Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Northeast, 02/27/2021

Old college threads.
Locked
katherine
Lulu
Posts: 57
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 12:12 pm
Location: MD

Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Northeast, 02/27/2021

Post by katherine »

Overview
This is an announcement for the Northeast collegiate site of the 2021 Southeast-Midwest Housewrite, which will take place on February 27. This tournament will cost $70 per team, with discounts outlined below. Ethan Ashbrook and I (Katherine Lei) will be directing this tournament through Discord.

Registration Information and Discounts
The registration form for this tournament can be found here.

Payment for this tournament will be exclusively over Venmo; further information concerning payment will be available upon registration. If this is an issue, mention that in the email and we can work something out.

The base entry fee is $70. The following discounts are available for teams to claim:

-$20 for a shorthanded team of 1 or 2 players
-$20 if the university has not fielded a team at a tournament since August 1, 2019

Staffing
To sign up to staff for this tournament, fill out this form. Staffers will be paid $40 for 9 rounds of moderating.

Set
The difficulty of the Southeast-Midwest Housewrite is around the level of 2018 PACE or 2019 ILLIAC; about 1.5 dots on the dot scale. The set is edited by Aidan Leahy [UGA], Govind Prabhakar [Georgetown], Arjun Nageswaran [Adlai E. Stevenson], Katherine Lei [MIT], Dylan Bowman [UIUC], Ethan Strombeck [Stanford], William Groger [Miami Valley], and Ethan Ashbrook [UMN] with featured writers from Yale, UIUC, Stanton College Prep, Lambert, and University Lab. Taylor Harvey [UF] will be acting as a general overseer. The distribution per packet is as follows:

4.00/4.00 Literature
4.00/4.00 History
4.00/4.00 Science
3.00/3.00 Fine Arts
1.00/1.00 Religious Beliefs and Traditions
1.00/1.00 Myths and Legends
0.75/0.75 Philosophy
0.75/0.75 Social Science
0.50/0.50 Current Events
0.50/0.50 Geography
0.50/0.50 Popular Culture and Other Academic

Eligibility
This tournament is exclusive to college teams; middle school and high school players may not play or moderate for this tournament. There will be no formal restrictions on strong players but a good rule of thumb would be “if you played ACF Winter, you can probably play this tournament.”

This tournament is restricted to teams from the following states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The regions are outlined in the map below.

Image

Misconduct
This tournament will not tolerate misconduct such as, but not limited to: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, verbal harassment of players or staff, and generally inappropriate comments. A link to the misconduct form as well as the IKEA Code of Conduct, to which we’ll be adhering, will be available and visible on the server.

Cheating
Cheating will not be tolerated at this tournament. Video will be required for all players; if this is not an option please let us know beforehand via email or Discord. We reserve the right to remove anyone whom we believe to be cheating from the tournament. Our protocol for dealing with cheaters can also be found on the Code of Conduct linked above.
Last edited by katherine on Wed Dec 23, 2020 1:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
Katherine Lei
Montgomery Blair HS '20
MIT '24
katherine
Lulu
Posts: 57
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 12:12 pm
Location: MD

Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Northeast, 02/27/2021

Post by katherine »

Current Field (18/18)

Harvard - 3
Bowdoin College - 1
Brown - 2
Amherst College - 2
Tufts University - 2
MIT - 3
Williams College - 1
Columbia University - 1
Brandeis University - 3
Katherine Lei
Montgomery Blair HS '20
MIT '24
katherine
Lulu
Posts: 57
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 12:12 pm
Location: MD

Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Northeast, 02/27/2021

Post by katherine »

The field for this tournament is now full. An email has been sent out to registered teams.
Katherine Lei
Montgomery Blair HS '20
MIT '24
linpaws
Lulu
Posts: 19
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:09 am

Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Northeast, 02/27/2021

Post by linpaws »

I heard that this tournament doesn't have an advantaged finals; could I ask for the reasoning behind this decision? I could be wrong, but to me it seems pretty standard in quiz bowl to have advantaged finals by default, foregone only with a good reason (like a large number of rounds or playing the same team multiple times already). This tournament has 9 rounds and a single round robin among playoff teams.
Swapnil Garg, Harker '18, MIT '22, Berkeley '27?
User avatar
Ehtna
Lulu
Posts: 77
Joined: Sat Dec 23, 2017 3:25 pm

Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Northeast, 02/27/2021

Post by Ehtna »

linpaws wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 10:09 pm I heard that this tournament doesn't have an advantaged finals; could I ask for the reasoning behind this decision? I could be wrong, but to me it seems pretty standard in quiz bowl to have advantaged finals by default, foregone only with a good reason (like a large number of rounds or playing the same team multiple times already). This tournament has 9 rounds and a single round robin among playoff teams.
Apart from wanting to make sure we finish at a reasonable time, this decision is due to the set's specific packet limitations. This set is producing 20 total packets, of which 10 are being allotted for the first round of mirrors and 10 are being allotted for the second round of mirrors (yet to be announced). In order for the two rounds of mirrors to be feasible, we have to limit ourselves to only using 10 packets for this first round, sacrificing the advantaged final. Thus, everyone who plays these first mirrors will get to hear nine packets, with one packet reserved for potential finals.
Ethan Ashbrook [he/him]
Uni Lab 2020
Minnesota 2024
linpaws
Lulu
Posts: 19
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:09 am

Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Northeast, 02/27/2021

Post by linpaws »

While I sympathize with the unfortunate circumstances of online quiz bowl, I take issue with the packet limitation reason. College quiz bowl sets generally have at least 13 packets, with many having 15. Granted, this is an online tournament, and there has been some discussion about reducing the number of packets produced for online tournaments; however I think 10 is too big of a jump from 13-15. By having only 10 packets and no advantaged final, this tournament would break years of quiz bowl standards. The general norm in quiz bowl is that having only one bad game should not disqualify you from the championship; advantaged finals are a mechanism to uphold that. I think getting rid of that is a much bigger sacrifice than, say, having only 7 or 8 rounds in the tournament. (There was some discussion on this in viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23059.)

