I am pleased to announce that the inaugural ACF Winter tournament will take place on the weekend of January 17, 2009, taking the place of Michigan's MLK, which previously occupied this date. What follows is the official global announcement for the tournament with general details and an invitation to submit bids.
Editors
I will be the head editor for this event. I will be assisted by Dennis Jang and Trygve Meade, both of whom you might remember from such tournaments as the last two EFT incarnation and this year's Illinois Open (if you can see the future). Seriously, though, these guys are great.
Hosting
We are now accepting hosting bids for ACF Winter. For a general overview of what is required to host an ACF tournament, please consult the official ACF Hosting Guidelines. To submit a bid, please email me at grapesmoker at gmail dot com or jerry_v at brown dot edu. We currently have hosts in the following regions (contact people in parentheses to register):
- Northeast: Yale (Mike Bilow)
- Southeast: University of Georgia (Chris Chiego)
- North: Carleton College (Eric Hilleman)
- Upper Midwest: University of Michigan (Andy Kravis)
- South America: village of Puente del Inca (Carlos Menem)
- Lower Midwest: Missouri S&T (Matt Chadbourne)
- West: CalTech (Micah Manary)
- Mid-Atlantic: J.S. Reynolds Community College (Dan Goff)
- Southwest
- Northwest
- Canada
Packet Submission
All experienced teams are required to submit packets for ACF Winter. For details regarding who is required to submit a packet and what your packet should look like, please consult the official ACF Packet Submission Guidelines. There will be discounts and penalties for timely and untimely submissions; they are detailed in the guide, but I summarize them below:
Packet submitted by:
Nov. 15: -$50
Nov. 29: -$25 (-$50 for optional packets)
Dec. 13: No penalty (-$25 for optional packets)
Dec. 20: +$25
Jan. 4: +$50
If you do not make special arrangements with me and do not submit a packet by Jan. 4, you will not be allowed to play. There will be no exceptions to this rule. Also, please take special note of the formatting rules for packet submission. Read this carefully: if your packet violates the formatting guidelines, I will send it right back to you. I am not kidding about this.
Difficulty
ACF Winter is intended as a regular-difficulty event. For comparison, I refer you to Penn Bowl 2007 and 2008 as reasonable sets which you should seek to emulate. In case of doubt, err on the side of the easier rather than the harder question. While ACF Winter seeks to be generally more challenging than ACF Fall, it is not the place for that tossup on Independent People you've been dying to write. If you are unsure whether a particular answer choice is appropriate for this tournament, contact the editors and we'll let you know. In general, you should strive to adhere to the question writing practices outlined in the Guide linked to above as well as in this document.
Other Stuff
If you have any other questions about the tournament, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me and I'll do my best to help you with whatever issues arise. This includes questions about question content, money, and so on. We look forward to producing another exciting set for you to play on.