What Time Should Tournaments End?

[cvdwightw]

This is inspired by the UTC Tournament Discussion, and I didn't feel like butting my head in there to further divert the topic.

Hypothetical situation: You are running a tournament. Assume it's NAQT timed, 20/20 untimed, standard 4 quarter, or any other format that takes between 30 and 40 minutes a round.

You have guaranteed all teams five games, perhaps more if it's a smaller tournament. The winner of your tournament will have played somewhere between 10 and 15 rounds. Your tournament is scheduled to start sometime between 9:00 and 10:00. What time should you shoot for when devising your tournament schedule?

I will start off by voting for between 5:00 and 6:00. At the college level, I like it a little later. Perhaps it is just that over on this coast we like to do things early - start early, end early, but a lot of coaches prefer to have the tournament done in time to have a reasonable amount of Saturday night left, whether that's for driving, team dinner, or something else. Then again, we also have small enough fields that just about everyone is guaranteed 10 games.

5:00 to 6:00 also gives you a reasonable amount of leeway if you have unforeseen problems. Telling a volunteer moderator/coach/etc. that the tournament will be over by 6:00, and running late, is far better than if that tournament was supposed to be over by 8:00.

[BuzzerZen]

My stance is that a regular-season high school tournament that ends after 6:00 PM has done something terribly wrong.

[Matt Weiner]

You give teams 10-12 games so they can get their money's worth and you still send everyone home at 5, because it only takes half an hour to run any kind of quizbowl match if you know what you're doing. The problem is never over-ambitious scheduling or long questions; the problem is always terrible, untrained moderators who lose control of rooms and let teams chatter between questions, combined with a perverse idea of "fun(n)" that involves multiple instances of gathering all the teams together for rambling speeches about nothing.

I read at Maryland's high school tournament on Sunday. The event ran 12 rounds (and 80% of the teams played until round 10; they didn't have the benefit of increasingly smaller numbers of rooms to deal with as in single-elim). The sun was certainly still up when everyone went home. It's not that hard, people.

[naturalistic phallacy]

I certainly hope that all tournaments that end by five or six guarantee more than five rounds.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Unless a tournament is advertised to be running multiple events (like how WoQ had the lit singles) or they do something like Vanderbilt where they run a few night rounds that start after dinner, I think every high school tournament should be able to end absolutely no later than 6:30 PM (and that's with only two teams left to play their final plus whoever chooses to watch). My reasoning is that most good formats can be run efficiently in 25 minutes or less for high school because the questions are shorter (6 lines TNR 12 for a lot of things or about 4 lines for NAQT). If you start at 9, that gives for 15 games by my count with an hour lunch by 5:30. I add in the buffer time because there are always going to be minor statistics delays and stuff like that. However, I can't think of a reason to run a tournament more than 15 rounds long (including final). Taking even longer for fewer rounds means your tournament direction must be atrocious.
For college, I mean, with longer questions it can be harder to keep things under control due to moderator speeds being different and some game taking longer to play if people buzz in later and stuff, not to mention a lot of times I think college tournaments are much more informal that high school. However, I'd still say 6 is a good time to aim for wrapping up a 13 round tournament or so, or at least start the finals then.

[dschafer]

My stance is that a regular-season high school tournament that ends after 6:00 PM has done something terribly wrong.

Well put. If you start at 9:00 AM, even at 40 (!!!) minutes a game and an hour for lunch, you can get 12 rounds in by 6:00 PM. If you are ending after that, something has gone horribly wrong.

[Terrible Shorts Depot]

If a hish school tournament ends after 6:00 without there being some sort of extenuating circumstances (eg 17 rounds, disappearing moderators), something has gone wrong. Hell, an NAQT game takes less than 20 minutes. You should be able to get in 2.5 or 3 games an hour. The fewer convocations there are, the better.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

A quick point.

It slightly matters on which day the tournament is held. On Saturdays, i would have less of a problem with a tournament "running late" into a couple of the evening hours, perhaps up to 6 or 7pm. But on Sundays (or god forbid, weekdays), it really needs to be over by 5pm at the latest, since kids just need to get home, and some of these drives are pretty lengthy.

[Sonic the Hedgehog and the Fox]

Another thing that should be taken into consideration is the endurance of the player. Granted, a player isn't going through Modern Decathalon, but I find that more than 12-15 rounds will result in mental fatigue, sort of like voter fatigue and exam fatigue. So, 15 rounds times 30 minutes (at most!) results in 450 minutes, or 7.5 hours. Granting an hour for lunch, and perhaps 30 minutes for errors in starting (regardless of who the fault lies with), that's 9 hours. So, if the tournament is set to begin at 9, it should get out at 6. After that, and you risk both player and moderator fatigue, and general displeasure at the length of time the tournament endured.

And on kids getting home, most quizbowl players are in upper-level courses, which means more homework than the average student. I mean, on a light night, I can get about 4 hours of homework, and on a heavy night...well, let's just say that 2 lab reports, an essay on Emiliano Zapata, and a commentary on Beowulf take a little more time to do.

Edit: For syntax/diction!

[Gautam]

Granted, a player isn't going through Modern Decathalon, but I find that more than 12-15 rounds will result in mental fatigue,

Clearly you haven't played quizbowl yet.

