NASAT Open Mirron @ Carleton (20-21 July 2019)

[Missing Shade of Blue]

Carleton University (the one in Ottawa) will be hosting a mirror of NASAT on 20-21 July 2019 (sorry about the late anbnouncement). The mirror is open: more information on the set can be found at its global announcement.

Location and Time
The tournament will start at 9:00 (so teams should arrive around 8:30) on both days, at an as yet undetermined location at Carleton (but porbably Richcraft Hall).

Registration and Fees
To register, email tedgan AT cmail.carleton.ca, with the discounts you wish to claim.

The fee schedule is as follows:
Base fee: $180 for both days, $120 for one day only
Shorthanded discount: -$15/missing player
Buzzer discount: -$10/set
Staff discount: -$10/staffer

Side Event
SHAWARMA II, a visual film tournament, will be played after the main tournament on Saturday 20 July. It will be free of charge.

Field

[Theodore]

Official Field (both days unless otherwise stated)
McGill (2 buzzers, 0.5 staff)
Raymond's Team
Jaayush
Tamara's Team
David's Team
Carleton

An unofficial team-making spreadsheet for free agents can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... p=sharing

Please note that the O-train that normally runs through Carleton's campus will be closed. The replacement bus is called R2.
More details here:
http://www.octranspo.com/en/alerts/#alerts-8291

[Theodore]

Final Logistics Update:

On BOTH days, meet at Richcraft Hall (formerly River Building) Room 3112 at 8:30, as games will start at 9 AM sharp. This is the same control room as Oxford Open.
The NASAT Saturday schedule is attached, including buzzer and staff room assignments.
SHAWARMA will be held Saturday evening directly after NASAT in Room 3110.

If you want a team name (other than the default “[Captain]’s Team”) to be used in the stats, please email me this name sooner rather than later.

Staff:
Please bring a laptop, as we will use Google Drive to distribute packets and scoresheets.

Transportation:
A campus map is found here: https://carleton.ca/campus/map/ We are in Building ‘RB’.
For those driving: all-day parking is $6/day; we recommend the basement of Richcraft Hall
https://carleton.ca/parking/visitors/parking-rates/
https://carleton.ca/parking/wp-content/ ... p-2015.pdf
Sunday only: Colonel By Drive is closed “from 9 AM to 1 PM”, but in practice, they may close the road earlier than 9 AM:
https://www.ottawatourism.ca/ottawa-ins ... bikedays/ For those taking public transit: the O-Train will be closed for the entire weekend. The replacement bus is called R2:
http://www.octranspo.com/en/alerts/#alerts-8291

Dining:
There will NOT be a dinner break between NASAT and SHAWARMA.
The world-renowned Carleton buffet will be open, but with a limited selection relative to the academic year. The only other option on campus, Tim Horton’s, may not be open, and may not serve full meals.
If there is interest, we will walk people 15 minutes away to Sunnyside at Seneca, where a burrito and pizza place are found.

[Theodore]

Sunday Logistics:

Please note Colonel By Drive is closed starting from a bit before 9 AM to 1 PM.

The schedule is attached. The free agents teams have been combined into one, so a triple round robin will be played. Due to pack(et) shortage, there will be no finals after the triple round robin. There are also no book prizes, as we exhausted them today.

First round (on pack(et) 12) starts at 9 AM sharp. There is no briefing meeting: you may go straight to your rooms.

Lunch is after Round 6.

---------------------
Saturday NASAT stats are here: http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/58 ... all_games/
Toronto R came from behind to beat Toronto J in the one-game final to win Day 1 of NASAT! Further congrats to Aayush and Tamara, who were the top scorers.

SHAWARMA stats:
Rein Otsason - 310
Henry Atkins - 260
Christine Irwin - 220
Jules - 95
Erik Christensen - 95
Aaron dos Remedios - 15
David Simon - 10
Jay Misuk - -15
All SHAWARMA feedback can be provided to Saul directly: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=21468

Thanks once again to Saul and the writers & editors of NASAT!

[Theodore]

Toronto J avenged their Saturday loss to Toronto R by winning Sunday's NASAT:
http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/58 ... all_games/
An advantaged final was not played because we ran out of packets and time, and 3 head-to-head games was deemed to be sufficient.

You may provide feedback to the NASAT editors by joining the "2019 NASAT Discussion" private forum in your User Control Panel.

Thank you to all the teams who played, especially the newer players: you succeeded on tough questions against tough competition.
Thanks to all staff: Christine Irwin, Brendan McKendy, Sam Karovitch, Aidan Ryan, and Tamara Vardomskaya for SHAWARMA. This tournament ran very smoothly thanks to you.

