TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

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TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

As discussed with both Trygve and Chris, Harvard will be hosting a northeast mirror of TIT/IO on Sunday, November 15th. Everyone's welcome to play, especially teams of high schoolers playing HFT. This tournament will be held in Sever Hall, which is shown on this map.

PRICING:

Packet submission is required if you have played a collegiate tournament before September 1, 2008, as is customary. Packets should be sent to Chris Ray ([email protected]).

+$100 - Base Fee
-$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 3rd.
-$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 10th.
+$0 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 17th.
+$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 24th.
+$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, October 31st.
+$100 - Packet submitted after that. Last year this system was insufficient to prevent roughly half the packets from arriving within days of the tournament, so teams should understand that packets arriving more than a few days after 10/31/09 will suffer increasingly unpleasant penalties (all the worse if your packet isn't on track and you don't LET ME KNOW).
-$5 - Working buzzer discount, unlimited
-$10 - Competent moderator discount (can be from moderating FIST, or vice versa)
+$10 - Formatting penalty for formatting your questions incorrectly (see formatting section below).
-$20 - Prize for the best unedited packet received in general, and by the best Division II (first two years play quizbowl) only team.

Minimum Fee Per Team: $40.

FIELD
1 Hunter HS
1-2 Dunbar HS
1+ RPI
1 Yale
1 Brown
1 Harvard House
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by grapesmoker »

Will you be wanting to mirror Walden 3 here as well? That should be easy enough to arrange.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

grapesmoker wrote:Will you be wanting to mirror Walden 3 here as well? That should be easy enough to arrange.
Yeah; it seems we are mirroring RMPFest II as well, so it would make sense that one could be Saturday night and the other Sunday night. Sound good?
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by grapesmoker »

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:Yeah; it seems we are mirroring RMPFest II as well, so it would make sense that one could be Saturday night and the other Sunday night. Sound good?
Does this mean that there will also be a Trash regionals this weekend?
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

grapesmoker wrote:
Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:Yeah; it seems we are mirroring RMPFest II as well, so it would make sense that one could be Saturday night and the other Sunday night. Sound good?
Does this mean that there will also be a Trash regionals this weekend?
If there is, we are not hosting it. (Two full tournaments plus two side events is just about the limits of, well, time.)

To wit, it looks like we're doing:

Saturday--HFT (everyone's welcome to staff! lunch status: free) + RMPFest II or Walden 3
Sunday--TIT/IO + RMPFest II or Walden 3

One of the side events may end up being Friday night because of people's likely transportation plans.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Our first registrations come from Hunter, which will be bringing one team, and Dunbar, which will be bringing one or two teams.

Woo!

Also, college teams: clearly a thing of the past at college tournaments.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Ondes Martenot »

Also, college teams: clearly a thing of the past at college tournaments.
RPI will probably bring at least one team to this.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by DumbJaques »

Hey, this is really cool. I absolutely think that seasoned high school squads will find this tournament perfectly appropriate (though predictably challenging). Please check out the main tournament announcement for more info, and note that experienced college squads will be required to submit packets. Anyone who isn't required to submit may send in a packet or half packet for a discount.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Maximus »

Yale will very more than likely come to this.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

On either Saturday or Sunday, I will be directing the Harvard mirror of RMP Fest 2. RMP Fest is a tournament where all of the questions are about religion, mythology, or philosophy. You can read more about RMP Fest 2 here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8454

Harvard RMP Fest 2 will be an open tournament. Anyone can play, including:

(1) college players in town for IO/TIT
(2) high school players in town for HFT
(3) high school coaches in town for HFT
(4) random people off the street

The tournament format will be doubles/triples. High schoolers can play in teams of three players (teams of two players and a coach will also be allowed), while everyone else can play in teams of either two or one.

The fee to play will be $10 per person, regardless of what kind of team you are playing on.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Norman the Lunatic wrote:One of the side events may end up being Friday night because of people's likely transportation plans.
I am going to say that I will likely do this with Walden III, and anyone who wants to play Walden III but doesn't want to deal with transportation hassles is welcome to sleep on someone's floor for Friday and/or Saturday nights.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Aaron »

Put Yale down for one team.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Yale and Columbia's registrations combine to make more college than high school teams registered for this event. More, please!
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by grapesmoker »

Brown will bring probably 2 teams.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Hey, Yetman, Tufts, NYU, and everyone else: come to this tournament!
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by sam.peterson »

