DWI 2011 @ University of Delaware - CANCELED

[mcgroth]

The University of Delaware Academic Competition Club announces the return of the Delaware Winter Invitational (DWI) for the year 2011. We are tentatively planning to hold this tournament at UD on Saturday, March 5, 2011.

Right now we are debating which format to use for the tournament. Last year, DWI adopted the This Tournament Goes to Eleven format, which (in case you didn't know) involves a larger team splitting up each round into two smaller teams, with one of the smaller teams playing an academic packet and the other smaller team playing a trash packet. We enjoyed doing this format; however, there have been concerns voiced this year regarding the amount of work needed to write a TTGT11 tournament (approximately 26 packets would need to be written, and like last year, we are writing this in-house).

Another format that has been suggested is the Ghetto Warz format of approximately half-academic, half-trash in a single packet. This would require us to write only 13 packets as opposed to 26, but some people may not be as fond of sitting through these "mixed" packets.

We would like to hear from you. Let us know whether you would prefer the TTGT11 format, the Ghetto Warz format, or something else. We want this tournament to be half-academic and half-trash, so take that into consideration if making an alternate suggestion.

Look for more information about the tournament to be posted in the coming weeks.

Thanks,
Matt Groth
Co-VP, University of Delaware Academic Competition Club

[Matt Weiner]

Hey, with all due respect to what I know are the good intentions and decent people on the Delaware team: there are several discussions on the board right now about how we're running out of weekends to hold tournaments in the spring semester, hybrid tournaments are dumb, and this set was pretty badly written last year and I see no reason to believe that the people writing it have significantly improved their skills since then. Can you please consider just mirroring one of the many already-announced academic events that need a Mid-Atlantic home this spring?

[Frater Taciturnus]

Personally I would rather see this as an academic tournament, maybe with a trash tournament the next day. Its still half-academic and half-trash, but its spread out so people who only wish to endure one and not the other are not forced to be around for the other.

[Duncan Idaho]

Personally I would rather see this as an academic tournament, maybe with a trash tournament the next day. Its still half-academic and half-trash, but its spread out so people who only wish to endure one and not the other are not forced to be around for the other.

I agree with this, and if this were to happen, there's a decent chance that our team would go to both tournaments. With regard an academic set, now that Penn Bowl has been moved to the same date as the Chicago mirror of Sack of Antwerp, it might be nice if SoA could be mirrored. Alternatively, you could try to mirror MUT.

[Duncan Idaho]

Also, if you want to mirror an already-written trash set, perhaps you could use TrashMasters? You can email Michael Kearney at friendlyneighborhood (at) gmail period com if that interests you.

[Black-throated Antshrike]

Charter would like it to be TTGT11 format from last year.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Why not run an academic tournament on Saturday and a trash tournament on Sunday? You'd make twice the money and perhaps attract more people -- there are academic players who hate trash and trash players who hate academic, and these would come to a two day event but not to a hybrid.

[mmp]

We're going to wait for more replies before we decide on anything. However, if we do decide to continue the way of TTGT11 or even continue writing our Academic packets, we will probably need outside Academic editors due to our lack of experience in this discipline. Is there anybody willing to help out and become an editor for our Academic packets? Thanks!

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Though it's unlikely I'd be going to this tournament, I strongly encourage the Delaware team to mirror a pre-existing academic event for the Mid-Atlantic on this Saturday rather than write their own. Especially given the admission that an outside editor would be necessary for the academic packets to exist, it saves a huge amount of time and effort for you guys to use one of the (many!) existent options available rather than write your own (and get someone else to volunteer their time to edit it).

Sack of Antwerp and Illinois Open both seem to be available for this weekend, and MUT would be open a week or so later. If you guys want some share of question-writing experience, it might be possible to submit some number of questions to the event you choose rather than attempt to produce a whole college set, which is a colossal, risky project for even the most talented clubs.

And yeah, for those on the Delaware team who really want to write the trash, they can submit to an existing trash tournament for Sunday and host that then. TTGT11 format is really bad for everyone, since it usually results in lopsided theme rounds and forces people to attempt to field extra-large teams for the purposes of splitting, which few clubs are able to do.

[DumbJaques]

I mean, I like playing the TTGT11 format a whole lot, and don't at all think there's anything wrong with having an amusing event like that each year. Both I and Maryland's club as a whole are strong supporters of DWI (and tournaments at UD in general), so I hope that my words will not be mistaken for "booo trash" sentiment or anything like that. Please note that I'm also speaking as someone who's taken part in the production of TTGT11 format before.

TTGT11 is a shit-ton of work. As you've noted, it's something on the order of 26 packets, which is more than any other tournament including ACF Nationals. There's also a bigger issue with the set last year, which actually had a reasonable amount of academic packets that weren't at all unplayable. The trash last year was, generally, written extraordinarily poorly. I'd like to caution the UD club against concluding that, if you could find an academic editor to help out, things would fall into place. I came to DWI last year planning on playing almost entirely trash rounds and ended up splitting it around 70-30 academic, because I got very tired of playing tossups that began "This 7-foot Georgetown center from Zaire. . ." I really like playing trash, but the academic material at this event is not what would keep me away from it this year.

