Terrapin Invitiational Tournament (11/14/09) at Maryland
Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 12:37 am
Terrapin Invitational Tournament XXI - Jeremy Eaton-coined subtitle forthcoming
Saturday, November 14, 2009
University of Maryland - College Park
ANNOUNCEMENT:
The Maryland Academic Quiz Team is pleased to announce the latest incarnation of our Terrapin Invitational Tournament, which (though technically the 23rd such tournament held) will repair the rip in the TIT space-time continuum by actually being TIT XXI. This event will be a packet submission tournament which will continue to explore the nature of Regular Difficulty - our goal is actually to have this tournament be about as hard as last season's TIT.
This is a packet submission event following the normal guidelines - if you were playing tournaments prior to last year, your team should be writing a packet. If your team meets this definition in name but doesn't really have much writing experience, you should email me *right away* to discuss it - I want teams to be able to attend this event, but building writing experience for teams is just as important as this event actually having enough submissions.
Illinois's venerable Mike Sorice has signed on to oversee the science editing for this set. He will hopefully [EDIT: be joined by] the hobo astronomer Bruce encountered on the side of the road that one time. I will once again be head-editing and working on the other subjects. Jeremy Eaton, SteveJon Guth, Jeff Amoros, and Rebecca Fischer will also be working on the set.
Since this event is taking on the Illinois Open role this year, it will be an open event, but the difficulty is not being raised since I feel the previous TIT would serve pretty much any field perfectly adequately while still being accessible enough (though a bit too hard at times) for the bulk of the field. It's our hope that this tournament will be more along the lines of a normal event where school-based teams compete, but which is also open to players who aren't in school anymore and the assortment of random hybrid or high school amalgam teams - similar to last year's Minnesota Open field, for example. If people feel the need to form COesque superteams for regular to regionals questions, I guess you're free to do that, but it seems silly.
EDIT: We WILL be running a mirror of Ryan Westbrook's FIST event on Sunday, November 15th. Packet submission will NOT be required for that event. We will also be running both the Walden III Social Science/Philosophy tournament and RMPfest II as side events. The exact schedule of the side events is still up in there, and will be split across friday/saturday/sunday nights depending on what is most convenient for everyone.
MIRRORS:
This tournament will be mirrored at Illinois (I believe, on the same date) in the usual Illinois Open spot, and on 11/15/09 at Harvard. Both sites require packet submission in the same manner described below. We would love to have a West Coast, Southern, or Canadian mirror, so please email me if you're interested.
PRICING:
+$100 - Base Fee
-$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 3rd.
-$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 10th.
+$0 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 17th.
+$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 24th.
+$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 31st.
+$100 - Packet submitted after that. Last year this system was insufficient to prevent roughly half the packets from arriving within days of the tournament, so teams should understand that packets arriving more than a few days after 10/31/09 will suffer increasingly unpleasant penalties (all the worse if your packet isn't on track and you don't LET ME KNOW).
-$5 - Working buzzer discount, unlimited
-$10 - Competent moderator discount (can be from moderating FIST, or vice versa)
+$10 - Formatting penalty for formatting your questions incorrectly (see formatting section below).
-$20 - Prize for the best unedited packet received in general, and by the best Division II (first two years play quizbowl) only team.
Minimum Fee Per Team: $40.
If you aren't require to write and want to, that would be awesome and your fee would be subject to even heavier discounting.
PACKET GUIDELINES:
Distribution 24/24
4/4 History (1/1 US, 2/2 European, 1/1 World; vary your answers by subject/time period, use judgment as to what category your ancient history questions fall under, but most should probably be counted as European)
4/4 Literature (1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 1/1 World; try to include at least 1/1 drama, 1/1 novels, and 1/1 poetry)
4/4 Science (1/1 Physics, 1/1 Chemistry, 1/1 Biology, 1/1 Other Science like Computer Science, Non-Computational Math, Geology, Astronomy, Earth Science, Engineering, etc.)
2/2 Extra Big Three (no more than 1/1 in any category; try to use these in a sensible way - if you're going to try and push the envelope with tossups on minor works of Robert Graves, you could include a replacement lit tossup here to ensure that I'm laughing with you and not crying in a corner when I get your packet)
3/3 RMP (1/1 Philosophy, 2/2 Religion and Mythology - these are grouped together because they sometimes overlap, but you should make sure your questions are appropriately varied)
3/3 Fine Arts (1/1 Visual Fine Arts like Painting and Sculpture, 1/1 Classical Music, 1/1 Your Choice or other like Architecture, Artistic Film, Dance, Opera or more painting / music.)