Andy -- would you care if Siva, Zhao, and I were to play this?
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

sam.peterson wrote:Andy -- would you care if Siva, Zhao, and I were to play this?
I'll register you tentatively with the understanding that I will pull from you first if we need additional staff. Since we already have (to my knowledge) me/Bruce/Ted/Dallas and presumably the potential of some others (like Katy, Dennis Loo, whatever), we have a fine shot at it.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by grapesmoker »

I have to double-check tomorrow, but I'm fairly sure that Brown is down to 1 team. Also, what's the schedule for doing RMPFest? I want to play and can do so on either day of the weekend. I think if it could happen Saturday night, that would be better for many of us so we don't have to stay late Sunday, but in principle either situation works for me.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

grapesmoker wrote:I have to double-check tomorrow, but I'm fairly sure that Brown is down to 1 team. Also, what's the schedule for doing RMPFest? I want to play and can do so on either day of the weekend. I think if it could happen Saturday night, that would be better for many of us so we don't have to stay late Sunday, but in principle either situation works for me.
Saturday night is overwhelmingly more probable because of the high schoolers who would want to play. Anyone else from the college field who would want to play: you're welcome to floor space Saturday night (and to staff HFT, if you like that sort of thing).
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Note:

If Andy and I tell you different dates for when RMPFest at Harvard is, believe Andy over me.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Whig's Boson wrote:Note:

If Andy and I tell you different dates for when RMPFest at Harvard is, believe Andy over me.
Heh, I hope we don't! But yeah; I'm trying to balance high school and college potential participants and maximize both sets.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Maximus »

if it helps at all, we'd like RMPfest to be played on Sunday so, well, we can play it
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

To clarify for Chris's sake:

Want to play?

Write a packet.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by DumbJaques »

To clarify for Chris's sake:

Want to play?

Write a packet.
Thanks, though if anyone is in town for staffing Harvard Fall and can't write 24/24 in the next few days, I'm sure we can work something out. Actually everyone at this site who needed to submit has done so; you're the only such site at this point. In fact, a couple of your teams who weren't required to submit also did so. My hypothesis relates to a scheme to further depress Andy over FIST submissions, a goal at which those teams have no doubt succeeded.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Since Andy is sleeping in after hft, I am emergency td. This starts at 9:30 now.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Hunter College (Yetman, Gioia, Arthur, Zhang) defeated Brown in a one game final to win.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Magister Ludi »

"Hunter" won the one game final (295-230) over Brown in large part to the heroics of ZHAO ZHANG who arrived 10 seconds before Jerry was going to force Anurag to start reading the finals. I'm sure people will have some words about the disastrous logistics of this tournament, which featured Jerry appointing himself co-TD upon arriving.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

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Magister Ludi wrote:"Hunter" won the one game final (295-230) over Brown in large part to the heroics of ZHAO ZHANG who arrived 10 seconds before Jerry was going to force Anurag to start reading the finals. I'm sure people will have some words about the disastrous logistics of this tournament, which featured Jerry appointing himself co-TD upon arriving.
Said logistics are no doubt in part my fault; when I got back home after HFT I realized that I wouldn't be able to stay up all night that night and that if I let myself go to sleep, I wouldn't be able to wake up before the afternoon. I emailed everyone signed up to staff the tournament and promptly began to hibernate for fourteen hours; I wish I had been able to be in attendance, since that probably would have improved the situation.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by grapesmoker »

I am using the wifi of the Bonanza bus to post the following in this thread: this was by a long shot the most incompetently run tournament I have attended in recent memory. This tournament notably featured me fulfilling TD duties, Anurag staffing, and zero actual manpower contribution from anyone on the Harvard squad. It took us from 9:30 until almost 7:30 to run 11 rounds and surely would have taken even longer if I hadn't made shit happen by yelling at people. More will be forthcoming once I actually make it home.
Last edited by grapesmoker on Sun Nov 15, 2009 9:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Whig's Boson wrote:Hunter College (Yetman, Gioia, Arthur, Zhang)
Apparently I am so misty in the head still that I didn't even read this. Who staffed this tournament? To my knowledge that puts this tournament at, uh, zero staffers. What!?
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Sir Thopas »

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:
Whig's Boson wrote:Hunter College (Yetman, Gioia, Arthur, Zhang)
Apparently I am so misty in the head still that I didn't even read this. Who staffed this tournament? To my knowledge that puts this tournament at, uh, zero staffers. What!?
You are correct.

