ANNOUNCEMENT: VETO 7/18/2009 in Vancouver, Hamilton, Ottawa

[cvdwightw]

So yes, part of the charm of VETO really has been the "special, special way that we play quizbowl where it is okay for questions to be bad".

Hey, this is terrible.

Jerry's not gone so far overboard that crazy gimmicky questions are excised entirely and theme packets with weird themes are rejected outright. Maybe he wants to do it, but I think Jerry's going to rein that instinct in so that at least the not-objectively-terrible gimmick bonuses stay in the packet. What I think Jerry is doing is trying to make sure that "it is okay for gimmicky questions to be bad because gimmicky questions are inherently bad" is different from "it is okay for all questions to be bad because gimmicky questions are inherently bad." I hope that you understand that your "special, special way of playing quizbowl" does not entitle you to think that the non-gimmicky portions of your packet can be terrible because everyone's too busy laughing at the gimmick questions to care whether the other 19/19 in the packet is decent.

[Camelopardalis]

I don't know who qualifies as a "prominent" New Democrat (well, Tommy Douglas, noted subject of an Emergency bonus, does). Just to compare, Mark Sanford is currently a prominent South Carolinian, but I'll be damned if I knew who he was 6 months ago. People fade in and out of prominence all the time, especially in politics, so questions about a random dude who did some thing that people in a different province might have cared about is not "prominent." If we're talking about a figure with actual national prominence, then of course I can see the motive for keeping that kind of question.

I think Canadian regional politics is actually quite prominent in Canada; Tommy Douglas, Joey Smallwood, Joseph Howe, any separatist (or federalist, I guess), Danny Williams, etc. These are all reasonable questions to ask about, and might even be a touch on the easy side. I mean, I'm not sure about Charlie Angus, but I just mean to say that regional politicians are fairly well known among Canadians.

1. A tournament with lots of Canadian teams has a larger canon of Canadian content than the typical American invitational.*

and

2. Writers should feel free to explore the edges of the canon at unusual summer events.

Additionally, I'd like to add that I think the canon for Canadian history and politics would be much larger than in other categories, most notably literature; sure there are lots of good Canadian authors, but good lit is good lit regardless of what country it's from, and I think we studied max one Canadian author per year in high school. A tendency towards obscurity in literature would result in fewer questions answered than a tendency towards obscurity in history or politics, and I would caution the editors to keep this in mind.

Canadian history is a mandatory, if short, course in high school (no AP Canadian History, it's just a grade 10 class). But there are no Canadian literature courses, as far as I know.

Would anyone at either of the Canadian sites object if Brown or some other Boston-area team had a "mirror" of VETO? I think there are enough people in the area who might enjoy playing in some sort of doubles or singles format.

I wouldn't object, if my vote counts at all. Also, for Canadiana advisers, I support Andy for this. I can run it by Tamara as well, who isn't playing.

Does this sound...REALLY sketchy to anyone else?

"20 on the bonus. We were looking for POTASSIUM cyanide."

edit: I guess I had Mingus on the brain.

[grapesmoker]

Jerry's not gone so far overboard that crazy gimmicky questions are excised entirely and theme packets with weird themes are rejected outright. Maybe he wants to do it, but I think Jerry's going to rein that instinct in so that at least the not-objectively-terrible gimmick bonuses stay in the packet. What I think Jerry is doing is trying to make sure that "it is okay for gimmicky questions to be bad because gimmicky questions are inherently bad" is different from "it is okay for all questions to be bad because gimmicky questions are inherently bad." I hope that you understand that your "special, special way of playing quizbowl" does not entitle you to think that the non-gimmicky portions of your packet can be terrible because everyone's too busy laughing at the gimmick questions to care whether the other 19/19 in the packet is decent.

If I may speak for myself here for a moment:

I am not, in principle, opposed to having questions in VETO that take on a slightly different form once in a while, e.g. visual bonuses or something of the sort. For example, a bonus that asked one to identify paintings by van Gogh would be fine with me. However, the fact is that right now I have 13 packets and none of them contain visual bonuses that I would currently allow to stand unedited. While I might try and keep the themes of those bonuses if possible, they are certainly going to be changed.