I suggested this in the DWI thread last year, but why take on such a daunting job all by yourselves? Why not maintain the TTGT11 format and use (perhaps partial) packet submission and collaboration with multiple mirror sites to produce a polished event? Not having to stretch your own writers so thin might also help preclude some of the traps earlier generations of TTGT11 producers fell into, like writing entire rounds on Final Fantasy or gay people.

Combo packets have certainly been done in the past without disaster - I consider Maryland alum Casey Retterer to be the Van Gogh of the medium, if you're looking for some non-Ghetto Warz models. But I don't think that makes it any less prudent to use packet submission/collaboration to produce the set - it's just a choice about the format, and won't solve some of the principal challenges of producing a set like this one. I'd certainly be willing to submit a half-packet, or collaborate with a few people to produce a whole packet, in an entertaining niche area.

Actually, just think about the kind of resources you could draw from if you could get a handful of half-packets from various pillars of the quizbowl world - wouldn't that make this tournament a much more rewarding experience? People in quizbowl know really cool, entertaining things, and if you can temper their niche appeal by doing something like combining packets and/or running concurrent rounds, it seems like DWI has the potential to be way, way more than it was last year. I really liked playing the Military History packet last year, for instance, but I doubt poor Mark could be asked to muster up another 20/20 year after year. But I'd be astounded if you couldn't get at least two solid sets of 10/10 military history from various quizbowlers who've just been waiting for a chance to subject their peers to that tossup on the 7.5th Battle of the Isonzo. I mean really, do you have any idea how much Jerry Vinokurov wants to play my physics packet? When you think about it, it's just cruel to deny him so.

Seriously though, I hope you'll consider this idea - if you'd like to shoot me an email, I'd be happy to discuss it further, as I thought a bit about how to make something like this work logistically after our last TTGT11 at Maryland. I also agree with other people that this could certainly be paired with another event as a full-weekend type thing, both to widen appeal and to avoid cross-scheduling of tournaments in a busy spring semester. I don't at all think one would need to necessarily nix the format of DWI to accomplish that, though.

[grapesmoker]

I mean really, do you have any idea how much Jerry Vinokurov wants to play my physics packet?

I don't think words exist that appropriately describe my desire to do this.

[Theory Of The Leisure Flask]

stuff

Like Chris, I really did enjoy the TGT11 format from last year and think that there ought to be room on the quizbowl calendar for this sort of novelty event. Just because some folks think that academic and "trash" can Never Be Mixed Ever doesn't mean that other folks such as myself don't explicitly enjoy that mixing.

The one big drawback to TGT11 is that requiring extra-large teams can be a pain for smaller programs; that might be a reason to go with a more straightforward hybrid format.

I'm probably not playing this, since my playing days are mostly over. But I want to see this tournament succeed, and be the best it can be, and to that end I would gladly freelance a theme packet.

[No Rules Westbrook]

As a person who, like others in this post, has no playing interest in this event, but would like to see Delaware run a quality event...I concur with the advice of folks like Weiner and Bruce.

Even if you have the best of intentions and actually convince quite a few people to work their butt off, the idea of doing this as a standalone new tournament is probably not wise. As others have said, if you want to do both academic and trash work - there are lots of options for mirrors out there - and I'm sure many of those tournaments would be happy to let your writers help if they specifically want to be a part of the writing/editing process (which is commendable).

To be clear, I don't have any particular problem with hybrid events - I just think your best chance for success is to mirror an academic tourney Saturday and a trash tourney Sunday. It's better than winding up with a cobbled-together new event stuck in the middle of the busy spring schedule - which I don't know that many teams would be convinced to attend, because there are lots of other choices out there.

[Theory Of The Leisure Flask]

Even if you have the best of intentions and actually convince quite a few people to work their butt off, the idea of doing this as a standalone new tournament is probably not wise.

This isn't a new tournament; it happened last year as well.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Would it be possible to run this as a summer event instead? As people have mentioned, the spring calendar is incredibly full already of academic events, and it just seems to me like people would be freer to play a hybrid type of event after school is out for the year. Obviously if you can't staff the event after school's out then there's nothing to be done, but if people are hanging around campus year round could it be a possibility?

[mcgroth]

Hi everyone -

Just wanted to let you guys know that we are reading your comments and taking them into consideration, and our lack of response thus far is because we are considering our options. We will post an update as soon as we make any decisions.

[Black-throated Antshrike]

I mean really, do you have any idea how much Jerry Vinokurov wants to play my physics packet?

I don't think words exist that appropriately describe my desire to do this.

I would really like to do this as well

[Frater Taciturnus]

I mean really, do you have any idea how much Jerry Vinokurov wants to play my physics packet?

I don't think words exist that appropriately describe my desire to do this.

I thought "absolute zero" was already a thing with a name.

[DumbJaques]

So is this tournament canceled?

[mpellegrini]

So is this tournament canceled?

Yes.