Well, that's not entirely fair. Two Harvard players read on their bye round.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Not That Kind of Christian!! »

I'm going to make the radical suggestion that once Harvard players were aware that there were 0 dedicated staffers, they should have stopped being players.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Not That Kind of Christian!! wrote:I'm going to make the radical suggestion that once Harvard players were aware that there were 0 dedicated staffers, they should have stopped being players.
Guy informs me Anurag was reading, so really only two staffers were lacking. Was there no schedule drawn up? We sort of had a seven team round robin (a choice of four, in fact!) already constructed from the previous day that we could have used, as I told everyone the night before...
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Sir Thopas »

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:
Not That Kind of Christian!! wrote:I'm going to make the radical suggestion that once Harvard players were aware that there were 0 dedicated staffers, they should have stopped being players.
Guy informs me Anurag was reading, so really only two staffers were lacking. Was there no schedule drawn up? We sort of had a seven team round robin (a choice of four, in fact!) already constructed from the previous day that we could have used, as I told everyone the night before...
Yeah, that was still on the board, so Jerry stuck a seventh team on, and then we matched packets to rounds, etc.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by grapesmoker »

Not That Kind of Christian!! wrote:I'm going to make the radical suggestion that once Harvard players were aware that there were 0 dedicated staffers, they should have stopped being players.
That would have been the reasonable thing to do but unfortunately my TD powers did not extend to forcing Harvard to staff their own tournament. Funny, they sure managed to find Zhao for the finals game but not for staffing.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

grapesmoker wrote:
Not That Kind of Christian!! wrote:I'm going to make the radical suggestion that once Harvard players were aware that there were 0 dedicated staffers, they should have stopped being players.
That would have been the reasonable thing to do but unfortunately my TD powers did not extend to forcing Harvard to staff their own tournament. Funny, they sure managed to find Zhao for the finals game but not for staffing.
That's an embarrassment to the club and I wish I was there to stop it from happening. This won't happen again, and I'll formally draw up the policy that no one has a god-given right to play house tournaments and circulate it on the list once I finish my Winter packet.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:
grapesmoker wrote:
Not That Kind of Christian!! wrote:I'm going to make the radical suggestion that once Harvard players were aware that there were 0 dedicated staffers, they should have stopped being players.
That would have been the reasonable thing to do but unfortunately my TD powers did not extend to forcing Harvard to staff their own tournament. Funny, they sure managed to find Zhao for the finals game but not for staffing.
That's an embarrassment to the club and I wish I was there to stop it from happening. This won't happen again, and I'll formally draw up the policy that no one has a god-given right to play house tournaments and circulate it on the list once I finish my Winter packet.
What about a god-given right to pull out of TDing a tournament at 7PM the night before, via email?
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Whig's Boson wrote:What about a god-given right to pull out of TDing a tournament at 7PM the night before, via email?
Yeah, see, these things are different. I had been up for the past sixty-five hours (not counting a ninety minute nap) making sure that HFT was as coherent as it could be and sending emails to teams. I thought I would have been able to still be awake the next morning; I was wrong. Instead of letting everyone know that I wasn't able to TD this tournament when it was impossible to wake me up that morning, I informed everyone who was signed up to staff.* giving you plenty of time to draw up a seven team round robin (which can be created for free in five minutes using the internet, folks) and staying up two more hours in case you had any more questions. That's all you needed to do.

Then you decided to PLAY THE FUCKING TOURNAMENT.

* Let me clarify what it means to have signed up to staff. On Thursday Ted declared to me for the first time that he had decided that you and he were playing on the house team, despite me having said beforehand that that would not be possible because we wouldn't have enough staff. I told Ted that we wouldn't have enough staff again, and Ted said that he didn't know that there was a staffing shortage, and that he'd therefore staff. That made me happy to hear. Then you decided to PLAY THE FUCKING TOURNAMENT.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by at your pleasure »

This all might have been avoided with a backup plan for an unavilable TD saying "If the TD needs to bail out and gives reasonable notice of this, so-and-so will take over as TD".
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Doink the Clown wrote:This all might have been avoided with a backup plan for an unavilable TD saying "If the TD needs to bail out and gives reasonable notice of this, so-and-so will take over as TD".
This is a wise plan, generally speaking, and I suggest that clubs do this thing. Given that I was able, up until that point, to get a total of two staffers to "agree to staff" (and who doubtless would have played anyway if I had showed up, given that they played when I did not), I bet I wouldn't have been able to get anyone to agree to be a backup TD.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by grapesmoker »

I have not yet quite completed my extensive decompression regime from playing this tournament but I want to say a few more things:

First off, I would like to award to Anurag the Glorious Medal of Socialist Quizbowl Labor. I do not in the slightest exaggerate when I say that Anurag literally saved this tournament and I can't heap enough praise on him for doing that.

