The Quizbowl Resource Center

The University of Ottawa Trivia Club is happy to announce the 2015 iteration of the Ottawa Hybrid Tournament, taking place in the nation's capital on March 14. This is an open tournament; difficulty is mild to medium, as in past years.

The distribution is unchanged from last year:

Academic (11/11)
2/3 or 3/2 Science (1 bio, 1 chem, 1 physics, 1 minor science, 1 your choice)
2/3 or 3/2 Lit (1 Continental Europe, 1 world or ancient, 1 British, 1 Canadian/American, 1 your choice)
2/3 or 3/2 History (1 Continental Europe, 1 “Anglosphere” [Britain/Canada/US/Aus/NZ], 1 World, 1 Ancient, 1 your choice)
1/1 RMP (1 philosophy, 1 religion or myth)
1/1 Fine Art (1 visual, 1 aural)
0/1 or 1/0 Social Sciences
0/1 or 1/0 Geography
0/1 or 1/0 Current academic events

Trash (11/11)
2/2 Sports (3 of American football, ice hockey, baseball, basketball, 1 other)
2/2 Movies
2/2 TV
2/2 Music (maximum of 1/0 or 0/1 pre-dating 1980)
1/1 Video games
1/1 Trash lit (genre literature, comic books, comic strips, popular fiction)
0/1 or 1/0 Other (internet, commercials, products, stores, board games, general pop culture, etc.)
0/1 or 1/0 Trash Current Events (Baby bumps, Taylor Swift songs about the metric ton of people she has broken up with, etc.)

The packet submission schedule is as follows:

$-50 deadline: January 4, 2015
$-25 deadline: January 18, 2015
No penalty deadline: February 1, 2015
$+25 deadline: February 15, 2015
$+50 deadline: February 22, 2015
Beyond the last deadline is an additional $10 per day and requires permission from the editing team.

Packets should be formatted according to the ACF formatting guidelines; we can provide a sample pack from previous years upon request. We reserve the right to send back packets that have the wrong number of questions (i.e. don't follow the distribution properly) or for egregiously bad formatting.
Packet submissions are to be sent to Brendan McKendy at brendan.mckendy AT gmail.com

Any folks interested in holding a mirror should contact Brendan McKendy at brendan.mckendy AT gmail.com
Mirror fees are $15 per team, or $10 per team if someone at your site wrote us a pack.

The discount schedule we will be using in Ottawa is the following:
$120 base fee
-$10 buzzer discount
-$15 staffer discount
-$10 distance discount (over 200 km one way)
-$5 best packet submission, as chosen by the editing team

I will be playing this. I will write questions. I am looking for teammates who preferably will be able to answer science and trash questions.

Why does this have to be when we have exams

I'd be up for writing a packet with someone who wants to submit for this and playing any and all mirrors.

cruzeiro wrote:1/1 Trash lit (genre literature, comic books, comic strips, popular fiction)

Journalism! Trash lit is kind of a narrow answer space, but you should absolutely stretch it to include some non-fiction. Write about famous magazines or famous websites with articles.

cruzeiro wrote:Packets should be formatted according to the ACF formatting guidelines; we can provide a sample pack from previous years upon request.

The sample pack is here. Just use that file as a template and Dennis will spare you from his wrath.

Just a reminder (as a fellow competitor) that the -$50 deadline is tomorrow. May want to get your packets in, as last year demand came close to completely filling (or overflowing) the field.

RECEIVED
-50: Colonel By, Toronto, "Waterloo A"
-25:
0: McMaster A, Huma's team
+25: Waterloo B, Carleton A
+50: McMaster B, MSU, Ottawa, Carleton B (with Patrick)

bmcke wrote: "Waterloo A"

Hell no. That team (consisting of Aayush R., Aaron D.R., Christine I., and myself) is "TURN DOWN FOR WHATERLOO." Nothing else will do in addressing this glorious team.

minusfive wrote:

bmcke wrote: "Waterloo A"

Hell no. That team (consisting of Aayush R., Aaron D.R., Christine I., and myself) is "TURN DOWN FOR WHATERLOO." Nothing else will do in addressing this glorious team.

Unlike Pablo Neruda, that night I could not write the saddest line

I assume there are teams still writing out there. Who are you? It'd be good to get a sense of numbers...

Carleton is working on two packets, both which should hopefully be done next week.

Since it appears my only final exam is on March 16th, I'm planning on being a model of responsibility and coming to this tournament. Expect a packet from Dartmouth within a week or so.

bmcke wrote:RECEIVED
-50: Colonel By, Toronto, "Waterloo A"
-25:
0: McMaster A, Huma's team

Any received this weekend?

minusfive wrote:

bmcke wrote:RECEIVED
-50: Colonel By, Toronto, "Waterloo A"
-25:
0: McMaster A, Huma's team

Any received this weekend?

