Gauging interest University of Rochester FDIC 9/26/09

[steinmasta]

I would like to gauge interest in teams who would like to attend our Frederick Douglass Invitational Championship (FDIC) Tournament on September 26, 2009. In this format, we use packets from NAQT Invitational Series. We encourage new/freshmen teams to compete as it is a nice introductory level tournament, and we use this as a first tournament for our freshmen/first year quiz bowlers.

You can reach me at my e-mail address: [email protected]. I am sorry for the late notice! When I start seeing how much interest there is I'll provide the specifics.

[Wall of Ham]

Cornell would send as many teams as we feasibly have transportation for (2-3 Hopefully)

[MicroEStudent]

RIT would send at least 1 team, possibly more.

[Frater Taciturnus]

I think you'd get more teams with a mirror of a tournament held on collegiate questions.

[AKKOLADE]

Not only that, Eric, but your tournament would be more respected by people. Holding a college tournament on high school questions is pretty looked down upon.

If you really want to hold a college event, maybe you could try hosting a mirror of ACF Fall on 10/31? You can find info on that here. Or maybe you could push back and host a mirror of Minnesota Open (10/17) if MIT somehow decides that they don't want to.

[wd4gdz]

Not only that, Eric, but your tournament would be more respected by people. Holding a college tournament on high school questions is pretty looked down upon.

Why do you consider IS questions "high school question?" NAQT says "These questions are well suited for new and less experienced players and NAQT recommends that they be used for juniorbird tournaments, CUT-style tournaments, rivalry matches, or community college events."

[Ondes Martenot]

Well...when you consider the fact that IS sets contain comp math which is seen nowhere else in the college game and are significantly easier than the easiest college sets like ACF Fall and MUT, there isn't much to gain, at least in my opinion.

Moving back on topic, if Rochester held an event on college questions, RPI would try to attend, assuming there isn't anything closer by.

[magin]

Not only that, Eric, but your tournament would be more respected by people. Holding a college tournament on high school questions is pretty looked down upon.

Why do you consider IS questions "high school question?" NAQT says "These questions are well suited for new and less experienced players and NAQT recommends that they be used for juniorbird tournaments, CUT-style tournaments, rivalry matches, or community college events."

Whether NAQT considers IS questions fine for college tournaments or not, the fact of the matter is that IS sets differ in noticeable ways (the distribution and answer selection, just for starters) from basically all other novice or easy sets produced for collegiate play (such as MUT, Illinois Novice, ACF Fall, and EFT, for some examples); playing them will not prepare teams for the vast majority of college tournaments, which are not played on IS sets or other high school level questions.

[wd4gdz]

If a young team wants to qualify for ICT, they'll need to do well at Sectionals. It seems to me that playing one NAQT tournament before Sectionals would be a good way to improve their performance at that relatively important tournament.

[rylltraka]

Also, it seems like a good fit for a small/young team which wants to hold a tournament that fits their schedule.

[magin]

If a young team wants to qualify for ICT, they'll need to do well at Sectionals. It seems to me that playing one NAQT tournament before Sectionals would be a good way to improve their performance at that relatively important tournament.

If you compare last year's Sectionals to any of the IS sets NAQT produced last year, the difference is fairly clear. Sections has a different distribution, longer questions, and a larger answer space than any of NAQT's IS sets, so playing IS sets seems like a rather poor way of preparing for Sectionals. If teams are expecting to prepare for Sectionals, I'd advise them to practice on last year's Sectionals and play tournaments that resemble Sectionals in distribution, question length, and answer selection, such as ACF Regionals or Penn Bowl.

[AKKOLADE]

Not only that, Eric, but your tournament would be more respected by people. Holding a college tournament on high school questions is pretty looked down upon.

Why do you consider IS questions "high school question?" NAQT says "These questions are well suited for new and less experienced players and NAQT recommends that they be used for juniorbird tournaments, CUT-style tournaments, rivalry matches, or community college events."

Doesn't matter what NAQT says, it matters what the reality is, and the reality is that no respected college events use NAQT IS sets.

[Mechanical Beasts]

If a young team wants to qualify for ICT, they'll need to do well at Sectionals. It seems to me that playing one NAQT tournament before Sectionals would be a good way to improve their performance at that relatively important tournament.