Second, your internal club drama is of no concern to me; I care not a whit for who said what to whom and why this or that person didn't do whatever it is they were supposed to do. The responsibility for hosting a normal tournament that people can play instead of an event where rounds drag on for almost an hour rests with the club as a whole.

Third, I'm pretty pissed off that Guy and Ian volunteered their time to help run HFT yesterday and in return were treated to this sham of an event. They deserved far, far better for dedicating half their weekend to your moneymaking enterprise, Harvard.

The full description of the cavalcade of ineptitude that was TIT/IO will have to wait for tomorrow when I'm capable of doing more than barely propping open my eyelids, but suffice to say that this was a great example of how not to run a tournament.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by DumbJaques »

This all might have been avoided with a backup plan for an unavilable TD saying "If the TD needs to bail out and gives reasonable notice of this, so-and-so will take over as TD".
I mean, the Harvard players who did show up, it seems, had an average quizbowl experience amount of at least five years. Based on my understanding of the problems here (tournament running slow because of lack of organization and possibly reading speed issues), the difficulty of finding a solution is somewhere in finding-your-ass territory, and probably shouldn't require both hands/a map/a "don't do anything puzzlingly foolhardy" caveat from Andy. Really guys, I've caused tournaments to not run quite as fast/well as they could have had I staffed because I really wanted to play a set, but not a cost of generating something that's so problematic that it's described as "the most incompetently run tournament in recent memory" by Jerry, who's got a beyond considerable amount of experience (and last time I checked, wasn't prone to running around hither and thither serially sugar-coating every TDing performance he observes).

The full description of the cavalcade of ineptitude that was TIT/IO will have to wait for tomorrow when I'm capable of doing more than barely propping open my eyelids, but suffice to say that this was a great example of how not to run a tournament
Hey dude, I'm not sure how much of a factor this stuff actually was, but I want to sincerely apologize for anything on my end that contributed to this. I'm trying to determine why and will hopefully be able to explain in the TIT discussion thread, but for some reason the final set of packets that was sent to all mirror sites/run at our tournament contained an unusual assortment of packet final-editing generations - that is, some packets were totally copy-edited and length-controlled state, some were in the state right before that with grammar issues abounding and the occasional repeated part or whatever, and a couple were in a state unacceptably worse even than that. I have balls all idea of what the hell could have caused this shit, despite spending a decent amount of time yesterday and tonight looking through stuff. Reading tossups that were like 2-4 lines longer than I would want (and had in fact edited) them to be, and readers stumbling over grammar issues probably added time to your day, even independent of making the tournament itself worse. I'm quite pissed off at myself about this, and am very sorry that you and everyone else had to deal with it.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by grapesmoker »

DumbJaques wrote:Hey dude, I'm not sure how much of a factor this stuff actually was, but I want to sincerely apologize for anything on my end that contributed to this. I'm trying to determine why and will hopefully be able to explain in the TIT discussion thread, but for some reason the final set of packets that was sent to all mirror sites/run at our tournament contained an unusual assortment of packet final-editing generations - that is, some packets were totally copy-edited and length-controlled state, some were in the state right before that with grammar issues abounding and the occasional repeated part or whatever, and a couple were in a state unacceptably worse even than that. I have balls all idea of what the hell could have caused this shit, despite spending a decent amount of time yesterday and tonight looking through stuff. Reading tossups that were like 2-4 lines longer than I would want (and had in fact edited) them to be, and readers stumbling over grammar issues probably added time to your day, even independent of making the tournament itself worse. I'm quite pissed off at myself about this, and am very sorry that you and everyone else had to deal with it.
I haven't particularly noticed that there were that many issues with this outside of the norm. The things I'm talking about were things that should have been fixed on site and had really very little to do with the questions.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by wd4gdz »

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:
Whig's Boson wrote:What about a god-given right to pull out of TDing a tournament at 7PM the night before, via email?
Yeah, see, these things are different. I had been up for the past sixty-five hours (not counting a ninety minute nap) making sure that HFT was as coherent as it could be and sending emails to teams.
I don't think you're going to get much sympathy here since that probably should have been done a week ago.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by millionwaves »

Please resolve your intra-team dispute on your mailing list, not on the message boards.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

wd4gdz wrote:
Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:
Whig's Boson wrote:What about a god-given right to pull out of TDing a tournament at 7PM the night before, via email?
Yeah, see, these things are different. I had been up for the past sixty-five hours (not counting a ninety minute nap) making sure that HFT was as coherent as it could be and sending emails to teams.
I don't think you're going to get much sympathy here since that probably should have been done a week ago.
Actually, I'll be spending time this week re-editing the set to make sure it's as high-quality as possible this week, too, and I'm sure that all the people who saw the work we did editing this set down can agree that the editing work this week was pretty important, so I'll ask you to shut the fuck up about issues you can't possibly contribute productively to.