20 packets really isn't enough for 2 tournaments, as it is around 1.5x the size of a normal tournament. I strongly urge you to have an advantaged finals, and write 2 more packets for the future tournament if necessary. The existence of other tournaments should not sacrifice the quality of this one.

However it seems that 2020 ACF Winter @ Yale (which I didn't play) had the same structure as this tournament, so there is some precedent for this (that I take issue with).
Swapnil Garg, Harker '18, MIT '22, Berkeley '27?
User avatar
Zealots of Stockholm
Tidus
Posts: 622
Joined: Fri Jul 10, 2015 3:28 am
Location: Atlanta, GA

Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Northeast, 02/27/2021

Post by Zealots of Stockholm »

linpaws wrote: Fri Feb 26, 2021 7:08 pm While I sympathize with the unfortunate circumstances of online quiz bowl, I take issue with the packet limitation reason. College quiz bowl sets generally have at least 13 packets, with many having 15. Granted, this is an online tournament, and there has been some discussion about reducing the number of packets produced for online tournaments; however I think 10 is too big of a jump from 13-15. By having only 10 packets and no advantaged final, this tournament would break years of quiz bowl standards. The general norm in quiz bowl is that having only one bad game should not disqualify you from the championship; advantaged finals are a mechanism to uphold that. I think getting rid of that is a much bigger sacrifice than, say, having only 7 or 8 rounds in the tournament. (There was some discussion on this in viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23059.)

20 packets really isn't enough for 2 tournaments, as it is around 1.5x the size of a normal tournament. I strongly urge you to have an advantaged finals, and write 2 more packets for the future tournament if necessary. The existence of other tournaments should not sacrifice the quality of this one.

However it seems that 2020 ACF Winter @ Yale (which I didn't play) had the same structure as this tournament, so there is some precedent for this (that I take issue with).
Ethan just explained that there are 20 packets, which in my opinion is much better split into 2 tournaments than having one tournament and 8 extra packets that some people read on their own time. Are you seriously saying you’d rather have the reassurance of an advantaged final than the existence of another full day of Quizbowl? If this were something that’s more of a “main” event on the calendar like Acf regionals, I would be just as adamant that there be an advantaged final as you are here, but for something at this difficulty I really don’t see the point in making a big deal out of this, especially when the writers/editors have produced 2 tournaments worth of questions!

Also fwiw, plenty of online tournaments this year have had a policy of “only having finals if it’s 1 game” since online tournaments already run long.
Chandler West
Staff, Emory
Vanderbilt University '22
Auburn University '20
Good Hope High School (Cullman, AL) '16
Full Member, ACF; Member, PACE
Writer/editor, ACF, PACE, IQBT
Votre Kickstarter Est Nul
Rikku
Posts: 363
Joined: Wed May 06, 2015 2:09 pm

Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Northeast, 02/27/2021

Post by Votre Kickstarter Est Nul »

At the risk of making a bigger deal of this than need be, the issue seems less "advantaged final vs. no advantaged final" and more "should quizbowl sets adhere to important norms." One such norm is that a set be complete, i.e. a full and good tournament can be run on it, including, if need be, finals. That things are online does not make the tournament less "real." People still pay standard fees for tournaments, play on school teams like regular tournaments, etc. IKEA, LIT, Regs, Workshop, etc all wrote their tournaments knowing it'd be online and adhered to the norm that there be enough packets to play an advantaged final. I also agree with Swapnil about advantaged finals, and though it's barely relevant, Princeton and Virginia did in fact pay a finals last week despite it being announced this wouldn't happen. The important fact here is that given a desire to play a finals, they could in fact do so.

The editors of the tournament, as it currently stands, will be making money from two sets of mirrors despite not actually writing two complete sets. This is no different than if workshop had announced last month that they were only producing 10 packets. While writing 20 packets worth of questions is admirable, it isn't necessary, and isn't the same as writing two full tournaments. Since they will be making 2 tournaments worth of money, they should produce 2 tournaments worth of questions.

I don't mean to mention the money issue to imply greed on behalf of anyone. I don't think it's like that. But the fact is that as currently stands a set is being split, thereby making two incomplete sets both of which will be played (and paid for) as individual regular sets. I think Swapnil is right, and y'all should either write 22+ packets to make it two tournaments or trim it down to one tournament.

EDIT: i typoed
Emmett Laurie
East Brunswick '16
Rutgers University '21
katherine
Lulu
Posts: 57
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 12:12 pm
Location: MD

Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Northeast, 02/27/2021

Post by katherine »

Congratulations to MIT A for winning the tournament by clearing the field with a 9-0 record! Stats can be found here. Category stats can be found here. Invoices will be sent to teams in a few days.

If you're from the Northeast region but wish to play at a future mirror, let me know at [email protected]. The global announcement, which contains the link to all of the sites, can be found here.
Katherine Lei
Montgomery Blair HS '20
MIT '24
Locked