The packets I have currently are:

UWO
Lisgar Alumni
Jordna Palmer
Toronto A
Toronto C
Lisgar B
McMaster
Waterloo A
Waterloo B
B2B
Oregon
Bentley et al
Aaron Kozak
Guelph

If you sent me a packet and your name is not on the list, let me know. If you didn't send me a packet, then it's too late to do so now. If contact people at both sites could either post in this thread or email me so I know who to send packets to, that would be great. It looks like people have asked for this to be run during Sun-n-Fun, which we'll try to do if possible; otherwise, there might be an impromptu Northeast tournament in our collective future.

[Camelopardalis]

The Guelph team sent their packet on Saturday to jerry_v AT brown DOT edu. The contact for that pack is Tom Minard.

[grapesmoker]

The Guelph team sent their packet on Saturday to jerry_v AT brown DOT edu. The contact for that pack is Tom Minard.

So you did. Found it.

[Camelopardalis]

Great, thanks.

[vetovian]

Lots of activity here today.

Would anyone at either of the Canadian sites object if Brown or some other Boston-area team had a "mirror" of VETO? I think there are enough people in the area who might enjoy playing in some sort of doubles or singles format.

I would say that by editing our packets, you and Hannah and Andrew will have earned a right to host a tournament played on them. Having it in the Boston area would especially tickle me because that's where I was based during my entire quiz bowl circuit career, after which I started up VETO in the remote outpost of Vancouver, initially using questions donated by Boston University. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that ten years later, VETO would be mirrored in the Hub of the Universe.

Some people asked about playing not-fully-edited VETO questions at the Sun 'n' Fun weekend which is a week before VETO. If the editors want to take that gathering of quizbowlers as an opportunity to play-test the questions, that would be great. But there are certain conventions about play-testing, namely that it's done by a small, exclusive number of people who don't talk about what they've heard with anyone who wasn't in the room, until after the event for which they're play-testing is over. As long as everyone who participates understands that, then I'm OK with it.

EDIT: I wrote the above before seeing page 2 of this discussion. Now it looks like people want to have the final VETO packets played a week before at Sun 'n' Fun. This sounds OK with me, of course with the usual question-security precautions for this kind of thing that y'all are used to anyway.

Part of the problem with VETO (c.f. a final score of 90-75 from either last year or the year before) is that it included questions on things that were horribly obscure.

I just looked that one up. Last year in Vancouver, the score of the final match was UBC B 95, B2B 75. Eleven tossups were answered. In Toronto, the same packet was played in round 2, with scores of 170-100 (12 tossups answered) and 250-20 (14 tossups answered). As usual, the Toronto teams did a bit better than Vancouver teams on the same packet, but those scores are still pretty low. This was the Queen's University packet, which I agree has some pretty obscure answers and unfortunately some non-pyramidal tossups ("They are the subject of nephrology ..."). I don't think the Canadian questions are on average more obscure than the non-Canadian ones.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

The exact kind of playtesting you described occurs almost daily on the internet, and in a more relevant context, occurs with lots of tournaments running delayed mirrors. Everybody knows the deal going in that they aren't supposed to be talking about the questions until the editor says they can.

[The Logic of Scientific Disco]

Since my traveling is constrained this summer, I would be thrilled to see a VETO mirror/get-together in the Northeast, and would presumably come (assuming it's somewhere relatively easy to get to like Brown).

[bsmith]

If you sent me a packet and your name is not on the list, let me know.

I sent to the brown.edu address on Saturday afternoon. The message also tells you how to get packets to the Ottawa site.

[Camelopardalis]

Quick results from the Ottawa site:

Standings:
triviahalloffame.com (Paul + Philippe): 8-0
Ottawa B(en): 5-3
Lisgar Alumni: 4-4
Ottawa A(aron): 3-5
Lisgar Students: 0-8

Individuals:
1. Ben Smith, Ottawa B(en)
2. Philippe Marchand, triviahalloffame.com
3. Paul Paquet, triviahalloffame.com
4. Brendan McKendy, Ottawa A(aron)
5. Chris Greenwood, Lisgar Alumni

I had a good time. I won't comment on the question set until all sites are completed, but overall I thought it was good, and certainly an improvement over past VETOs. I thought the Canadian content varied quite a bit in difficulty, but I've seen that at every Canadian event I've ever been to.

Special thanks to Ben and Shauna for organizing this and running it well, and congratulations to triviahalloffame.com for their undefeated record. I'd also like to give props to all the all-under-16 Lisgar students for playing the whole day with such good spirits.

