2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

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Quinctilius Varus
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2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

This is the official announcement for 2020 ACF Winter, which will be held on November 7th, 2020. (Note that this is two weeks earlier than the original date.) It will target a difficulty halfway between ACF Fall and ACF Regionals. The tournament will be head edited by me (William Golden) and subject edited by Ganon Evans, Nick Jensen, Vishwa Shanmugam, Bryanna Shao, Christopher Sims, Jaskaran Singh, Andrew Wang, and Chandler West. Andrew will also provide science oversight.

FORMAT:

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ACF Winter will be held entirely online this year. ACF will coordinate with host schools to hold mirrors using an online platform (to be announced later), and will work to create the most authentic and engaging quizbowl experience possible under these circumstances.

PACKET SUBMISSION:

Any team with at least two people on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or high school student) prior to September 1, 2019, is required to submit a half-packet, unless it is a high school team attending a high-school-only mirror. Please email [email protected] if you are unsure whether your team is required to submit a half-packet. A team that is not required to submit a packet may submit an optional packet by the no-penalty deadline for a $50 discount.

* For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT SCT (Division I or Division II), NAQT ICT, and typical college-level academic invitationals count as regular collegiate academic tournaments. Pop culture or “hybrid” tournaments, HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT’s Collegiate Novice series sets do not.

Here is the submission schedule.

September 6th, 2020: -$50
September 25th, 2020: -$25
October 4th, 2020: no penalty
October 18th, 2020: +$25
October 25th, 2020: +$50

If teams required to submit a half-packet have not submitted by November 1st, they will be dropped from the tournament, with no exceptions.

If your team is going to submit a half-packet, whether required or not, email [email protected] to request a distribution. All finished packets must be sent to that email before 11:59 PDT on the day listed to receive the discount or penalty. Please format the half-packet in .doc or .docx before sending it. The email subject line should list the name of the school, the team number (if applicable), and the words “half-packet.”

REGISTRATION:

Fill out the central 2020 ACF Winter registration form with all relevant information. The form is here. The field for each site can be found here.

If possible, teams should register for the site that is geographically closest to them and/or is in the region they would normally attend. The field cap for all sites is 18, after which teams will be placed on a waitlist or potentially assigned to another site. Please register by November 2, 2020.

DISTRIBUTION:

The subject distribution is listed at this link. Winter will be using the same distribution as Regionals.

FEES:
Base fee per team: $120
New to quizbowl discount: –$80
Shorthanded discount (1-2 players): –$60
Staffers: –$25 per staffer with functional laptop. Staffers must register with ACF in advance.

The new to quizbowl discount is for schools that did not send a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (exclusively Novice tournaments do not count) since September 2019, and have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school.

Host sites will bill teams as soon as possible after the teams register. Teams should pay their host sites by whatever method is convenient for the hosts, who will in turn pay ACF by check, bank transfer, cash, or PayPal.

TIPS AND GUIDELINES:
- Please make sure your questions are harder than questions in ACF Fall and easier than at ACF Regionals. 2019 EFT is a good difficulty target. A majority of your tossup answers should conceivably be a tossup answer at ACF Fall.
- Questions should be written in 10-pt Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Although you may submit longer questions, tossups will be capped at seven lines for the tournament. Each bonus part should be a maximum of three lines in length, with the majority being one or two lines long.
- When writing bonuses, aim for the easy parts to be converted by around 90% of teams. The giveaways for tossups should also conceivably be answered by the majority of teams. While creative questions are great, don’t sacrifice playability for novelty.

More information can be found in ACF’s packet submission guidelines .

HOSTS:
If you are interested in hosting an online mirror of ACF Winter, fill out this form. If you have any questions about hosting or about the form, contact ACF’s Mirror Coordinator, Margaret Tebbe, at [email protected]. Hosts must abide by ACF’s Hosting Guidelines, which will be revised to reflect requirements for online tournaments.

Mirrors will by default be regional. One benefit of online tournaments, however, is that smaller sites can be condensed without creating transportation barriers. ACF reserves the right to move teams and staffers between sites. ACF intends to mirror 2020 ACF Winter in the following regions:

Northeast: Yale
Upper Mid-Atlantic: Rutgers
Lower Mid-Atlantic: UMD
East Coast Overflow: TBD
Southeast: Vanderbilt
Great Lakes: Ohio State
Midwest: Alex Damisch
North: Iowa
South Central: UT Austin
Mountain West + Northwest: Washington
California: Southern California
Eastern Canada: Toronto
UK: Warwick
High school only: High School

HIGH SCHOOL MIRRORS:

ACF Winter will be available for high school mirrors. If you want to host a high school mirror of Winter, please email [email protected]. High school mirrors are restricted to high school teams; no college teams can participate.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to email [email protected].

PACKETS RECEIVED:

-$50 deadline:

Berkeley A
Cambridge A
Florida A
Florida B
North Carolina A
North Carolina B
Princeton A
Princeton B
UCSD A

-$25 deadline:

McGill A
Nebraska A (-$50)
NYU A
NYU B
Oxford A
Purdue A
Purdue B
Rutgers B

-$0 deadline:

Boise State A
Bowdoin A
Carleton A
Columbia A
Cornell A
Cornell B
Depaul A
Duke A
Georgia Tech A
Georgia Tech B
Harvard B
Iowa B
Liberty A
Liberty B
McMaster A
MSU A
MSU B (-$50)
MSU C (-$50)
NYU C (-$50)
Rutgers A
SIU-Edwardsville A
Virginia A (-$50)
USC A
Yale A

+$25 deadline:

Brown A
Claremont A
Colorado A
Harvard A
Illinois A
Iowa A
Minnesota A
Minnesota B
MIT A
MIT B
Michigan A
Oxford B
Penn A
Penn B
Penn State A
Rice A
VCU A
Warwick A

+$50 deadline:

Auburn A
Carnegie Mellon A
Colgate A
Colorado B
Columbia B
Illinois B
Southampton A
Swarthmore A
WUSTL A
WUSTL B
WUSTL C

+$80 deadline:

Amherst A
Last edited by Quinctilius Varus on Fri Oct 30, 2020 2:29 pm, edited 15 times in total.
William Golden
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

Thanks for getting this up! Very glad to see that ACF has put good plans together for this fall's quizbowl season. Look forward to seeing you all virtually!
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Carlos Be »

Quinctilius Varus wrote: Sun Aug 09, 2020 2:39 pm and subject edited by Ganon Evans, Nick Jensen, Vishwa Shanmugam, Bryanna Shao, Christopher Sims, Jaskaran Singh, Andrew Wang, and Chandler West.
Is it ACF's policy not to specify which editor is in charge of which categories? I assume that some people know who's doing what anyway, either from talking to the editors or by knowing their specialities, so it might as well be publicly announced.
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

Carlos Be wrote: Tue Aug 11, 2020 3:12 pm Is it ACF's policy not to specify which editor is in charge of which categories? I assume that some people know who's doing what anyway, either from talking to the editors or by knowing their specialities, so it might as well be publicly announced.
I'm happy to specify each editor's categories:

Ganon Evans: World History, Other Fine Arts, Geo/CE/Pop Culture/Misc.
Nick Jensen: American History, Chemistry, Religion, Social Science
Vishwa Shanmugam: Biology, Other Science, Mythology
Bryanna Shao: British, European, and World/Other Literature
Chris Sims: Classical Music and Philosophy
Jaskaran Singh: European and Ancient/Misc. History
Andrew Wang: Physics
Chandler West: American Literature, Painting/Sculpture
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by linpaws »

Are there plans to have some kind of advanced stats at this tournament? For example, TangStats (https://gemeln.github.io/) was used successfully at the BLAST online high school mirror in April (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23908, https://grogerranks.com/2020/04/18/blas ... e-writeup/).
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

A reminder that the first packet submission deadline is tonight!
linpaws wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 6:35 pm Are there plans to have some kind of advanced stats at this tournament? For example, TangStats (https://gemeln.github.io/) was used successfully at the BLAST online high school mirror in April (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23908, https://grogerranks.com/2020/04/18/blas ... e-writeup/).
Not currently, but I will update the post if any plans are made to incorporate advanced stats.
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

Reminder that the -$25 deadline is at midnight Pacific time on September 20th. I've also updated the main post with a list of teams who submitted by the -$50 deadline. Please let me know if that information is inaccurate.
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

The -$25 deadline has been extended to 11:59 PDT on Friday, September 25th. Please send your packets in, and make sure to request a distribution if you haven't already!
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

T-minus 24 hours until the extended -$25 deadline is over. Get those packets in!
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

I've updated the list of submissions by the -$25 deadline. There are three days until the next deadline, which is at 11:59 PDT on Sunday, October 4th. The original post listed the three upcoming deadlines as being on Saturday night; I've adjusted it so that the deadlines are on Sundays.
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by LeoLaw »

Are there any updates on the list of mirrors?
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Snom »

LeoLaw wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 1:56 pm Are there any updates on the list of mirrors?
Image

(Obligatory I'm not associated in any way with ACF, but the forms and fields are linked in the Iowa and OSU mirror announcements in this forum)
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

The original post has been updated with a registration link, the list of sites, and the list of teams who submitted by the -$0 deadline. We are still looking for a Midwest site, two additional East Coast sites, a UK site, and a high school site. Registration and requesting a half-packet distribution are two different processes; please make sure to register even if you have already received a distribution.
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

Don't forget that the +$25 deadline is tomorrow (Sunday, October 18th) at 11:59 PST!
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

We have found hosts for the Midwest, Lower Mid-Atlantic, and United Kingdom sites. We are still searching for another east coast mirror and a high school mirror. I have also updated the list of teams that submitted by the +$25 deadline.
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

A reminder that the +$50 deadline is tomorrow (Sunday, October 25th).
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by caroline »

A reminder to everyone to please register to play Winter on November 7th!! We're excited to see y'all online. :)
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by Quinctilius Varus »

Post updated with every team that made the +$50 deadline. Teams still have until November 1st to submit a packet, although the penalty is an extra $10 a day starting from last Sunday. We're excited for you to play this set!
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by caroline »

We're still in need of more staffers, so please sign up to staff Winter on this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... A/viewform Hope y'all are having a good weekend!
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by caroline »

The 2020 ACF Winter editors have offered to give feedback on packet submissions this year, so a form for requesting feedback has been emailed out to everyone who sent in a submission to Winter (using the email the team registered for Winter under). We hope teams will find this useful to them! If you submitted a packet and didn't receive an email, feel free to contact me at [email protected]. The form closes on Sunday, November 22nd.
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Re: 2020 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 7)

Post by caroline »

caroline wrote: Thu Nov 19, 2020 2:00 am The 2020 ACF Winter editors have offered to give feedback on packet submissions this year, so a form for requesting feedback has been emailed out to everyone who sent in a submission to Winter (using the email the team registered for Winter under). We hope teams will find this useful to them! If you submitted a packet and didn't receive an email, feel free to contact me at [email protected]. The form closes on Sunday, November 22nd.
Hi all — feedback on submissions was emailed out to every team who requested it a few hours ago. If you didn't get an email with your feedback file from me, let me know. We hope teams will find this helpful!
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