1/1 Social Science (Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, Linguistics, etc.)
1/1 Trash. Go nuts!*
2/2 Academic Choice - This is an experimental category that I'm testing out as a means of resolving the great geography/social science dilemma. What can you do in this category? Well, pretty much anything. You can write straight academic questions from other categories, you can write geography, or you can write interdisciplinary questions. Please note that interdisciplinary questions are not "general knowledge" questions - all the clues had better be academic enough to fit in any other tossup, or you're rewriting it. Essentially, make a case for your preferred way to round out the distribution. Believe in academic geography? Put up or shut up. Want to pile own the social science until Ahmad builds you a temple of skulls? Go for it. Are you Shantanu? Write more renaissance art-chitecture questions. Your only restriction here is that you're limited to 1/1 in a category. That includes interdisciplinary questions (that is, don't write more than 1/1 interdisciplinary). You also obviously can't write trash questions here.
*In a way that produces good trash questions, stop sending me questions on K-pop.
Please vary all your questions by time period, region of the world (when applicable) and genre. Also vary the type of question you ask. For example, do not write 5 literature tossups on 19th century British novelists. A better literature selection would include tossups on authors, works and characters, on American, British, and World literature, and on fiction, drama, and poetry.
Difficulty:
Your answer selections should range between Fall and Regionals difficulty, inclusive. Last year's Terrapin is probably the best model for likely difficulty of this event, and is definitely the best model for how hard you should make your questions. You are strenuously encouraged to err on the easier side. I'm happy to be excited by accessible tossups on stuff that doesn't get as much coverage as it should, but if you're writing a tossup you honestly don't believe more than 20% of the field will convert - stop.
Every bonus should have a clear easy, medium and hard part. Almost every team in the tournament should be converting the easy part of the bonus, while a little more than half of the teams should be converting the medium part. The hard part of a bonus should be able to be answered by those with in-depth knowledge in the field.
Question Length:
All of the following lengths apply to documents written in Word with 1 inch margins (change these from the default), and a 10 point Times New Roman font.
Final tossups will be between 6 and 8 lines long. However, we'd prefer that you submit tossups on the long side (or even over the 8 line limit), since it's always easier for us to get rid of clues that we don't like than to add additional clues by ourselves.
Bonus parts should be kept within reason. Do not write extremely lengthy leadins or bonus parts (try to keep them under 2 lines, generally). Also do not write extremely short bonuses or list bonuses, as these are typically not very interesting. The vast majority of your bonuses should be 10-10-10. Please do not write any 30-20-10 bonuses, as these really throw off the balance of the bonuses in a round. 5-10-15 bonuses are similarly bad and should be shunned, since they arbitrarily weight the hard part when in theory the bonus should have the same relative difficulty to all the others. However, I have an unusual tolerance for 10-5 bonuses and a few other creative point structures, so including one or two of these isn't out of the question, but don't do it more than that.
Formatting:
Please format your questions in the following matter:
1/1 Unfunny Meta Example Questions (reused to honor our recent alum):
The person involved in this event is starting a rumor that it was actually a planned occurrence to get himself mentioned in a meta question in Matt Weiner's canceled Chicago Open trash tournament. Immediately after this event occurred, one person was unable to identify Okazaki Fragments. It was preceded by Jeremy Eaton answering a tossup on time dilation. The person responsible for this event blamed not getting enough sleep the night before and the two hour drive to Richmond, but most of all just plain not paying attention. Occurring in a game against South Carolina at the 2007 VCU Open, it is now immortalized in the YTMND page Nude Descending a Gas Chamber. FTP, identify this action wherein Mike Bentley erroneously answered "The Armory Show" for "Auschwitz".
ANSWER: Worst Buzz (also accept Nude Descending a Gas Chamber before mentioned, Mike Bentley's Embarrassing Neg with The Armory Show on the Auschwitz Question at the 2007 Illinois Novice Tournament, and clear knowledge equivalents; do not accept just "Armory Show" or "Auschwitz")
Answer the following about a certain comic strip, FTPE.