[pray for elves]

I have no complete results, but Bruce Arthur sent me a text message saying that Toronto D (featuring Bruce) won the Hamilton site.

[women, fire and dangerous things]

I have no complete results, but Bruce Arthur sent me a text message saying that Toronto D (featuring Bruce) won the Hamilton site.

Toronto C (Chris, Eric, Eric and Chan) came in second, with the same record as Toronto D, and Toronto D won on head-to-head. My team (UWO) was 5-2, I think in third place. There were originally 11 teams, but it ended up with only 8 because some teams left, complaining that the questions were too hard/not fun enough. I'm not going to offer my opinion on this right now, but no doubt it'll be fervently discussed. I think Jay did an admirable job in running this tournament, considering what he had to deal with.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

The questions were of a similar style and difficulty level to EFT. Overall I thought they were mostly solid, with the primary problem being a few repeats and what seemed like insufficient randomization. There would be clumps of 3-4 literature or history tossups very close to each other.

I'd like to quickly thank the people at the Hamilton site who helped me find the tournament and who accepted me as their guest. I would especially like to thank Eric and Jessica from Toronto for putting me on one of their teams and fielding my constant questions about how to get to the tournament etc. I felt that I received very friendly treatment at all times.

[AKKOLADE]

VETO discussion has been moved here.

[Mike Bentley]

Quick results from Vancouver:

The Oregon team ended up winning with a record of 7-1. Our team came in second at 6-2 and FARSIDE finished 3rd with a 5-3. Because we didn't have time to run an advantaged final, Oregon was declared the winner outright. Peter won the individual scoring prize again.

[Mike Bentley]

FYI, results for Vancouver were posted at http://caql.org/results/veto09.html. The top teams at this tournament were around the 15-16 PPB range, which strikes me as very much within the D1 SCT difficulty. As a comparison, the top team at SCT South this year got 13.64 PPB, 17.31 at Southeast, 21.34 at Northeast, 15.59 at Mideast.

[grapesmoker]

Is Phil on Oregon Phil Huang? He used to play for Berkeley and I know he went to Oregon to do a Ph.D.

[Mike Bentley]

Yes, it's Phil Huang.

[dxdtdemon]

Having looked at the Canadian message board, one field update had that a team from Ohio University was coming. I was wondering if some regular VETO participant is now at OU, or what, since they've only done CBI in recent years.

[sc_from_or]

Yes, it is Phil Huang, and he went to law school at University of Oregon (he's already graduated)

As for OU, it might refer to either us (Oregon) or Ottawa, but definitely not Ohio.

As for the tourney itself, we did enjoy the tourney overall (of course winning it helps :) and I note that we did better on the ACF-style packets than the unedited ones.

One note on the packets: There has to be some sort of central editing that would prevents questions that started like this: "Arising out of an 1859 dispute over the boundary running east of San Juan Island" If that wasnt an invitation for a buzzer race on the Pig War, I dont know what is.....(sorry, B2B, but that was a bad start to this question)

Speaking only for myself (and at the risk of restarting the flame war), I think the big ruckus that ensued afterwards I would say was due to poor communication resulting in different expectations from everyone involved. Much venom has been spewed on this point and need not to be repeated.

What should be done for VETO 2010? A few ideas:

Distribution wise something like this:
3/3 literature
3/3 history
3/3 science
2/2 arts
2/2 religion, mythology, and philosophy
1/1 social science
1/1 geography
1/1 trash, current events, or miscellaneous
1/1 Canadian history
1/1 Canadian geography
1/1 Canadian pop culture
1/1 Canadian miscellaneous

You would still have your Canadian content, plenty of academic content while providing a little more pop culture and geography, which seem to have more room for Canadian content than in categories like literature where it seemed like everyone was trying to stretch finding some obscure Canadian author to write about.

In general, I think that Bentley's proposal would be a good one. My main disagreement is that I don't think there is a need or demand for an American mirror of VETO, but it wouldn't hurt.

The number one thing that MUST be improved is COMMUNICATION!!!! If everyone had understood that this was going to be an ACF style tourney, I suspect there would've been a lot less venom on this board (if any) There needs to be clear communication between the editors, organizers, and teams in the tourney as to the level of difficulty expected.

[dxdtdemon]

I didn't mean you guys. Ohio University was supposed to have gone to the mirror in Hamilton.