[Stained Diviner]

I generally agree with the above. I'll add that if your targeted finish time is after 5:00, then say so in tournament announcements, invitations, and confirmation letters. Part of the problem with ending late is that families and friends of coaches and students make dinner and evening plans based on an expectation of when they'll get home. I've had students play in tournaments all day and then play in a concert that evening.

Last year, U of I hosted a team tournament and solo tournament on the same day. They told everybody that it would go past dinner time, so people made arrangements and it was OK. Some people didn't enter the individual tournament so that they could get home at a reasonable time, which is also OK.

If you want a 20 round tournament, or if your logistics are so bad that you need a 30 minute break in between matches, you can still run a tournament. However, you have a duty to tell teams that before they show up. Teams can then choose ahead of time to clear out their evening schedule, book a hotel for the night, and/or not show up.

[Sonic the Hedgehog and the Fox]

Granted, a player isn't going through Modern Decathalon, but I find that more than 12-15 rounds will result in mental fatigue,

Clearly you haven't played quizbowl yet.

Maybe that's just my ADHD then, but I'll add that I've been on Varsity since my freshman year.

Can you elaborate as to why a player wouldn't experience mental fatigue after approximately 7.5 hours of academic competition? I mean, it's at least slightly comparable to SAT or AP tests, with the intense concentration for a limited amount of time. That, of course, could also be related to individual playing style, which is something completely different.

Edit: For logic/elaboration!

[Stat Boy]

I thought Gautam was referring to this:

Granted, a player isn't going through Modern Decathalon

not this:

I find that more than 12-15 rounds will result in mental fatigue

[Sonic the Hedgehog and the Fox]

I thought Gautam was referring to this:

Granted, a player isn't going through Modern Decathalon

not this:

I find that more than 12-15 rounds will result in mental fatigue

Well, it's not like a player is going into Modern Decathalon.

Modern Decathalon can't touch quizbowl.

[at your pleasure]

I would say adam's right. nobody would seriously argue with the proposition that more than 15 rounds per day is fatuiging(of course,matters are different if a total number of rounds greater than 15 is achived only by the addition of side events)
another consaideration is the distance teams travel. If a DC tournament attacts 27 DC area teams, Chater, Kellenberg, and Ike, you can afford a longer tournament than if everyone is traveling a long ways.

[quizbowllee]

I was an athlete in high school and I can attest to the fact that I was never more exhausted than I was after a quiz bowl tournament. I never understood it, but quiz bowl is the most exhausting competition I've ever been part of.

[Matthew D]

I will agree with Lee on this one.. I could play an entire basketball game and not feel half as tired as I did after quizbowl

[Terrible Shorts Depot]

I'm not sure what sports you all are playing, but I've never experienced temporary blindness or vomiting after quiz bowl. Mental fatigue does exist, however.

[Auks Ran Ova]

I'm not sure what sports you all are playing, but I've never experienced temporary blindness or vomiting after quiz bowl.

And you call yourself a real quizbowl player.

[pray for elves]

I'm not sure what sports you all are playing, but I've never experienced temporary blindness or vomiting after quiz bowl.

And you call yourself a real quizbowl player.

These symptoms start to manifest themselves after playing Chicago-Open-2008-length tournaments.

[Stat Boy]

I've never experienced temporary blindness or vomiting after quiz bowl

You should ask Shantanu about his WoQ experience...

[lasercats]

It's always nice to have a tournament finish and leave the team enough time to paint the town red.

[Matthew D]

Well I can honestly say that I have never threw up after a basketball game in the entire time I played from 2nd grade till I graduated

[Terrible Shorts Depot]

Since I live in a quiz bowl desert that is 4 hours from everything, I have yet to attempt some sort of 18 round quiz bowl marathon. That doesn't mean I don't want to, though. In fact, if someone will direct me to a tournament that has more than 15 or 16 rounds of play in a day, I would definitely attempt to attend.

[Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe]

I've never experienced temporary blindness or vomiting after quiz bowl

You should ask Shantanu about his WoQ experience...

Yeah, seriously, don't avoid sleeping or eating for three days before a quizbowl tournament. Really. Also, eat food at regular intervals. It's good for you.

[Joshua Rutsky]

One point worth considering, perhaps--the question for me isn't always when a tourney should end, but when it should BEGIN, particularly if you are hoping to draw out-of-state competitors. For practical reasons this year we are having to travel to and from tourneys on the same day--my varsity team has four males and two females, plus myself, and that means three hotel rooms if we're staying overnight, which means a big chunk of my budget is gone. I'm all in favor of tourneys ending by 5:00 (I've been able to consistently finish twelve round tourneys by 4:30 with a 9:00 AM start and a lunch break), but I'd be willing to go to 6PM or even 7PM if it meant a start that would let me travel without leaving at 5 AM. That, of course, is the price you pay for living in central Alabama (well, that's one of the prices, anyway), but to be a reasonably competitive team, you really do have to get out of state a few times a year, and Nashville and Atlanta are both about three hours from us.

I've also started waiving the fee for out of state teams at our tourney, if only to encourage the competition. I'd rather make up the fundraising difference elsewhere and get more teams in to play, and that extra $60-$80 pays for one night at a hotel (two rooms if you can get a good deal on priceline...)