Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

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Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Off To See The Lizard »

The New York University Quizbowl team is pleased to announce that we will be hosting a mirror of the Early Fall Tournament on Saturday, October 1st. We apologize for the extremely late announcement. We ran into some unexpected difficulties while trying to secure the rooms with our administration, but we are now good to go.

The tournament will take place at NYU’s Global Center for Academic and Spiritual Life (GCASL) building, which is located at 238 Thompson Street. We will begin registration at 9 AM and hope to get games started by 9:30.

Due to space restrictions, the tournament will have a hard field cap of 24 teams. In order to ensure that this tournament is played by as many collegiate teams as possible in the area, we will NOT be allowing open teams to play this tournament. High school teams that seek to register will be placed on a waitlist until we have secured enough places for the collegiate teams.

Registration for this tournament will have a base fee of $120 per team. Discounts will be available for the following:
-$10 per buzzer system
-$15 per moderator with working laptop
-$10 travel discount for every 150 miles travelled (calculated based on Google Maps)

Payment will be accepted in the form of checks or cash on or before the day of the tournament. If you need invoices we will be happy to supply them, so long as you give us prior notice. Checks should be made out to "New York University" with "Quiz Bowl@NYU" in the memo line.

To register for the tournament please email me at [email protected] with the subject line “Registration for EFT @ NYU.” Feel free to email me or post in this thread with any questions or concerns, as well.

EDIT: Information about who checks should be made out to is now available above.
Last edited by Off To See The Lizard on Fri Sep 23, 2016 4:29 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Off To See The Lizard »

Current Field [Teams/Buzzers/Moderators]
Brown University [1/0/0]
University of Vermont [1/0/0]
Harvard University [2/4/0]
Princeton University [2/0/0]
Yale University [3/1/0]
Columbia University [9/3/0]
Amherst University [1/0/0]
Rutgers University [2/0/0]
University of Pennsylvania [1/1/0]

Total [22/9/0]
Last edited by Off To See The Lizard on Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:34 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Off To See The Lizard »

The field is already more than half full so get your registrations in as soon as possible!
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Off To See The Lizard »

We are going to go ahead and close the field at 22 teams. I will send out an email tonight with reminders for the day of the tournament.

Teams that are registered, please let me know ASAP if you are planning on dropping. We need to make sure that we can adjust the schedule accordingly.
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by ProfessorIanDuncan »

Thank you to everyone who came to this tournament, I hope you all enjoyed yourselves. Thank you to everyone who brought buzzers, everyone who came out to read especially Richard Yu, York Chen, and Jason Lai. Thank you to Will Alston and his team of writers for producing an enjoyable set. Congratulations to Columbia A for beating Yale A in a nail-biter in the finals. If I have forgotten to thank anybody else, I apologize and thank you.
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Doga (Dog Yoga) »

Are the stats available somewhere?
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by The Story of a Head That Fell Off »

What happened to the MATH bracket after prelims? I was told there was some screwup involving teams leaving

Also when will stats be available?
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Amizda Calyx »

While I enjoyed the tournament overall, there were some issues with staffing and logistics that I think should be noted.
  • One of the scorekeepers was on his phone the whole time in two of the rounds we had with him (he disappeared before our third round in that room). Consequently, after most tossups he would ask the moderator who buzzed in, and after most bonuses he would ask what the score was. He'd also have to make corrections during score checks. This dragged games on longer than necessary and was unprofessional.
  • Some staff did not appear to understand rules for prompting: in a few instances I gave a promptable answer, was prompted, gave another promptable answer, and then was negged without further prompting because the moderator didn't seem to think you could prompt more than once or felt I "wasn't going to get it".
  • One reader, who was otherwise one of the best moderators I've encountered, gave out double negs, claiming that it was standard. When I told him that this was definitely not a thing, he said that they always used this format at NYU and "all the other staffers were probably also [giving out double negs]" so if it wasn't an ACF/NAQT rule then I should just consider it a "house rule". What's worse is some Columbia H team or whatever also said they used this format. Fortunately, when the team that was to play in that room next came in, they emphatically agreed with me so the moderator "made a note" on the scoresheet. This moderator appeared knowledgeable about all the other rules and was excellent at reading, so I am baffled how this practice was considered acceptable to him.
  • Timing rules were widely variable between rooms.
  • Teams were given about 40 minutes for lunch. While this isn't necessarily a problem, I feel that it would probably have been better to give a little extra time just so that stats could be entered, since it seemed that this was a problem throughout the tournament.
  • Related to the above point, three rounds from the prelims hadn't even been entered by the time scoring prizes were given out at the very end of the tournament. This can become somewhat of an issue given the stratification of team strength in each bracket, the fact that the prelims were round-robin, and the existence of bye rounds. Also, if the stats were complete enough after 8 (or 7) rounds to give out individual prizes, I don't see why they couldn't have been uploaded to the database by this time.
  • We were also never told what to do after the two playoff rounds ended; given the format of the schedule, I would assume there'd be at least one superplayoff game required, but it looked like people just left after round 13. It was around 8 PM at this point though so I guess it's understandable that there wouldn't be an actual closing meeting.
Additionally, were there no tiebreakers in the set?
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

