(11/14/09) Illinois Open at UIUC
Posted: Sat Sep 12, 2009 1:35 pm
This is an announcement for Illinois' traditional academic tournament, Illinois Open 2009: Spite of Infinite Resignation, to be held Saturday, November 14, 2009 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I, Craig Messner will be co-tournament director of the event along with Trygve Meade. You can contact me at [email protected].
Location
This tournament will most likely be held at Gregory Hall which is located at the intersection of Wright and Armory streets. The full address is:
810 S. Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801
There is ample parking in the area including lot E-3 which is right next to the main library and less than 5 minutes from Gregory Hall.
Packet Submission
This year IO will be a mirror of the TIT set, so please send all packet submissions to Chris Ray at [email protected].
Here is the packet submission and pricing information, copied verbatim from the TIT announcement thread:
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 CHRIS RAY KNOW).
-$5 - Working buzzer discount, unlimited
-$10 - Competent moderator discount
+$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.
PACKET GUIDELINES:
Distribution 24/24
4/4 History (1/1 US, 2/2 European, 1/1 World, 1/1 Your Choice; vary your answers by subject/time period, use judgment as to what category your ancient history questions fall under)
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.
Side Events
We will be running both RMPFest II and Walden 3 at this site. Scheduling will be figured out once we can come to a consensus on what is amenable for the players who wish to play these events.
Contact Information
If you wish to attend this tournament, or if you have any questions about it, you can e-mail me at [email protected]. Please inform me of the number of teams, buzzers, and moderators you intend to bring, as well as whether or not you believe you qualify for the travel discount.
I hope to see many of you in scenic Urbana-Champaign this November!
Location
This tournament will most likely be held at Gregory Hall which is located at the intersection of Wright and Armory streets. The full address is:
810 S. Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801
There is ample parking in the area including lot E-3 which is right next to the main library and less than 5 minutes from Gregory Hall.
Packet Submission
This year IO will be a mirror of the TIT set, so please send all packet submissions to Chris Ray at [email protected].
Here is the packet submission and pricing information, copied verbatim from the TIT announcement thread:
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 CHRIS RAY KNOW).
-$5 - Working buzzer discount, unlimited
-$10 - Competent moderator discount
+$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.
PACKET GUIDELINES:
Distribution 24/24
4/4 History (1/1 US, 2/2 European, 1/1 World, 1/1 Your Choice; vary your answers by subject/time period, use judgment as to what category your ancient history questions fall under)
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.
Side Events
We will be running both RMPFest II and Walden 3 at this site. Scheduling will be figured out once we can come to a consensus on what is amenable for the players who wish to play these events.
Contact Information
If you wish to attend this tournament, or if you have any questions about it, you can e-mail me at [email protected]. Please inform me of the number of teams, buzzers, and moderators you intend to bring, as well as whether or not you believe you qualify for the travel discount.
I hope to see many of you in scenic Urbana-Champaign this November!