The Quizbowl Resource Center

The University of Michigan quizbowl team is pleased to announce that we will be hosting a mirror of Penn Bowl on October 19, 2019. As is usual for Michigan tournaments, it will take place in Mason Hall and begin at 9:00 AM, with registration beginning at 8:15 AM. The tournament will be directed by club tournament director David Geering.

Question Set and Eligibility

The tournament will use the 2019 Penn Bowl set. It will use ACF's official eligibility rules. Closed high school teams are allowed to play. High school chimera teams are not. If you have any requests for special exemptions from the eligibility rules, please email me and the head editor of Penn Bowl.

Format and Rules

The tournament will use ACF's official gameplay rules. It will use a round-robin format with multiple preliminary and playoff pools if necessary.

Fees and Payment

+120: each team
-5: per buzzer system.
-10: per staffer. If you are planning on bringing staffers, please email me with the staffers' contact information so I can include them on staffing emails.
-10: per 200 miles traveled one-way to the tournament, per Google Maps.

Registration

Register by filling out this Google form. No other form of registration will be accepted!

You can pay by cash or by check made out to "Michigan Academic Competitions". If you require an invoice in order to pay on the day of the tournament, let us know as soon as possible and we will do our best to facilitate it. We expect payment the day of the tournament; if that is not possible please let us know as soon as possible.

Contact

Anyone with questions about the tournament can contact me by email at [email protected].

Current Field (teams/buzzers)

Chicago (4/2)
Illinois (2/1)
Indiana (1/0)
Kenyon (1/1)
Lewis (1/0)
Michigan (1/4)
Michigan State (2/2)
Ohio State (2/2)
Purdue (1/2)
Wayne State (1/0)

Current Field: 16 teams

Can you post a contact email?

Shorts are comfy and easy to wear wrote: ↑Thu Sep 26, 2019 11:26 am Can you post a contact email?

Oops, I knew I'd omitted something. Edited!

If you guys need any help staffing for the tournament, I can swing over.

We've instituted a field cap of 16 for room reservation reasons. Given the current field, we shouldn't have to expand. We might still be able to if needed, but it's not 100%.

This tournament occurred. Thanks to all the teams that came up to Ann Arbor!

First of all, my apologies for some of the delays that occurred. Many of our staffers were new college players, and I completely neglected to impress upon them the importance of, for example, not letting teams talk substantially between questions. This is my oversight and I'm sorry for it. (There were also some factors that were out of the moderators' control, including a near-total lack of pronounciation guides and the fact that regular difficulty college questions just take longer, but it could have been mitigated.)

With that out of the way -- congratulations to Chicago A, who beat OSU A in the first game of an advantaged final! Stats should be posted very shortly (aka, as soon as the TD emails them to me so I can post them). Advanced stats are presumably available in the private discussion forum for the set, which you should all join if you want to discuss the questions.

Thanks again to all the teams and staffers for a great day of quizbowl!

On the topic of mitigating staffing challenges, it probably would have been a good idea for the Michigan house team to have volunteered to staff instead of playing. This tournament suffered considerably from inexperienced staffers often having to read, keep score, and handle advanced stats solo, and I found it rather frustrating to see a whole team's worth of very qualified readers playing when they were desperately needed in other rooms. I realize that not being able to play a set can make hosting it less enjoyable, but running an efficient tournament that provides the best possible in-game experiences for teams has to come first, and it seems like it didn't today.

Thanks for the feedback, Ben. For what it's worth, the only instance that I can remember of a new staffer having to handle things solo was because one of our staffers left substantially earlier than I thought he would and neither he nor his partner told me this until lunch (at which point it didn't matter). I am, uh, also very annoyed about this, because I had tried to make sure that all the first-time staffers *did* have partners.

I definitely overestimated the moderating abilities of a few of our players before the tournament, and was reluctant to change things up more seriously (that is, more than just shuffling rooms) because I both didn't want to deny my teammates the opportunity to play and didn't want to embarrass the newbies / discourage them from staffing future tournaments.

If I'd foreseen what would happen before the tournament I'd definitely have made the house team staff most or all rounds (we probably would have at least had a rotating solo player because byes are bad). As it was, though, my (probably overblown) fear of causing social issues within our club prevented me from making that call during the tournament. I'm not sure it was the right one, and I'm sorry to anyone who was impacted by it.

we have some staaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaats

Congrats to the top scorers:
Chris Ray (OSU)
Jacob Reed (Chicago)
Matt Lehmann (Chicago)
Alex Fregeau (Lewis)
Alston Boyd (Chicago)
Evan Suttell (MSU)

If you want advanced stats, Penn has opened the private discussion forum; so go there to discuss the set!