Amizda Calyx wrote:Additionally, were there no tiebreakers in the set?
There was a separate packet specifically for tiebreakers
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Amizda Calyx »

Ok, well apparently this wasn't made clear to a moderator who accidentally revealed an answer. He initially wanted to get round 12 or 13 packets to use for a tiebreaker tossup but then decided not to so one team just had 19 answerable tossups that round.
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

Bubalus Period wrote:
Amizda Calyx wrote:Additionally, were there no tiebreakers in the set?
There was a separate packet specifically for tiebreakers
I forgot to attach the tiebreakers to the initial packets email I sent out, but about midday yesterday I emailed out the tiebreakers to each site. Also, Richard was on-site and had access to the tiebreakers, so it shouldn't have been a problem in any case.
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Off To See The Lizard »

This tournament happened, Columbia Hamilton came back to win both games of an advantaged final against Yale A (who had the advantage).
Stats are now up.
geremy wrote:What happened to the MATH bracket after prelims? I was told there was some screwup involving teams leaving

Also when will stats be available?
So while we were frantically trying to gather stats after Prelims ended, as Joelle described, I had ranked the teams according to their records (as far as I could gather) and broke ties with PPG's we had up until round 10 (penultimate round of prelims). This is obviously not ideal and led to a few mixups in the playoff rankings, mostly in the lower brackets.

Additionally, I forgot to take into account that Amherst was leaving right after prelims (due to the fact that I was trying to fix playoff groups as quickly as possible so the already long day did not get any longer) when I was ranking the teams. By the time I realized this, I was too late when I tried to go correct the situation - some of the rounds had already started and since Columbia Ambedkar was the only team left that hadn't been in a game, I made the decision to let them take Amherst's spot in the third bracket rather than interrupt the games that had already started. This is totally a colossal fuckup on my part and all blame should be directed to me. I wholeheartedly apologize to all teams that were gypped of a higher ranking due to this.

Regarding your complaints Joelle,
I am very sorry for all the terrible staffer decisions that came your way and I will bring your post up, specifically, during practice this week to try and resolve matters. We held a staffer meeting the night before the tournament and specifically emphasized things like "no double negs" or "no negs after the tossup has ended," but regrettably those mistakes still happened. I'm not sure what rule the staffer was talking about when they said double negs are used at practice, but I think they may be referring to when we do "free for all" packets at practice.

Nevertheless, we hope you understand that this was the first time hosting, staffing and organizing a tournament for many of us and we were obviously not well accustomed to the pace and amount of games we had to coordinate. I sincerely apologize on behalf of our team.

Regarding the tiebreakers situation:
When i received the tiebreakers from Will at the middle of the day I was trying to focus on reading the tiebreaker bonus in my room and naturally forgot to forward the email with the tiebreakers to the rest of the mods. This was a big mistake on my part and I guess I hadn't been told that other mods had needed to read tiebreakers before I finally remembered to email the tiebreaker packets out later in the day. Sorry again about this.

At the end of the day, despite all the mistakes, I was still happy that this tournament happened and I hope that the teams who came managed to derive some sort of enjoyment from the tournament. Should we host a tournament again in the future, we will definitely look back at our (many) mistakes from yesterday and work to correct them.
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by The Story of a Head That Fell Off »

Thanks for posting the stats, but will there be combined stats?
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Amizda Calyx »

Also, when will the stats be updated to reflect major corrections?
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by Off To See The Lizard »

They will be updated soon, midterms have kept us busy.
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Re: Early Fall Tournament @ NYU (October 1st, 2016)

Post by The Story of a Head That Fell Off »

Thank you for updating the stats!
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