But not an IS-set tournament, whose distribution and difficulty both substantially differ from an NAQT collegiate tournament. (And I'd argue that playing a novice mACF tournament would be little worse than playing an old SCT--certainly a better course than an IS-set.

If you want NAQT practice before SCT, play an old SCT in practice.

[swwFCqb]

I suppose even if it's an IS-set Case Western would probably still consider bringing a team.

[wd4gdz]

If a young team wants to qualify for ICT, they'll need to do well at Sectionals. It seems to me that playing one NAQT tournament before Sectionals would be a good way to improve their performance at that relatively important tournament.

If you compare last year's Sectionals to any of the IS sets NAQT produced last year, the difference is fairly clear. Sections has a different distribution, longer questions, and a larger answer space than any of NAQT's IS sets, so playing IS sets seems like a rather poor way of preparing for Sectionals. If teams are expecting to prepare for Sectionals, I'd advise them to practice on last year's Sectionals and play tournaments that resemble Sectionals in distribution, question length, and answer selection, such as ACF Regionals or Penn Bowl.

I don't know if IS sets and Sectionals would have the same distribution if math calc was taken out (which is an option, I believe), but if so, I think that's a fine way to prepare. I don't ever hear anyone saying preparing for ACF Nats by attending ACF Regionals is horrible just because Nationals has longer questions and a larger answer space.

Not only that, Eric, but your tournament would be more respected by people. Holding a college tournament on high school questions is pretty looked down upon.

Why do you consider IS questions "high school question?" NAQT says "These questions are well suited for new and less experienced players and NAQT recommends that they be used for juniorbird tournaments, CUT-style tournaments, rivalry matches, or community college events."

Doesn't matter what NAQT says, it matters what the reality is, and the reality is that no respected college events use NAQT IS sets.

Instead of just repeating this over and over, perhaps it'd be helpful to myself and others to explain why you feel this way. Is it because...

The questions are too easy? If so, where do you draw the line between at something being too easy, i.e. what makes something like ACF Fall hard enough, but IS sets = too easy.

There's math calc? Would your feelings change if it was removed?

[Cheynem]

I don't think it's about too easy. From my experience with IS-sets, the questions are far shorter than SCT or ICT questions. Also, I'm not entirely convinced that preparing to do well at SCT/ICT should be the primary objective for new teams or players.

[Camelopardalis]

I still wonder though if perhaps there is room for an easier tournament than the novice-level events that are currently available? Only speaking from my experience, I've found that despite the easy difficulty level of ACF Fall, EFT, etc., completely new players can still sometimes become discouraged during the jump into collegiate quizbowl from easy questions/no quizbowl experience, which is exacerbated by playing against established teams in combined fields. Perhaps this is just something that I've seen in an area where the most challenging level of high school quizbowl asks you "What is the capital of Sweden?", but I wouldn't doubt that some non-zero number of people in other areas of North America are scared off after competing in collegiate quizbowl for the very first time, instead of embracing opportunities to improve.

So if one of the goals of collegiate quizbowl is getting more people involved and enthused about the game, and, very importantly, encouraging them to improve, could it not be feasible to have an even more introductory tournament than currently available, open only to freshmen or other players completely new to quizbowl? That way, players wouldn't be competing on these questions for their entire playing careers (as they would be only eligible once), and the tournament would be, at most, an introduction to the game itself. I don't think IS sets are the answer, since they are high school questions that are not reflective of the collegiate game, but perhaps something akin to the High School Novice Tournament that's being produced this year, but for university? I'm definitely willing to believe that there are reasons why this is a bad idea, I just thought, if there was a way to get more people involved in quizbowl on the ground floor, it might be good for the whole collegiate circuit.

[Theory Of The Leisure Flask]

You know, quizbowl really, really does need to bring back the true JB tournament. An IS set is, for various reasons, suboptimal (comp-math-free IS sets this year do improve the situation somewhat). However, what other options does Rochester have?

Someone should take the trouble to de-comp-math and otherwise college-ify the Delta Burke set, which we tweaked for QuAC/RIOT last year and which I also worked with for SNEWT back in the day.