[10] Like Chris Ray, the title character of this Dik Browne comic strip has red hair and a big beard, and is also illiterate and bathes only once a year.
ANSWER: Hagar the Horrible
[10] Using Wikipedia might erroneously lead you to believe that Hagar the Horrible was based on this play by Henrik Ibsen in which Sigurd defeats Hjardis by killing her sentinel, a white bear.
ANSWER: The Vikings at Helgeland
[10] If Jonathan Magin had his way, Hagar the Horrible and all other comic strips would be inspired by this Robert Louis Stevenson novel about some Scottish dude and his buried treasure.
ANSWER: The Master of Ballantrae
DO NOT USE ANY AUTOMATIC WORD FORMATTING EXCEPT FOR SMART QUOTES. Specifically, do not use any indentation or automatic numbering in your packets. Submit all packets in .doc or .rtf format please.
If questions are not correctly formatted (at the discretion of the editors), your packet will be returned for you to reformat. If you submit your packet at the deadline and it is rejected for formatting issues, you will be charged a $10 formatting fee (and asked to reformat the packet), but you will not have to pay any additional fees for missing the deadline, unless you are aggravating about resubmitting the format fixes.
Also note that your questions should be organized by category and type, not pre-mixed or divided into tossups and bonuses (thus, you should have the 4 history tossups followed by the 4 history bonuses, followed by the 4 lit tossups and 4 lit bonuses, etc.
Misc.:
As with all packet submission tournaments, questions must be blind to all other teams attending the tournament. Specifically, if a school is sending more than one team to the tournament, members of different teams should not know of each others' questions.
Please do not plagiarize questions. Do not copy direct passages and phrases from the sources you use to write questions. Additionally, do not write questions directly out of Wikipedia. While Wikipedia can be a useful source in finding preliminary information on a question, we encourage you to use more in-depth, scholarly and peer reviewed sources when writing your questions. Please see various question writing guides such as Jerry's guide for more information on where to find good sources for writing questions.
REGISTRATION:
To register, email me at [email protected]. Please indicate how many teams you're bringing (or interested in bringing) and what discounts you think you apply for (such as the number of moderators and buzzers you're bringing). If you're just adding to the open field as a free agent, let me know that as well.
Details on where on campus the event will be held and when specifically registration will be will be announced closer to the date of the tournament.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
University of Maryland - College Park
ANNOUNCEMENT:
The Maryland Academic Quiz Team is pleased to announce the latest incarnation of our Terrapin Invitational Tournament, which (though technically the 23rd such tournament held) will repair the rip in the TIT space-time continuum by actually being TIT XXI. This event will be a packet submission tournament which will continue to explore the nature of Regular Difficulty - our goal is actually to have this tournament be about as hard as last season's TIT.
This is a packet submission event following the normal guidelines - if you were playing tournaments prior to last year, your team should be writing a packet. If your team meets this definition in name but doesn't really have much writing experience, you should email me *right away* to discuss it - I want teams to be able to attend this event, but building writing experience for teams is just as important as this event actually having enough submissions.
Illinois's venerable Mike Sorice has signed on to oversee the science editing for this set. He will hopefully [EDIT: be joined by] the hobo astronomer Bruce encountered on the side of the road that one time. I will once again be head-editing and working on the other subjects. Jeremy Eaton, SteveJon Guth, Jeff Amoros, and Rebecca Fischer will also be working on the set.
Since this event is taking on the Illinois Open role this year, it will be an open event, but the difficulty is not being raised since I feel the previous TIT would serve pretty much any field perfectly adequately while still being accessible enough (though a bit too hard at times) for the bulk of the field. It's our hope that this tournament will be more along the lines of a normal event where school-based teams compete, but which is also open to players who aren't in school anymore and the assortment of random hybrid or high school amalgam teams - similar to last year's Minnesota Open field, for example. If people feel the need to form COesque superteams for regular to regionals questions, I guess you're free to do that, but it seems silly.
EDIT: We WILL be running a mirror of Ryan Westbrook's FIST event on Sunday, November 15th. Packet submission will NOT be required for that event. We will also be running both the Walden III Social Science/Philosophy tournament and RMPfest II as side events. The exact schedule of the side events is still up in there, and will be split across friday/saturday/sunday nights depending on what is most convenient for everyone.
