that's why you make up contingency schedules.

Ndg wrote: If your understanding of teams' strength is this poor, you need to get rosters before the day of the tournament. I would gladly have sent you our rosters, as would most teams.

I want to emphasize that this is a very good idea.

I readily acknowledge it can be very hard to seed teams at ACF Fall, but that makes getting rosters all the more important. Since there were some similar (those less bad) issues last year, I would hope OSU (as well as other host) decide to use more thorough methods for seeding in the future.

Ndg wrote:

tintinnabulation wrote: Because I was playing, I was not involved in the scheduling process

Thanks for bringing up the other thing that annoyed me.

I actually wanted to mention these things as well.

Re: the bracketing - your mirror of PADAWAN a couple weeks ago also had this same issue of comically unbalanced prelim pools, and since you were not playing, I can only assume that you were on the scheduling process then. I voiced my complaints in regards to the issue when it first happened (even though that time the situation was to our benefit) so I'm not entirely certain why nothing was done to amend that going forward.

Also, though I've apparently been informed that it was an issue at other mirrors as well, I wasn't too pleased that 12 rounds of play (which only gave most teams 10 matches) lasted until nearly 7:00, especially considering that these questions were both shorter and generally answered more quickly than regular difficulty ones.
Part of the issue was that multiple staffers were unable to finish a round in less than 40 minutes, which leads me to also question why there was a house team playing when this was the case.

Also, unless Louisville B somehow scored exactly 5 bonus points against MSU A, there might be an error with the stats for that match.

In addition, having the rosters in advance means you can create sqbs files before the event which saves your stat person a lot of time and frustration (particularly if whomever wrote the roster down has bad handwriting) the morning of the event. Also, it means your stat person is free the first round to help in another capacity if there are other issues that need addressing (ie a staffer is running late and you need someone to read that room, a password protected packet won't open and you need to get in touch with the producer responsible, etc.).

I'm bringing this incident up as it seems to be relevant to some larger issues being discussed here. Apparently in Room 211 in the afternoon there was a match between Kenyon B and Kentucky C where the moderator read bonuses 8 and 9 out of order. Kentucky C then made protest about the difficulty of the bonuses, and after checking with the war room, the moderator read replacement bonuses to both teams.

There seems to be absolutely nothing about bonuses being read out of order in the ACF protest rules.

ACF Rules wrote:H. Protests

4. The following potential errors, and only the following, are protestable:

4.1. The answer in the packet is wrong for the question and the protesting player/team gave the correct answer.

4.2. The question or answer was ambiguous, so the answer given by the player should be accepted since it fits all the clues given in the entire question text, or all the clues up to a significantly deep point in the question.

4.3. The player gave a correct alternate name for the answer that was not included in the list of acceptable answers to the question.

4.4. More information was required than was reasonable to identify the answer, and the protesting player gave sufficient information to identify the answer but not as much as the packet required and was ruled incorrect.

4.5. Two or more clues within the question uniquely describe different answers, or one clue definitely does not refer to the same answer as the other clues—hence, there is no correct answer to the question. This protest may be lodged by either team at the end of a question converted by neither team or by the team that did not get the question after a question is converted by one team. However, if this situation arises on a tossup that the other team converted before the first clue creating a contradiction was read, there may be no protest because the team that missed the question was not misled.

4.6. The protesting team’s opponent received credit for an incorrect answer through either packet or moderator error.

5. Nothing else is protestable, including but not limited to: judgment calls of any kind such as calling time, whether a tossup had begun before an accidental buzz as described in E.11, whether verbal conferring occurred, or the failure of the question to require a prompt on an opposing team’s answer.

It's unfathomable to me that such circumstances could be protestable, and I'm baffled as to why such a protest was upheld. If I'm confused about something please enlighten me, but the situation seems to be clearly covered under "nothing else is protestable."

I might have more to say about this later, but this underscores the need for properly trained staff and the issues brought on by fielding a house team without a sufficient number of experienced staffers.

You could conceivably argue that 4.6 applies inasmuch as the team got points for answers that were not the correct answers to the bonus they should have been read ("through moderator error"). But that's a pretty weird interpretation.

I would argue that deciding which bonus question should be read next is a effectively a judgement call by the moderator. Certainly it's one for which there is no excuse for messing up, but it's a judgement call nonetheless.

From a big-picture point of view, protests are supposed to make unfair situations more fair. Since the issue was that teams were read different bonuses than they were supposed to get, giving them other different bonuses doesn't make anything better and is a waste of time.

I was responsible for the scheduling and most of the day-of organizing of the tournament. Although some of the problems people are bringing up were related to factors outside of our control (teams brought inexperienced moderators, there were four contenders for the championship after the playoffs, and a team dropped from the tournament late on Friday night) the tournament was neither planned nor run as well as it should have been, and that's on me. Of those problems that didn't stem directly from my organizational mistakes, most were due to the fact that we didn't have enough competent staffers to make the tournament run smoothly. In light of this, OSU should not have entered a house team, and going forward we will not try to run another tournament of this size until we have a larger number of experienced team members to staff it. I'm very sorry for the problems we had with the tournament, and I hope people enjoyed it anyway.

Thanks for posting.

unknot wrote:I hope people enjoyed it anyway.

Lest I sound like I had a miserable time on Saturday, I assure you I didn't. It was definitely fun to finally get to play ACF Fall. I was just frustrated that most of the issues that came up could have been obviated with just a little bit more forethought and preparation.

Thanks for owning up to the issues, Tyler. The tournament was certainly still a good time on the whole, but I sincerely hope OSU will learn from this and run better tournaments in the future.

I would still like an explanation from someone who knows more about the out of order bonus protest issue discussed above. I think this also serves as a reminder that TDs should go over the rules in some detail with inexperienced staffers before tournaments. Obviously the easiest solution is to have an adequate number of competent staffers, but in situations with newer staffers the TD should take steps to help them learn the rules. Mistakes like this can have serious consequences.

a bird wrote:Thanks for owning up to the issues, Tyler. The tournament was certainly still a good time on the whole, but I sincerely hope OSU will learn from this and run better tournaments in the future.

i've never heard of a situation like this being protested, let alone being overruled as part of a protest.

a bird wrote: I would still like an explanation from someone who knows more about the out of order bonus protest issue discussed above. I think this also serves as a reminder that TDs should go over the rules in some detail with inexperienced staffers before tournaments. Obviously the easiest solution is to have an adequate number of competent staffers, but in situations with newer staffers the TD should take steps to help them learn the rules. Mistakes like this can have serious consequences.

This is mostly my fault too, I'm afraid. I didn't make that call, but I put an inexperienced team member in the war room and failed to adequately explain how to deal with protests.

sephirothrr wrote:Also, unless Louisville B somehow scored exactly 5 bonus points against MSU A, there might be an error with the stats for that match.

This error has been found and fixed.