[dtaylor4]

I still wonder though if perhaps there is room for an easier tournament than the novice-level events that are currently available? Only speaking from my experience, I've found that despite the easy difficulty level of ACF Fall, EFT, etc., completely new players can still sometimes become discouraged during the jump into collegiate quizbowl from easy questions/no quizbowl experience, which is exacerbated by playing against established teams in combined fields. Perhaps this is just something that I've seen in an area where the most challenging level of high school quizbowl asks you "What is the capital of Sweden?", but I wouldn't doubt that some non-zero number of people in other areas of North America are scared off after competing in collegiate quizbowl for the very first time, instead of embracing opportunities to improve.

Solution: restrict the field. At our Novice tournament, we only allow players who are in their first two years of legitimate collegiate competition.

[swwFCqb]

I still wonder though if perhaps there is room for an easier tournament than the novice-level events that are currently available? Only speaking from my experience, I've found that despite the easy difficulty level of ACF Fall, EFT, etc., completely new players can still sometimes become discouraged during the jump into collegiate quizbowl from easy questions/no quizbowl experience, which is exacerbated by playing against established teams in combined fields. Perhaps this is just something that I've seen in an area where the most challenging level of high school quizbowl asks you "What is the capital of Sweden?", but I wouldn't doubt that some non-zero number of people in other areas of North America are scared off after competing in collegiate quizbowl for the very first time, instead of embracing opportunities to improve.

Solution: restrict the field. At our Novice tournament, we only allow players who are in their first two years of legitimate collegiate competition.

The one time I was at FDIC as a freshman, I believe Rochester did something of this sort. I think they restricted players with 2+ years of experience to playing on teams of 2.

[Auroni]

What we're trying to get at is that IS set questions were ultimately written and intended for a high school field, and that hosting novice tournaments on them is a particularly bad idea because it does not expose one to topics that get further explored in harder questions, and in fact stunts the growth of teams. It's comparable to expecting that reading NAQT's speedcheck questions will be serviceable to a HSNCT-bound team.

[No Rules Westbrook]

As for the "preparation" argument, playing ACF Fall or EFT or some other novice event will surely prepare you almost as well, if not even better, for SCT than playing an IS set will - that is, if "preparing for SCT" is your big club goal, which I'm not saying it should be. Stuff like ACF Fall and EFT, while a different format, will teach you way more stuff - and that stuff is going to be useful down the road in QB.

As for the "intimidation" argument, not buying it - very few acf fall/eft type fields are "combined" or scary. If you can't handle playing against a very small handful of talented undergraduates, then I don't know how we're going to convince you to stay in qb and get better anyway. We're not going to retain people by coaxing them with candy and tricking them. As for getting used to the new question style and format, well, that's has some truth - but you're gonna have to make that leap.

Like Watkins said, if you wanna get a feel for the format of SCT and the current events/geography/random crap explosion there, then have a few practices on SCT questions - but for tournaments, go play novice collegiate events. People around here respect those events more for all sorts of good reasons.

[Camelopardalis]

The one time I was at FDIC as a freshman, I believe Rochester did something of this sort. I think they restricted players with 2+ years of experience to playing on teams of 2.

But that doesn't really seem like restricting the field to me. It doesn't prevent established players from playing in an easy tournament, and it means that people can continue playing on easy questions for their entire career. Also, teams of two established players will still run roughshod over four brand new players much of the time. Collegiate tournaments won by solo players or two-person teams on NAQT IS or IS-A questions in the past two years include:

GIT XIII (Mike Sorice)
Mississippi State's Fall NIT (Jonathan Thompson, Dan Marion)
CUT XI (Austin Bell, Ted Kuhn, followed by Michael Servis and Andreas Stoehr in second)
Ragnarok I (Jonathan Thompson, followed by Billy Beyer in second)
Nole Bowl II (Zach Harper, Sean)
Shorter College Invitational (Jonathan Thompson)
Rollapalooza 2007 (Mike Sorice)
CUT X (Brendan Byrne, followed by Trevor Davis and Gautam Kandlikar in second, followed by Garret Ryan in third)

[marnold]

A formerly active circuit team that has liberated itself from CBI capture wants to hold a small tournament in a relatively inactive local circuit on a date with no real tournament up against it or available to mirror... and the circuit at large feels compelled to badger them about it? I guess I might accept that IS-set tournaments are bad when they will draw teams away from real stuff or when there are teams that play them year after year - neither are the case here, so who cares?