MIRRORS:
This tournament will be mirrored at Illinois (I believe, on the same date) in the usual Illinois Open spot, and on 11/15/09 at Harvard. Both sites require packet submission in the same manner described below. We would love to have a West Coast, Southern, or Canadian mirror, so please email me if you're interested.
PRICING:
+$100 - Base Fee
-$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 3rd.
-$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 10th.
+$0 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 17th.
+$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 24th.
+$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 31st.
+$100 - Packet submitted after that. Last year this system was insufficient to prevent roughly half the packets from arriving within days of the tournament, so teams should understand that packets arriving more than a few days after 10/31/09 will suffer increasingly unpleasant penalties (all the worse if your packet isn't on track and you don't LET ME KNOW).
-$5 - Working buzzer discount, unlimited
-$10 - Competent moderator discount (can be from moderating FIST, or vice versa)
+$10 - Formatting penalty for formatting your questions incorrectly (see formatting section below).
-$20 - Prize for the best unedited packet received in general, and by the best Division II (first two years play quizbowl) only team.
Minimum Fee Per Team: $40.
If you aren't require to write and want to, that would be awesome and your fee would be subject to even heavier discounting.
PACKET GUIDELINES:
Distribution 24/24
4/4 History (1/1 US, 2/2 European, 1/1 World; vary your answers by subject/time period, use judgment as to what category your ancient history questions fall under, but most should probably be counted as European)
4/4 Literature (1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 1/1 World; try to include at least 1/1 drama, 1/1 novels, and 1/1 poetry)
4/4 Science (1/1 Physics, 1/1 Chemistry, 1/1 Biology, 1/1 Other Science like Computer Science, Non-Computational Math, Geology, Astronomy, Earth Science, Engineering, etc.)
2/2 Extra Big Three (no more than 1/1 in any category; try to use these in a sensible way - if you're going to try and push the envelope with tossups on minor works of Robert Graves, you could include a replacement lit tossup here to ensure that I'm laughing with you and not crying in a corner when I get your packet)
3/3 RMP (1/1 Philosophy, 2/2 Religion and Mythology - these are grouped together because they sometimes overlap, but you should make sure your questions are appropriately varied)
3/3 Fine Arts (1/1 Visual Fine Arts like Painting and Sculpture, 1/1 Classical Music, 1/1 Your Choice or other like Architecture, Artistic Film, Dance, Opera or more painting / music.)
1/1 Social Science (Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, Linguistics, etc.)
1/1 Trash. Go nuts!*
2/2 Academic Choice - This is an experimental category that I'm testing out as a means of resolving the great geography/social science dilemma. What can you do in this category? Well, pretty much anything. You can write straight academic questions from other categories, you can write geography, or you can write interdisciplinary questions. Please note that interdisciplinary questions are not "general knowledge" questions - all the clues had better be academic enough to fit in any other tossup, or you're rewriting it. Essentially, make a case for your preferred way to round out the distribution. Believe in academic geography? Put up or shut up. Want to pile own the social science until Ahmad builds you a temple of skulls? Go for it. Are you Shantanu? Write more renaissance art-chitecture questions. Your only restriction here is that you're limited to 1/1 in a category. That includes interdisciplinary questions (that is, don't write more than 1/1 interdisciplinary). You also obviously can't write trash questions here.
*In a way that produces good trash questions, stop sending me questions on K-pop.
Please vary all your questions by time period, region of the world (when applicable) and genre. Also vary the type of question you ask. For example, do not write 5 literature tossups on 19th century British novelists. A better literature selection would include tossups on authors, works and characters, on American, British, and World literature, and on fiction, drama, and poetry.
Difficulty:
Your answer selections should range between Fall and Regionals difficulty, inclusive. Last year's Terrapin is probably the best model for likely difficulty of this event, and is definitely the best model for how hard you should make your questions. You are strenuously encouraged to err on the easier side. I'm happy to be excited by accessible tossups on stuff that doesn't get as much coverage as it should, but if you're writing a tossup you honestly don't believe more than 20% of the field will convert - stop.
Every bonus should have a clear easy, medium and hard part. Almost every team in the tournament should be converting the easy part of the bonus, while a little more than half of the teams should be converting the medium part. The hard part of a bonus should be able to be answered by those with in-depth knowledge in the field.
Question Length:
All of the following lengths apply to documents written in Word with 1 inch margins (change these from the default), and a 10 point Times New Roman font.
