The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hello!

I am pleased to announce the Canadian site of ACF Fall 2016, to be held at University of Waterloo on Saturday, 5 November 2016. ACF Fall is the year's premier introductory-level collegiate quizbowl tournament, and we do hope that you join us at this event.

This tournament will almost certainly take place in Waterloo quizbowl’s brutalist headquarters, Mathematics and Computing (MC), likely on the fourth floor where our tournaments usually are. This tournament will be taking place in J.R. Coutts Engineering Lecture Hall (RCH), the control room will be RCH 207.
EDIT: Due to an error on the part of the university, this tournament will actually be taking place in Douglas Wright Engineering (DWE) with the control room being DWE 1501. This tournament will have a soft field cap of 16 teams, however we will likely be able to expand that given enough notice and sufficient staffers. More logistical information will be available as the tournament takes shape, but expect an 8:30 meeting with a 9AM start time on Saturday morning.

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

If you would prefer to get in touch with me some other way or in person, that is fine but please note that I will not be considering registrations final until the ACF registration form is completed

Fees
Base fee: $135
Buzzer: -$5/functional system
Staffers: -$10/staffer
Shorthanded fee (teams of 1 or 2 players): $60
"New to Quizbowl" discount: $100
For schools which did not send a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (exclusively Novice tournaments do not count) since September 2013, and have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school

Packet Discounts/Penalties
Any team with at least two people on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament prior to September 1, 2015 is required to submit a packet. High school players are exempt from this definition, are not permitted to submit packets, and pay fees as determined by their site hosts.

Half-packet templates will be sent out to your team after you have submitted the registration form. 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 2016: [Team Name]” in the subject line.

Submission schedule
The submission schedule is as follows:

11.59 PM PST September 10: -$30
11.59 PM PST September 24: -$15 (-$30 if optional)
11.59 PM PST October 8: no penalty (-$15 if optional)
11.59 PM PST October 15: +$25
11.59 PM PST October 22: +$50
After October 22: +$10/day until October 29; teams who are required to submit a packet and do not submit one by November 1 will not be allowed to play.

Payment
Payment for ACF Fall will be processed through the ACF treasurer, Gautam Kandlikar. He will get in touch with you about how much your team owes, how to pay for the tournament, etc. Please contact Gautam at [email protected] with any questions regarding payment.

Note Regarding Highschool Teams
High school teams are no longer allowed to compete in Collegiate ACF Fall events.

For more information, refer to the Global Announcement of ACF Fall 2016 or email the editors at [email protected].

Field Update
12
House Team
2nd House Team
Ottawa
Toronto A
Toronto B
Toronto C
Case Western
Queens
Rochester
McGill
McMaster
McMaster B


Buzzers/Staffers
13/5

Hello everyone!
It is great to see all the interest in ACF Fall, however, as a result our field is filling fast. Register your teams (and staffers) quick to ensure you can play this! I think at this point I can also expand the field cap to 16 teams, however you should still register quick!

See you all November 5th!

For teams attending this site (except Case Western and any other US-based groups), I sent out the below email about coordinating electronic payments. Cross posting here.

Hi representatives of Canadian teams:

I'm hoping we can do payments completely electronically this year. To keep things simple for it makes sense for the payment system to mirror the one we have with the US teams.

I have learned from last year that Money Orders are too difficult to encash and handling cash is too problematic. I will not be accepting cash or money orders this year.

There are 2 options you have for electronic payments:
1. If your club or finance office can handle credit/debit card payments in USD, that would be wonderful. On the invoice you get, it will clearly have a link to pay with a credit/debit card and you can take it from there.

2. If it's not possible to do something via your institution, I'm asking you to setup or activate a personal account and work with your club/finance folks on reimbursement. I hope this is not too taxing for you. If it is, get back to me about it.

If you don't have a PayPal, I request you to set one up ASAP as it takes some time to get the account to be fully functional.It should be pretty straightforward: you'd go to https://paypal.ca and proceed with the registration from there. It might ask for bank account or credit/debit card details.

Let me know if you have questions about this process. If you have friends from other universities planning to sign up for ACF Fall, please let them know about this info as well.

Thanks!

In a break from usual procedure, this tournament will be held in J.R. Coutts Engineering Lecture Hall (RCH). The control room will be RCH 207. As was outlined in the OP, the university double booked us with the Faculty of Engineering's events for the university's fall open house. Fortunately, due to the luxuries of UWaterloo's room booking system, we have been relocated to a building with no open house events which will likely mean a much quieter and smoother tournament than we were previously looking at. This new building for our tournament is Douglas Wright Engineering (DWE) and our new control room is DWE 1501. Further logistical information will be forthcoming in an email to registered teams.