Also, I'll side with Trygve with respect to inter-team squabbling: no more needs to happen, and more already has happened than necessary.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by wd4gdz »

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:
wd4gdz wrote:
Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:
Whig's Boson wrote:What about a god-given right to pull out of TDing a tournament at 7PM the night before, via email?
Yeah, see, these things are different. I had been up for the past sixty-five hours (not counting a ninety minute nap) making sure that HFT was as coherent as it could be and sending emails to teams.
I don't think you're going to get much sympathy here since that probably should have been done a week ago.
Actually, I'll be spending time this week re-editing the set to make sure it's as high-quality as possible this week, too, and I'm sure that all the people who saw the work we did editing this set down can agree that the editing work this week was pretty important, so I'll ask you to shut the fuck up about issues you can't possibly contribute productively to.

Also, I'll side with Trygve with respect to inter-team squabbling: no more needs to happen, and more already has happened than necessary.
I'd be glad to help so that you only have to stay up 60 straight hours this week.
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

Please don't troll simply for the sake of trolling.

EDIT: Or, in fact, at all!
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

I mean, Billy's not wrong. Andy editing the completely separate HFT (which should have been done a week ago) is no excuse for this atrocious thread (and according to people who are reliable, equally atrocious tournament).
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Re: TIT/IO Northeast at Harvard (11/15/09)

Post by grapesmoker »

So here are the things that happened at this tournament:

While on the T at about 9 AM on Sunday, I note a missed call from Bruce. When I return his call about 10 minutes later, he tells me that Andy will not be available and asks me to set up a schedule for 5 (I think) teams. When I get to the game building, I find various quizbowlers, including two Dunbar teams and their coach, milling around in the hallway. I herd everyone into the largest of the game rooms and start taking roll. There is an indeterminate number of teams due to no one knowing exactly how many people are actually coming from where; nevertheless, it is established that there are perhaps 6 teams present. Bruce arrives close to 9:30 and tells me that there is a Harvard house team; up until that point I had assumed Harvard would be staffing and didn't figure a house team into the schedule. Then Doug Yetman shows up, and I make the suggestion that the Harvard house team be combined with Doug in order to create 7 teams, since byes are inevitable due to submitted packets from everyone in the room (except Harvard). A 6-team schedule from RMPfest is already up on the board and with some minimal fuss I manage to modify it to fit 7 teams by tacking on a bye column. In a perhaps prophetic move, I decide that since a double RR leaves no finals packets available, the playoffs will consist of a top 4/bottom 3 split with a RR within the brackets. I'm basically making things up as I go along. Bruce asks bye teams to staff one of the rooms and makes a call to Anurag. He also asks Doug to "make Katy Peters appear;" whatever magical powers Doug might have been thought to possess that would have enabled him to do so are clearly not working that day, as Katy never materializes. I can't remember who the last staffer might have been; I want to say that it was Lauren from Harvard, but I think she staffed only RMPfest the previous night and not TIT/IO. While things are happening, Anurag arrives, saving the day. Teams are ordered to disperse to their rooms around 9:45 or so, which starts the games. It goes without saying that no one is doing live stats.

Rounds are taking forever. The moderators from the high school teams are somewhat slow, which I don't blame them for. It takes us until 1:30 to get through 5 rounds, which for those of you keeping track at home adds up to the blistering pace of 45 minutes per packet. I fight for an extra half hour of lunch and we all agree to return at 2:30.

By 2:20, I have been sitting in the game room and reading my latest acquisitions from the Harvard Book Store for about 10 minutes. After checking the bus and train schedules, Ian Eppler makes hopeful noises about the prospects of catching the 6:45 train; I disabuse him of his idealistic notions, founded on a wholly improbable packet-reading schedule. At 2:30, Dunbar, our latest opponents, have not shown. I grow irate and begin pacing back and forth, cursing the heavens. At some stage, it is decided to throw Willy Ha, Hunter's 5th man, to the wolves (us) by making him a stand-in for Dunbar. Dunbar continues to not be present until we have answered something like 8 tossups against poor Willy. It never becomes clear to me why Dunbar failed to show up when they were supposed to, but we conclude our round and move on, only 15 minutes behind the already glacial pace of this tournament.

