CULT Nationals - VCU - 6/26/10-6/27/10
Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 3:03 pm
CULT (Competition on Usually Likable Trash) Nationals
Saturday and Sunday, June 26-27, 2010
ANNOUNCEMENT:
I am pleased to announce the first incarnation of CULT Nationals, a new national trash (popular culture) tournament. This tournament will take place at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA on Saturday and Sunday, June 26-27, 2010.
QUESTIONS:
The questions for this event are all being written by the editing team, teams do not need to submit packets. The editing team currently consists of Mike Bentley, David Letzler, Jonathan Magin, Sid Chandrasekhar and Christopher Greenwood. We are currently targeting 20 rounds of questions, although a few of them will be reserved for tie-breakers and finals.
The questions themselves will be written to the standards of modern quizbowl. We will be working very hard to make sure that tossups have clues in the right order and reward the teams with the most knowledge of a subject. The target length for tossups in this tournament is 7 Lines in 10 Point Times New Roman font with 1 inch margins. No tossups will exceed 8 lines. We will also be working hard on bonus consistency. I am hopeful that almost all of the questions for this tournament will be complete by the end of January to allow ample time for editing and play-testing.
I would encourage people to take a look at Chris McCray (http://quizbowl.stanford.edu/archive/cmk07/index.html) for an example of what trash questions of this type will generally look like (note that the distribution and difficulty of that tournament was slightly different than this tournament).
A note about the difficulty at this tournament: I expect that this tournament will end up being easier than what one may expect for a national tournament. Tossups are still going to be clue-dense and require significant knowledge of a subject to answer in the first few clues, but by the end I expect most teams to be converting most tossups. Additionally, I expect most teams to routinely be able to convert the easy part of bonuses. My main reasons for doing this are mostly expounded in a post I made following ACF Nationals last year on the difficulty of national tournaments. My main arguments there were that by upping the difficulty of these tournaments, we’re skewing the topics asked about in a peculiar and sometimes not beneficial way for the benefit of the top teams. By keeping the difficulty down (but still providing strictly pyramidal tossups and well-defined bonuses), the tournament can test both the top teams and the bottom teams at the tournament. Furthermore, for this specific tournament, I hope that a slightly lower difficulty will attract more teams and won’t put off the top teams due to the somewhat anti-canonical nature of trash questions.
The distribution will likely look like this:
4/4 Movies
4/4 TV
4/4 Music
4/4 Sports
1/1 Videogames
3/3 Other (Comics, Internet, Trash Lit, Consumerama, Cross-Disciplinary Questions, Everything Else)
There’s a slight possibility that TV might get bumped down to 3.5/3.5 or 3/3 and Other increased a little bit.
The packets will not be themed.
SCHEDULE:
This will be a two day tournament. We plan to run somewhere around 10-12 rounds on Saturday, 6/27/10 and the remaining rounds on Sunday, 6/28/10. I expect the main event to go no later than 4 PM on Sunday.
Since this is a summer tournament attracting what will hopefully be a large field, I am open to having side events on Friday, Saturday and/or Sunday night. I will give precedence to trash events, but am willing to have academic (or hybrid) side tournaments if no one comes forward with satisfactory side events.
Details about when and where to meet on Saturday and Sunday will be forthcoming.
ELIGIBILITY:
All teams are eligible to compete in this tournament, regardless of school affiliation.
Teams do not need to qualify for this tournament.
There will be a cap of 32 teams for this tournament. Spots will be reserved on a first-come-first-serve basis. Depending on how many teams we get interested in the tournament, it’s possible that teams registering late may need to provide a down payment to guarantee their entry in the tournament. More details on this will be announced later.
PRICING:
+$160 Base Fee per Team
-$20 Discount per Team for paying before 4/15/10
-$20 Discount for a 2nd team from a school
-$40 Discount for a 3rd or more team from a school
-$10 Working Buzzer (at least 8 functional ports) Discount per School
-$40 Discount for a competent staffer who staffs both days per School
-$5 Discount per player on a team for traveling from the Pacific Time Zone (e.g. a team of 4 players from California will receive a $20 discount)
+$25 Penalty per Team per Day for arriving after the posted registration time
Minimum Fee per Team: $80
Make checks payable to “Michael Bentley”.
Teams that have not paid by registration on Saturday, June 26th (without working out a prior agreement) will not be allowed to play.
TRAVEL DETAILS:
VCU will be providing further details on the best way to get to campus, local hotel guides and some recommendations for things to do in Richmond besides playing in this tournament.
RULES:
We will use standard ACF rules at this tournament, with the following added rule: Any use of pseudonyms will result in forfeiture of all rounds where pseudonyms are used. You’re free to call your team whatever you want, but individual pseudonyms make it far more difficult to keep stats and slow down the entire tournament.
There will not be lames at this tournament.
STAFFING:
We are in great need of volunteers to staff this tournament. We would like to be able to support up to 32 teams, meaning we’ll need at least 18 staffers. Ideally, we’d like to have closer to 32 staffers to ensure that every room has a moderator and a scorekeeper.
We’ll be providing lunch to staffers on both days of the tournament, and dinner on Saturday. We can probably also arrange to pay for some or all of the travel cost for staffers arriving by car.
If you are interested in staffing, please e-mail me at [email protected].
TO REGISTER:
To officially register your team, please send me an e-mail at [email protected].