[millionwaves]

A formerly active circuit team that has liberated itself from CBI capture wants to hold a small tournament in a relatively inactive local circuit on a date with no real tournament up against it or available to mirror... and the circuit at large feels compelled to badger them about it? I guess I might accept that IS-set tournaments are bad when they will draw teams away from real stuff or when there are teams that play them year after year - neither are the case here, so who cares?

Hear hear. This is precisely the attitude that I think we should take towards this sort of situation.

[rylltraka]

Hear, hear!

[Important Bird Area]

Not speaking for NAQT for a second:

I'll endorse the posts above mine, and I'd like to reply to Jonathan's points.

It strikes me that there are (at least) two different reasons to oppose running college tournaments on IS sets.

1. The distribution is different (math comp, too much geography, not enough literature and philosophy, etc.). I fully understand this argument and agree with it myself.

2. The questions aren't difficult enough. This one I don't buy; it's certainly true for certain fields. But I also think it's entirely possible to produce a field of novice collegiate teams for which an IS set would be appropriate. Say the following experiment: take a dozen DII SCT teams, now run a tournament for the seven of them with the lowest bonus conversion. If you have a bunch of teams that are converting 8-12 ppb on DII SCT and not powering many questions, it seems likely to me that an IS set will in fact both teach them something and produce fair results.

Speaking for NAQT again:

What would people think of the possbility of producing a C-series? Same difficulty as an IS set, but same distribution as SCT.

EDIT: Dwight just started a new thread to talk about this, so maybe we should go over there.

[MicroEStudent]

A formerly active circuit team that has liberated itself from CBI capture wants to hold a small tournament in a relatively inactive local circuit on a date with no real tournament up against it or available to mirror... and the circuit at large feels compelled to badger them about it? I guess I might accept that IS-set tournaments are bad when they will draw teams away from real stuff or when there are teams that play them year after year - neither are the case here, so who cares?

This is exactly the type of tournament I may be able to get more than 4 people interested in. The majority of people with any sort of quiz bowl experience at RIT have only CBI experience. Hopefully I can convince a good number of people to go to the tournament that would normally only play once a year during the campus CBI tourney.

Now, we are also planning on sending at least one team to EFT as well, so we do want to go to mACF style tournaments as well and not just play this type of tournament year round.

[Matt Weiner]

Man, it feels like we have this discussion every six months...wonder why that is. For those with poor memories: The fact that this tournament is not on the same date as another doesn't mean it's not in competition, because quizbowl teams don't have infinite time or money. If this tournament happens, there will be multiple teams who don't show up to EFT the following week because they just spent a weekend of study time and a portion of their budget playing high school questions. This is a fact. Furthermore, this is not the first time someone has tried to host a college tournament on high school questions, so we don't need to talk about it as a theoretical idea. We can examine past events, as Chris Greenwood did, to determine what is likely to happen in the future (I know induction isn't a favorite tactic among people who like to pretend that bad tournaments will somehow turn out differently this time, but bear with me.) This tournament will not feature a field of novices who enjoy playing quizbowl showing up to be drawn in by lower difficulty. It will instead feature the northeast equivalent of Mike Sorice or Seth Kendall showing up to win every game by 500 points against some teams who should have spent their resources on EFT instead, and a whole bunch of people who laugh at the idea that people know things, complain about the lack of video game questions, and are never seen again. How can I be so sure that this will happen? Because it's what happened the last 78 times someone hosted a college tournament on high school questions, and that is in fact evidence that it will continue to happen in the future.

[marnold]

The reason these conversations keep happening is the classic Weinerian argument just isn't particularly persuasive - at least it isn't to me, and apparently it isn't to other people either. Obviously there are limits to quizbowl budgets. Obviously there will be people who go to this instead of EFT. Obviously there will be people from these formerly CBI teams who won't like it. Obviously someone better at quizbowl will win a tournament attended primarily by crappy players. But your conclusion is, eo ipso, hsquizbowl should agitate against this tournament happening; this is where I disagree. The tournament will be happening in a small, otherwise isolated circuit and will help a formerly active team rebuild and fund their club - this seems like a perfect example of why the announcement of any IS-set tournament shouldn't necessarily be a call-to-arms.