The Quizbowl Resource Center

This is the official announcement for Some Tournament Initiative Maryland is Pursuing with Yale. This event will be a packet submission tournament aiming to be roughly the same difficulty or easier than 2014's SUBMIT. We would like to run mirrors in the first two weeks of March, prior to ICT.

Our packet submission requirements are the same as that of ACF: "Any team with at least one person on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament (either as a college student or as a high school student) prior to September 1, 2013 is required to submit a packet."

Editors

Head Editor: Chris Manners (with help from Jacob Reed)
Co-Editors: Jacob Reed, Grace Liu, Jordan Brownstein, Dan Puma, Brian McPeak, Sohan Vartak, various other Yale and Maryland folks


Mirrors

We are looking for mirrors and will keep a running list in this thread.
If you're interested, contact Dan Puma at danjpuma AT gmail DOT com.

Pricing

+$100 - Base Fee

Note: All submission times are by 11:59 PM of the day listed.
-$50 - Packet submitted by Sunday, December 28.
-$25 - Packet submitted by Sunday, January 11, 2015.
+$0 - Packet submitted by Sunday, February 8, 2015. (-$50 if packet optional)
+$25 - Packet submitted by Sunday, February 15, 2015. (-$25 if packet optional)
+$50 - Packet submitted by Sunday, February 22, 2015.
+$100 - Packet submitted after that, with an additional $10/day.

Packets should be sent to us at stimpytournament AT gmail DOT com.

Penalty

+$10 - For major formatting errors, see: http://acf-quizbowl.com/documents/2014- ... formatting

Packet Guidelines

Standard ACF distribution and question length, see: http://acf-quizbowl.com/documents/2014- ... uidelines/


List of Received Packets

-$50
VCU A
Dartmouth A
Ottawa
Illinois A
Rice A

-$25
WUSTL A

+$0
Michigan A
Penn C (optional, -$50)
Columbia A
Harvard A
Penn A
WKU A
Virginia A
NYU
Kentucky B

+$25
Kentucky A
Chicago B
Chicago A
MIT B
Louisiana

+$50
Michigan B
MIT A

+$100
Harding (+$30)
Rutgers (+$40)


A list of mirrors can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16524#p294864

Will this set have powers?

Yes.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but we will be mixing up the Fine Arts for this tournament informed by some of the thinking in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15605

The 3/3 will be divided as such:
Auditory arts (including classical, jazz, world music): 1/1
Visual arts (combining painting and sculpture): 1/1
Other arts (including opera, ballet, film, architecture, misc. arts): 1/1

If you've already written this part of your packet, don't worry about it; we'll sort it out when we get it.

Please include a full distribution for this tournament in the first post, including the Fine Arts change. It's easy to miss otherwise. (and refer to the ACF site for full details)

I see that you've asked for mirrors: is the main site at Maryland, Yale, both or neither? And what will the mirror fee be?
As a final thing, I recall that SUBMIT was an open eligibility tournament. Is this an open eligibility tournament?

I believe that the main site will be at both. STIMPY will not be open eligibility, as far as I know.

Have any mirrors of this been scheduled yet?

Giovanni I Participazio wrote:
-$50 - Packet submitted by Sunday, December 14.
-$25 - Packet submitted by Sunday, December 28.
+$0 - Packet submitted by Sunday, January 4, 2015. (-$50 if packet optional)
+$25 - Packet submitted by Sunday, January 11, 2015. (-$25 if packet optional)
+$50 - Packet submitted by Sunday, January 18, 2015.
+$100 - Packet submitted after that, with an additional $10/day.

Packets should be sent to us at stimpytournament AT gmail DOT com.

Although I'm pretty (99.9%) sure of your meaning, since "by" in this case is somewhat ambiguous, could you please confirm that "by" includes the date given (for example, the $-50 deadline expires at 11:59 p.m. on December 14, NOT December 13th, etc.)?

That is indeed what it means; I'll edit the original post.

Has the date for the Maryland site been determined yet?

On a related note: how are mirrors in other regions shaping up? I'd like to know if a Midwest site is happening before I sit down and write a whole packet.

The Maryland mirror should be on March 14. Dan is in control of mirrors and should have a list of them.

Also, I am going to push back the submission deadlines for this tournament an additional 2 weeks. MattJ brought it to my attention that they overlapped significantly with the deadlines for ACF Regionals. This was likely to hurt the volume of submissions for both tournaments, and seeing as STIMPY is later, it made sense to move the dates back. So there you have it. I'll update the original post with the new deadlines.

List of Mirrors:

Canada: McMaster - 3/21
Northeast: Yale (duh) - 4/4
Mid-Atlantic: Maryland (duh) - 3/14
Southeast: Lousiville - 4/4
Texas/Gulf Coast: Louisiana Tech - 3/14
Great Lakes: UIUC - 3/14
Ohio/Michigan: Kenyon - 4/4
California: Cal Tech - 4/25


As you can see, we're still looking for a bunch of mirrors and would love to get some mirrors confirmed in the west and Midwest. Let me know if you're interested in hosting those mirrors!

the charm wrote:On a related note: how are mirrors in other regions shaping up? I'd like to know if a Midwest site is happening before I sit down and write a whole packet.