It takes until probably around 4:30 for the round-robin to finally shake out. While this is happening, I take advantage of our room's being the first to finish and start making a schedule for the playoff teams based on my hypothesis about their performance. Fortunately, ever team ends with a unique record, enabling quick assignments of seeds for the playoff brackets. The first playoff game kind of starts close to 5, I think; Ian Eppler, looking more downcast than ever, suggests hopefully that we might still get through 3 rounds within the time frame necessary to catch the 6:45 train. I marvel at his extraordinary delusion and suggest that we stand a far better chance of catching the 8:00 bus instead. At this dramatic juncture in the narrative, Hunter decides that to catch their 7:00 bus, they should leave at 5:00, despite the fact that the ride to the bus terminal takes 10 minutes, and they're taking their buzzer system with them. My attempts to explain the timescales involved in Boston public transit fall on deaf ears, but eventually, they offer the compromise solution of having Doug take the buzzers back to NYC with him. For the second time that day, I unilaterally agree on Doug's behalf to make him do something (previously, I had assigned him to the Harvard team without consulting him).

The round-robin kind of happens in the top bracket, though the bottom bracket disperses once Hunter takes off and Dorman has to presumably go catch their flight. There are no prizes, so none are awarded; Brown loses the second matchup against Harvard + Doug to take the tournament to a one-game final. It becomes obvious during that playoff round that we are not under any circumstances making the 6:45 train, just as I had prophesied. A single tear rolls down Ian's cheek, but he takes it stoically otherwise. That's the kind of steely nerve I require in a teammate. After the match itself concludes at 6:30, we sit around for 20 minutes for reasons that I cannot quite understand at this stage. I spend much of this time roundly berating everyone on the Harvard team for their incompetence as regards the organization of this tournament, but none of the targets of my wrath appear particularly moved. A fateful decision is made to play the finals on Ike Jose's packet; I should have held out for Trygve. We are informed that Ted has gone to fetch Zhao so he can play in the finals against us, Sam Peterson having absconded with Harvard's science knowledge after the lunch break. I point out how we absofuckinglutely are going to catch that 8:00 bus and that I am not waiting for Zhao. Ted attempts to haggle with me, to which I reply (supported by Anurag's desire to get the hell out of Dodge) that this round begins in exactly 1 minute regardless of anything else. Zhao arrives with 15 seconds to spare and contributes perhaps one tossup and a bonus part in Harvard's victory on Ike Jose's incomprehensible packet; we rally in the closing tossups due to some hilarious negs by Bruce but it is all to no avail and Harvard + Doug wins the tournament. We run like the dickens and are fortunate to make the Peter Pan bus, from which I post my stern disapproval of the way this tournament was run.

Basically, this was a master class on how not to host events. There was no prepared schedule, no plan for for what to do about stats or playoffs, not even a list of how many teams owed what kinds of money besides whatever Bruce had in his email, which proved difficult to access due to Internet misbehaving in Sever Hall. The simplest actions took forever because no one had any kind of a plan; if it wasn't for me basically directing this tournament and telling people what they were going to do, every step that didn't involve the actual reading of packets would have taken twice as long. There were no staff from the hosting institution, which makes me wonder why we were even paying Harvard any money at all for this tournament (and correspondingly, why no one was paying me any money for directing this). This tournament was a horrible clusterfuck and I think that everyone on the Harvard team should be ashamed to be associated with it. You cannot simply declare a tournament and then fail to do even the minimal set of things required from a host to make it happen.

I'll close by issuing hosts the following warning: I'm tired of bullshit and I'm tired of incompetence. I'm pretty lenient when it comes to forgiving people for being slow readers, certain unforeseen logistical snafus, and so on, but if you fail to get anything right, you will make me, and any other paying club, pretty mad about it. The next time I show up and you can't get your shit together because you don't understand the concept of minimal planning ahead, I will just commandeer your tournament and tell people what to do, since you clearly can't be trusted to do it yourself. If you throw a tantrum about it and don't do what I say, I will say "fuck you," turn around, and leave, and pay you a pro-rated entry fee based on the number of packets we played.
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