Only Waterloo B submitted one. Other teams are encouraged to submit as soon as possible.

So all 3 "Waterloo" packets should be in by now (Team JP+Waterloo people, Team Adam Swift+Waterloo people (Huma's team) and Team Pure Waterloo).

That's all you're getting from us, see you at the tournament!

Let's cap this tournament at 13 teams, since that's all we have space for.

UPDATED: We have received packets from 9 teams, and we've heard interest from 3 others -- Carleton B (with Patrick), an Ottawa team, and America's Will Alston. If any other teams were hoping to submit and play this thing in Ottawa, it will probably only work if their packet requires very little editing.

Our packet is about 1/3 of the way there. I'll try to get it done this week; my exams have gotten in the way and I apologize.

EDIT: Unless we come up with a good team name, I highly encourage the Canadians to give us one. The only requirement is that the name has to do with the USA somehow.

We are at the ugly number of 12 teams, any awesome 13th team we haven't heard from?

Just a couple of questions:
1) Since it was raised, what is the format of the tournament going to be? Full round robin, followed by playoffs, or something a little more innovative?
2)

Mightyrodrigo wrote:We are at the ugly number of 12 teams, any awesome 13th team we haven't heard from?

Is this still true? With less than 2 weeks to go, you've only listed 9 packets.

minusfive wrote:Just a couple of questions:
1) Since it was raised, what is the format of the tournament going to be? Full round robin, followed by playoffs, or something a little more innovative?
2)

Mightyrodrigo wrote:We are at the ugly number of 12 teams, any awesome 13th team we haven't heard from?

Is this still true? With less than 2 weeks to go, you've only listed 9 packets.

We've received a pack from uOttawa's home team and one from Patrick's team, we are at 11 packets.

Update: We have 11 teams submitting + 3 editor packets. The plan now is to do an 11-team round-robin, plus finals.

Update: Also, some portion of the science is being written/edited by me and is likely to be of very poor quality. We hope you don't mind this.

Could we please have a logistical update on this? (i.e. where and when to meet this Saturday)

Theodore wrote:Could we please have a logistical update on this? (i.e. where and when to meet this Saturday)

How was this post *not* made by Jordan Palmer?!

Theodore wrote:Could we please have a logistical update on this? (i.e. where and when to meet this Saturday)

Please meet in Lamoureux 215 for 8:30 AM, games beginning at 9:00 AM. A full logistics email will follow later this evening.

The Jordan Palmer Superteam beat Toronto in the first game of an advantaged final to win undefeated.

For those of you who wish to do so, message me for any team names. I will update with this in a couple of days in one fell swoop.

STATS: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/2651

A very enjoyable day!!! I want to thank Head Editor Brendan and all the subject matter experts (really cool questions, even if sometimes your biases showed---looking at your soccer questions, one-who-shall-not-be named!) for a great set, Shelby and Dennis for running a smooth and buffet-compatible tournament (even though the "unlimited bacon" today was only "unlimited Canadian bacon"), and to all the readers and scorekeepers.
Thank you to some very tough competition (especially Toronto's "I'm in love with the Cocos[?]", MSU, great competitiors, great guys, and Colonel By, who really gave us a scare) and fun/neat people to hang out and play against.
Thanks to my teammates, Aayush, Christine, and Aaron! Champs guys champs.
All in all, a (pretty) perfect day.

Credits and Thank-Yous
- I wrote or did a full edit on about half the tossups in this set, and on a significantly smaller fraction of the bonuses.
- Rodrigo Morante did the next-most work after me, probably followed by Ian Dewan. Rodrigo was particularly dedicated and reliable on this project. He wrote most of the Ottawa team's round by himself.
- Dennis Beeby, Chris Johnston, Aaron Kozak, Shelby Robert, Ben Smith, and Joe Su all wrote and edited a lot of questions for this tournament.
- Joe packetized the whole tournament. He stayed up very late for this.
- Dennis and Shelby directed the tournament. They are very good directors by now. Many Ottawa people staffed this tournament -- I'll single out Colleen Grieve for scorekeeping my room and getting me to calm down a bit.
- The submissions we received this year were quite good -- certainly improved from the other Hybrids I've worked on. Connor Teevens and especially Patrick Liao were very earnest about doing a good job on their submissions. The Colonel By team sent a very good pack for the earliest deadline.
- Leslie Newcombe and Jordan Palmer both complimented some questions at some point yesterday. That meant a lot.