I'd like to announce [REDACTED], a guerrilla conspiracy theory side event, will be happening after ACF FALL at Waterloo. It will be free but writing your own pack to read is greatly encouraged. packets will be around 10 tossups each and no bonuses. I am hoping we will have at least 5 packets. If you are not attending the Waterloo site but wish to contribute email me at [email protected].

For [REDACTED], a conspiracy can involve any subject - politics, religion, music, sports, even meta conspiracies are welcome. Questions on events that were surrounded by conspiracy but turned out to be true are also welcome. There is no distribution but as a general guideline everything must come from a source that is not yourself. Difficulty and tossup length are generally at your discretion but please don't write 10 tossups on regarding the authorship of Zambian detective fiction or the Freemasonry imagery present in Armenian oboe sonatas. Content relating to conspiracies involving race and religion should be written sensitively.

After the tournament, I plan on editing the packets for anyone who would like to play it at another site.

Imma contribute something to this worthy endeavour. How many packets do you have so far for [REDACTED]?

Senator_Jay wrote:Imma contribute something to this worthy endeavour. How many packets do you have so far for [REDACTED]?

None so far (they will likely all be finished on Friday night), all packets are welcome.

Ok. Mine's half done. I'm looking forward to this!

After a few drops, the field is now capped at 12. All teams should have received a logistics email.

The tournament will open at 8:30AM in DWE 1501, it is recommended all teams get here as early as possible to prevent any issues arising due to Waterloo's fall campus visit day which begins at 10AM.

Live stats are being updated here http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... und_robin/

Toronto A cleared the field (surprise surprise) to win the tournament outright. After the round robin, Ottawa had a one-game advantage over Rochester but Rochester elected not to contest the final in the interest of getting home faster, as such Ottawa won UG. This is very sad as a final between the two would have been excellent quality (judging by their prelim performances) but understandable considering travel. Waterloo B won DII outright.

This tournament would not have been possible without the help of our wonderful staffers Peter, Aaron, Rico, Dennis, Adam, Joe, Paul, Noah, Kira and Venessa. A special shoutout must be given to Peter Cordeiro who ran the control room after round 8 and oversaw the end of the tournament as I had to leave for a midterm, you rocked Peter!


Additionally, we had a lot of fun not playing [REDACTED] after the tournament.

It turns out Toronto A fielded ineligible players for this tournament. As a result, their wins have been vacated and the team from University of Ottawa, has now been awarded the overall title in addition to the UG title, with University of Rochester coming in second for both. Congratulations to Ian, Rodrigo, Shervin and Audrey!

Stats will be updated to reflect this shortly (read: when I figure out how to make HTML edits to the stats page).

How did this happen? Which players were ineligible and why?

In my time playing quizbowl, this is the second tournament whose champion has forfeited the title. The first was the first tournament I ever played, the Maryland site of ACF Fall 2014. That tournament was won by a Virginia team featuring high schooler Eric Xu, who competed for Virginia in good faith with the intention of enrolling at Virginia in spring 2015, as was then permitted. When Eric did not in fact enroll at Virginia in the spring, Virginia vacated its victory. Consequently, eligibility rules were changed to avoid such complications so that today a high schooler in Eric Xu's situation would not be allowed to play a collegiate site of ACF Fall.

Was Toronto's case similarly a case of eligibility rules being problematic, or did Toronto knowingly field a team that was not allowed to play? If the former is true, then ACF should look into changing its rules to avoid whatever the problem was here, as it did in the Virginia case. If, however, the latter is the case and Toronto intentionally ignored ACF rules, then that is an issue that concerns the whole quizbowl community.

I must take responsibility, as it was my mistake entirely. I had not thoroughly understood the eligibility requirements, and had not yet sought confirmation of eligibility because I did not think that it would have been an issue. Because I fully intend to be taking classes at Toronto in 2nd semester, I thought that I would have been eligible to play for Toronto all year. However, I have since learned (from seeking confirmation of eligibility for Regionals) that I would have had to have been enrolled in said classes at the time of competition. At the time of ACF Fall, I was still enrolled at McMaster; although neither taking classes, nor having played for, nor intending to play for that school during this school year. In short, from my understanding after clarification from the ACF eligibility committee, I was/am eligible to play for McMaster until I am enrolled in the appropriate courseload at Toronto, which at the time of ACF Fall I was not. Neither myself nor the Toronto club knew that I was not in fact eligible to play for Toronto because of my own confusion on this matter and subsequent assumption of eligibility. Although it may not be a sufficient excuse, I was too preoccupied with graduating and working to think about my status as a player until it was suggested recently that I seek confirmation of eligibility. Therefore, upon recognizing that that was indeed the case, we opted to vacate our wins at ACF Fall. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused, and will ensure that I more carefully read eligibility guidelines and/or seek clarification and confirmation when necessary. I must stress that this was an honest mistake, and was not intended to contravene any regulations. Neither the Toronto club nor my teammates were responsible for my choice to play without my fully knowing my eligibility status, and I shall seek confirmation in the future.