Thanks,
Mike Bentley
Chief Editor, CULT
Saturday and Sunday, June 26-27, 2010
ANNOUNCEMENT:
I am pleased to announce the first incarnation of CULT Nationals, a new national trash (popular culture) tournament. This tournament will take place at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA on Saturday and Sunday, June 26-27, 2010.
QUESTIONS:
The questions for this event are all being written by the editing team, teams do not need to submit packets. The editing team currently consists of Mike Bentley, David Letzler, Jonathan Magin, Sid Chandrasekhar and Christopher Greenwood. We are currently targeting 20 rounds of questions, although a few of them will be reserved for tie-breakers and finals.
The questions themselves will be written to the standards of modern quizbowl. We will be working very hard to make sure that tossups have clues in the right order and reward the teams with the most knowledge of a subject. The target length for tossups in this tournament is 7 Lines in 10 Point Times New Roman font with 1 inch margins. No tossups will exceed 8 lines. We will also be working hard on bonus consistency. I am hopeful that almost all of the questions for this tournament will be complete by the end of January to allow ample time for editing and play-testing.
I would encourage people to take a look at Chris McCray (http://quizbowl.stanford.edu/archive/cmk07/index.html) for an example of what trash questions of this type will generally look like (note that the distribution and difficulty of that tournament was slightly different than this tournament).
A note about the difficulty at this tournament: I expect that this tournament will end up being easier than what one may expect for a national tournament. Tossups are still going to be clue-dense and require significant knowledge of a subject to answer in the first few clues, but by the end I expect most teams to be converting most tossups. Additionally, I expect most teams to routinely be able to convert the easy part of bonuses. My main reasons for doing this are mostly expounded in a post I made following ACF Nationals last year on the difficulty of national tournaments. My main arguments there were that by upping the difficulty of these tournaments, we’re skewing the topics asked about in a peculiar and sometimes not beneficial way for the benefit of the top teams. By keeping the difficulty down (but still providing strictly pyramidal tossups and well-defined bonuses), the tournament can test both the top teams and the bottom teams at the tournament. Furthermore, for this specific tournament, I hope that a slightly lower difficulty will attract more teams and won’t put off the top teams due to the somewhat anti-canonical nature of trash questions.
The distribution will likely look like this:
4/4 Movies
4/4 TV
4/4 Music
4/4 Sports
1/1 Videogames
3/3 Other (Comics, Internet, Trash Lit, Consumerama, Cross-Disciplinary Questions, Everything Else)
There’s a slight possibility that TV might get bumped down to 3.5/3.5 or 3/3 and Other increased a little bit.
The packets will not be themed.
SCHEDULE:
This will be a two day tournament. We plan to run somewhere around 10-12 rounds on Saturday, 6/27/10 and the remaining rounds on Sunday, 6/28/10. I expect the main event to go no later than 4 PM on Sunday.
Since this is a summer tournament attracting what will hopefully be a large field, I am open to having side events on Friday, Saturday and/or Sunday night. I will give precedence to trash events, but am willing to have academic (or hybrid) side tournaments if no one comes forward with satisfactory side events.
Details about when and where to meet on Saturday and Sunday will be forthcoming.
ELIGIBILITY:
All teams are eligible to compete in this tournament, regardless of school affiliation.
Teams do not need to qualify for this tournament.
There will be a cap of 32 teams for this tournament. Spots will be reserved on a first-come-first-serve basis. Depending on how many teams we get interested in the tournament, it’s possible that teams registering late may need to provide a down payment to guarantee their entry in the tournament. More details on this will be announced later.
PRICING:
+$160 Base Fee per Team
-$20 Discount per Team for paying before 4/15/10
-$20 Discount for a 2nd team from a school
-$40 Discount for a 3rd or more team from a school
-$10 Working Buzzer (at least 8 functional ports) Discount per School
-$40 Discount for a competent staffer who staffs both days per School
-$5 Discount per player on a team for traveling from the Pacific Time Zone (e.g. a team of 4 players from California will receive a $20 discount)
+$25 Penalty per Team per Day for arriving after the posted registration time
Minimum Fee per Team: $80
Make checks payable to “Michael Bentley”.
Teams that have not paid by registration on Saturday, June 26th (without working out a prior agreement) will not be allowed to play.
TRAVEL DETAILS:
VCU will be providing further details on the best way to get to campus, local hotel guides and some recommendations for things to do in Richmond besides playing in this tournament.
RULES:
We will use standard ACF rules at this tournament, with the following added rule: Any use of pseudonyms will result in forfeiture of all rounds where pseudonyms are used. You’re free to call your team whatever you want, but individual pseudonyms make it far more difficult to keep stats and slow down the entire tournament.
There will not be lames at this tournament.
STAFFING:
We are in great need of volunteers to staff this tournament. We would like to be able to support up to 32 teams, meaning we’ll need at least 18 staffers. Ideally, we’d like to have closer to 32 staffers to ensure that every room has a moderator and a scorekeeper.
We’ll be providing lunch to staffers on both days of the tournament, and dinner on Saturday. We can probably also arrange to pay for some or all of the travel cost for staffers arriving by car.
If you are interested in staffing, please e-mail me at [email protected].
TO REGISTER:
To officially register your team, please send me an e-mail at [email protected].
Thanks,
Mike Bentley
Chief Editor, CULT