Apologies
- There were a lot of typos and non-sentences, and a few factual errors, in this tournament. This is mostly my fault for bad planning / management. It also punished the other moderators more than me, because they couldn't really fix my errors as they were reading. We absolutely should have done read-alouds on Friday instead of spending time touching up trash bonuses.
- There were some bad-idea tossups and hoses in this set, and there were some misplaced early clues in tossups. I'd like to think we minimized that, but we let a lot more through than we should have. This might have happened disproportionately in my own tossups.
- There were a lot of my questions where I should have the answer-lines more generous.
- I made an effort, for diversity or whatever, to ask trash questions about some famous things that are mostly famous to other kinds of people than quizbowlers. Those questions disproportionately went dead. I still don't totally regret those questions, but it would have been better to write stuff that the audience could buzz on.

Rants
- Teams were really hostile, throughout the day, about difficulty of some trash questions. I don't think this was fair. As far as I could tell, the trash was still easier than the academic side of the tournament. This tournament was more difficult and lower-scoring than I intended, but at about 213 PPG/team, it was not much lower-scoring than Ottawa's last mirror of ACF Fall.
- The sub-distributions were skewed a little by the editors' interests, but they mostly followed along the lines of what people submitted questions about. We made a pretty real effort to preserve the answer-lines or topics from the questions that teams sent to us.
- People often asked why we changed their questions. Sometimes if people asked nicely, it opened an actual dialogue and I was glad to talk about it. Other times it seemed like people were whining at me for doing my job as an editor.
- People obviously should be allowed to evaluate this kind of project, but I took it personally when I heard some players make really routine complaints about whatever questions they missed. I think most of the complaints I heard weren't actually made about the bad questions in the set -- they were just made by whoever was losing in a given round.

Plans
- VCU isn't mirroring this, but I'm still hoping some American sites will mirror. This means that the question content is not public. People can use this thread to discuss the questions in general terms.
- Teams that played yesterday can contact me for the set we played yesterday, or they can wait a while and contact me for a version with the mistakes fixed. Players can also contact me with queries like "Why did you change X question?" -- I promise to be nice about that kind of thing.
- Hosts interested in mirroring this can contact me to look over the set for themselves. (I realize that people might want to check the quality before they decide if this is worth hosting.)

Notes
- For a project like this, much more effort goes into making good academic questions, but players pay much more attention to the trash questions, for really understandable reasons. I kind of wonder if the nature of doing a Hybrid tournament is that most players show up to hear trash and then they don't get what they want half the time.
- I don't plan to do much writing or editing for future tournaments. I mostly think there shouldn't be a 2016 Ottawa Hybrid Tournament, or if there is, it should have a team of 10 or so experienced editors with very clear category assignments.

I am really grateful that so many people made questions for this event and traveled long distances to play in it.

Hey guys, thanks for editing/running this tournament! We had a really good time, and I definitely consider the tournament well worth the somewhat lengthy drive from East Lansing to Ottawa.

A few thoughts:

Logistically, this tournament ran quite well. I believe that we were done before 5, and all the games we played ran quite smoothly.

There were a pretty large amount of typos and grammatical errors throughout this set; hopefully, this can be corrected prior to future mirrors.

It seems pretty clear that the difficulty for this tournament was really all over the place. I think the blame for this lies both with the uneven editing and the submissions themselves. Difficulty variance is unavoidable in a tournament with a large trash distribution; when it comes to trash, it’s often hard to estimate what’s well known by a lot of people as opposed to what you as an individual know a lot about. I totally understand that editors are in a bit of a lose-lose situation when faced with submissions that are full of obscure, difficult trash answer lines on niche subjects. Get rid of the questions entirely, and the writers complain that you cut their pet question. Keep them, and players complain about the difficulty. I would say that it's probably better to err on the side of removing questions that seem too difficult. I’d also say it’s incumbent on the writers of trash questions to try and balance out writing on your particular interests with writing questions that a reasonable percentage of the field can answer. With this tournament, I definitely think the distribution swayed too much towards the latter.

Again, MSU had a really good time at this tournament. If future iterations of Ottawa Hybrid happen, and our schedules permit, we will definitely make the trip up.

Thanks to everybody that came out to the tournament! I had a lot of fun in my first experience editing. Shout-out to all the editors, but in particular Brendan. I learnt a lot from Brendan and without him this tournament wouldn't have happened.

There were some kinks and errors in the tournament, but they will be fixed for any potential mirrors. Any constructive criticism is encouraged

On behalf of Carleton, a big thanks to everyone at uOttawa who helped write/put on this tournament. We all had lots of fun and a great day!