This was my last tournament as a Carleton and Canadian student. Thanks to everybody in the Canadian (especially Ottawa) quizbowl community I've met, from experienced mentors like Ben Smith and Jordan Palmer, to young stars like Kevin Fan and Kevin Le.

[Protean]

A belated thanks to Carleton for running another fun quizbowl weekend! It was great to see a lot of old and new faces alike, the readers were good, things ran pretty smoothly and on time, and the buffet was a pleasure as always. However, as I believe there will be a lot of turnover in the leadership this coming year, I would like to offer some constructive criticism on a few logistic issues that came up this weekend so that future tournaments might avoid them.

Most importantly, tournaments should be announced as early as possible. This is important for many reasons and goes for all hosts/tournaments, but is especially important if your school is a bit more geographically isolated and you expect a significant portion of your field to be travelling a fair distance. This tournament gave my team 8 days to arrange transportation from Toronto to Ottawa as well as find accommodations. By the time the announcement went up, one of the cheaper housing options (a single in a Carleton residence) was completely booked and transit options (Greyhound, Via Rail) had essentially doubled in price compared to if it had gone up a week or two earlier. I understand that an early announcement might not always be possible, but even a tentative post could help save on very tangible costs to travelling teams.

It is also very helpful to set a registration deadline, just to get an idea of what your field will look like. Logistics should be planned out based on confirmed players and maybes/late confirmations can be slotted in where there is space afterwards. It's very messy to not even know how many teams will be in the field and be juggling people around the night or two before the tournament. What should not happen is expecting established teams to shift around to accommodate latecomers who can't confirm until then. To be clear, I'm not saying latecomers can't play and a strong reasonable effort should definitely be taken to include them, but players who sign up on time should take priority.

Related to the above is that if you're running a two-day tournament, know who is going to show up to which days. Get a clear confirmation that people will play both days and assume someone isn't going to show up if they can't clearly confirm. Reformatting teams and making a schedule for a different number of teams on Saturday night because you found out somebody isn't coming tomorrow is probably very stressful. Lastly, it's always worth it to mind the little details. Things like how many book prizes you have and when to give them out, how many paсks are available to play, etc. aren't disastrous but keeping them in mind helps keep things running smoothly.

Again, I had a lot of fun that weekend and the tournament itself ran very smoothly overall, though a few easy fixes addressing the above could've made it even better. Carleton has always hosted great tournaments and I look forward to attending the next ones in the coming years. Thanks again for having us!

(tl;dr Give people a reasonable amount of time to plan out a long trip and get people to be able to confirm if they're coming or not sooner than right before the tournament.)

[Theodore]

Thanks for the good advice Raymond.

Re: tournament announcement:
We posted the announcement as soon as we had official confirmation of the NASAT set. This was delayed by Fred having an unexpected family emergency, which is of course not his fault and I hope his family is alright. This situation was communicated to the Eastern Canada Quizbowl Facebook chat well before the official confirmed tournament announcement.
If this arises again in the future, possible ways to handle this include:

• Posting an official tournament announcement without the questions confirmed. I felt that communicating the situation by other means was sufficient in place of this. If people disagree, we can do this in the future.

• contacting another NASAT-affiliated person for the set e.g. head editor Jakob Myers

• obtaining a different set

Re: registration deadline and people not showing up for Day 2:
I didn't put a registration deadline because of the late tournament announcement and to convince newer players to come.
I asked if teams wanted to be shuffled around as a just-in-case inquiry; it's perfectly fine to say no, as we of course respect your original registration. In the future, I will not ask.
It's tricky accommodating new players who are often on-the-fence last-minute confirmations. Of course, late-comers are not entitled to a playing spot. However, as the TD I was personally willing to simply take the L and make backup schedules and last-second changes to free agent house teams, because I feel this extra work is worth giving younger players experience, even at summer open tournaments. In the future, I will try to minimize the impact this has on other teams; although I am personally willing to put in extra work to accommodate them, this should not come at the expense of our guests. This time around, it worked out, as the newer players told me they had fun and learned a lot, and there were mostly close games.

Re: number of packets:
Sorry, this was my fault for not realizing that what I assumed was a full pack 21 was named "21-extras.doc".
For future reference:
If you are a TD who is playing, it's worth opening a pack named "extra" to verify if it is a full extra pack or not; worst case scenario, you and/or your house filler team sits out of that round. Otherwise, it should be assumed that this is not a full pack. This may seem obvious, but I overlooked this.
For editors: Always make it clear in your file names to demonstrate if your leftover questions make up a full pack. I must commend the NASAT editors because this warning was thoughtfully placed at the top of the document: thanks!

I'd like to reiterate that this was good constructive criticism, and how discussion and improvement should happen. Thanks once again for the advice and for attending this tournament