A UIUC mirror has just been confirmed!

Is the date of the Yale mirror confirmed yet?

christino wrote:Is the date of the Yale mirror confirmed yet?

Yale's mirror will be on 4/4. The original date fell during their spring break and they could not find another open spot.

Giovanni I Participazio wrote:

christino wrote:Is the date of the Yale mirror confirmed yet?

Yale's mirror will be on 4/4. The original date fell during their spring break and they could not find another open spot.

This means my teammates and I can play quizbowl and makes me happy.

So, I'm rather unhappy that VCU is getting screwed again by sticking to the rules of submission and actually getting a packet in on time as required.*

STIMPY's dates and ACF Regionals's dates don't conflict. VCU submitted an ACF Regs packet at the -$50, had a small part of STIMPY written, and submitted for the STIMPY -$50 2 weeks later, with the same writing team of 2 people writing both packets.

Especially now that finals are over for the majority of people, there is no reason that a team cannot write a packet -- or even two -- in a 2-week period. And if they can't, they'd just as well submit to ACF Regs first because the deadlines are soon to narrow to 1 week, unlike STIMPY.

STIMPY's problems with packets are not really tied to the packet deadline, but to the fact that STIMPY (a) had 0 confirmed sites (in terms of having an actual date) before like today, and people are very wary about submitting packets given such a situation (cf. SUBMIT) (b) had its -$50 towards the end of finals for people -- so many people were tied up the entire week before the -$50 deadline.

On both fronts, the decision to move the deadline is a good one, but it's frustrating to be punished for sticking to the rules and see not-actual-worries like a barely-even-conflict with ACF Regs taken seriously while the important reasons for a lack of submissions (mirrors) are barely addressed.

*note that VCU is guaranteed to pay the min fee or one of $0, $5, $15, or $25 for this tournament, so this isn't even a financial gripe.

Since I've never written for a power-marked set before: we don't powermark our submissions, correct?

the charm wrote:Since I've never written for a power-marked set before: we don't powermark our submissions, correct?

I'm hardly a STIMPY editor, but this is basically universally correct and I can't imagine they'd do any differently.

Just sent in our STIMPY Pack. It's a Festivus Miracle!
Happy Holidays, New Year, and Merry X-Mas (for those who are into that).

It might be wise for the initial post to contain, or link to Dan's post containing, the mirror list. It might also be wise to list the dates for the mirrors in that list, especially if they are like Yale's and not on the traditional weekends.

Is there a date for the McMaster mirror yet?

Ndg wrote:Is there a date for the McMaster mirror yet?

Yes, sorry - the Canadian quizbowl situation in March is a little bit chaotic. We've gotten permission to host our mirror the third weekend of March (Sat. Mar. 21); we'll be putting up an announcement soon.

christino wrote:It might be wise for the initial post to contain, or link to Dan's post containing, the mirror list. It might also be wise to list the dates for the mirrors in that list, especially if they are like Yale's and not on the traditional weekends.

I imagine that this list, and threads by those mirror hosts, and dates for those mirrors, will all come in handy if you actually want to receive packet submissions for this event. The no-penalty deadline is 8 days from now, and in that time most teams will have no motive to actually write you anything on faith that there will be a site near them.

As you can now see from Dan's post of mirrors, Kenyon has signed on as the Ohio/Michigan site. The tournament will be on 4/4. A full announcement will come soon, but for now, feel free to communicate questions to me, reidg [at] Kenyon [dot] edu.

Illinois' mirror will be most likely be 3/14. Will confirm once I can get to campus to reserve the rooms

I'm bumping this as the $0 deadline has passed and we've only received nine packets. I'd be willing to extend the $0 deadline another week or two if it's convenient for everyone. Thanks!

Is there going to be a West Coast mirror?

gyre and gimble wrote:Is there going to be a West Coast mirror?

Or for that matter, a Southeast mirror? There's a big hole in a 500 mile radius around the state of Georgia that could probably be filled with the slightest bit of outreach.

gyre and gimble wrote:Is there going to be a West Coast mirror?

Probably not going to happen. No one in SoCal is interested in hosting and none of the NorCal teams have written packets.

We're working on a southeast mirror. I had heard rumors of a potential UCLA mirror, but have not heard anything from them. If you're a team in California who wants to host this, let me know.

The southeast mirror will be at the University of Louisville.

The California mirror will be at Cal Tech.

Giovanni I Participazio wrote:I'm bumping this as the $0 deadline has passed and we've only received nine packets. I'd be willing to extend the $0 deadline another week or two if it's convenient for everyone. Thanks!

Was any decision made about this? If there is a new fee schedule, is it posted somewhere?

I've decided to extend the $0 deadline through Feb. 8. I'll update the original post. I was originally only going to extend it through today, but I forgot to post the change and felt it would be unfair.

Reminder that the $0 deadline is tonight! I don't plan on extending it again, so get your stuff in.

I have sent out the set to the 3/14 sites. If there's a problem shoot me an email.

There is now a discussion forum set up for this set. Go to User Control Panel -> Usergroups to request access.