Final tossups will be between 6 and 8 lines long. However, we'd prefer that you submit tossups on the long side (or even over the 8 line limit), since it's always easier for us to get rid of clues that we don't like than to add additional clues by ourselves.
Bonus parts should be kept within reason. Do not write extremely lengthy leadins or bonus parts (try to keep them under 2 lines, generally). Also do not write extremely short bonuses or list bonuses, as these are typically not very interesting. The vast majority of your bonuses should be 10-10-10. Please do not write any 30-20-10 bonuses, as these really throw off the balance of the bonuses in a round. 5-10-15 bonuses are similarly bad and should be shunned, since they arbitrarily weight the hard part when in theory the bonus should have the same relative difficulty to all the others. However, I have an unusual tolerance for 10-5 bonuses and a few other creative point structures, so including one or two of these isn't out of the question, but don't do it more than that.
Formatting:
Please format your questions in the following matter:
1/1 Unfunny Meta Example Questions (reused to honor our recent alum):
The person involved in this event is starting a rumor that it was actually a planned occurrence to get himself mentioned in a meta question in Matt Weiner's canceled Chicago Open trash tournament. Immediately after this event occurred, one person was unable to identify Okazaki Fragments. It was preceded by Jeremy Eaton answering a tossup on time dilation. The person responsible for this event blamed not getting enough sleep the night before and the two hour drive to Richmond, but most of all just plain not paying attention. Occurring in a game against South Carolina at the 2007 VCU Open, it is now immortalized in the YTMND page Nude Descending a Gas Chamber. FTP, identify this action wherein Mike Bentley erroneously answered "The Armory Show" for "Auschwitz".
ANSWER: Worst Buzz (also accept Nude Descending a Gas Chamber before mentioned, Mike Bentley's Embarrassing Neg with The Armory Show on the Auschwitz Question at the 2007 Illinois Novice Tournament, and clear knowledge equivalents; do not accept just "Armory Show" or "Auschwitz")
Answer the following about a certain comic strip, FTPE.
[10] Like Chris Ray, the title character of this Dik Browne comic strip has red hair and a big beard, and is also illiterate and bathes only once a year.
ANSWER: Hagar the Horrible
[10] Using Wikipedia might erroneously lead you to believe that Hagar the Horrible was based on this play by Henrik Ibsen in which Sigurd defeats Hjardis by killing her sentinel, a white bear.
ANSWER: The Vikings at Helgeland
[10] If Jonathan Magin had his way, Hagar the Horrible and all other comic strips would be inspired by this Robert Louis Stevenson novel about some Scottish dude and his buried treasure.
ANSWER: The Master of Ballantrae
DO NOT USE ANY AUTOMATIC WORD FORMATTING EXCEPT FOR SMART QUOTES. Specifically, do not use any indentation or automatic numbering in your packets. Submit all packets in .doc or .rtf format please.
If questions are not correctly formatted (at the discretion of the editors), your packet will be returned for you to reformat. If you submit your packet at the deadline and it is rejected for formatting issues, you will be charged a $10 formatting fee (and asked to reformat the packet), but you will not have to pay any additional fees for missing the deadline, unless you are aggravating about resubmitting the format fixes.
Also note that your questions should be organized by category and type, not pre-mixed or divided into tossups and bonuses (thus, you should have the 4 history tossups followed by the 4 history bonuses, followed by the 4 lit tossups and 4 lit bonuses, etc.
Misc.:
As with all packet submission tournaments, questions must be blind to all other teams attending the tournament. Specifically, if a school is sending more than one team to the tournament, members of different teams should not know of each others' questions.
Please do not plagiarize questions. Do not copy direct passages and phrases from the sources you use to write questions. Additionally, do not write questions directly out of Wikipedia. While Wikipedia can be a useful source in finding preliminary information on a question, we encourage you to use more in-depth, scholarly and peer reviewed sources when writing your questions. Please see various question writing guides such as Jerry's guide for more information on where to find good sources for writing questions.
REGISTRATION:
To register, email me at [email protected]. Please indicate how many teams you're bringing (or interested in bringing) and what discounts you think you apply for (such as the number of moderators and buzzers you're bringing). If you're just adding to the open field as a free agent, let me know that as well.
Details on where on campus the event will be held and when specifically registration will be will be announced closer to the date of the tournament.