2015 CO Visual Arts

[Fado Alexandrino]

At what time should we arrive on Sunday morning?

[gyre and gimble]

The plan right now is 8:30.

Can I also get someone to do stats?

[gyre and gimble]

Hello everyone,

As I said earlier today, please plan on arriving by 8:30 tomorrow.

Due to some last minute adds and drops, as well as some reconsiderations, the brackets are now as follows:

Gupta/Lawrence
Brownstein/Manners
Sorice/Tourdot
Jackson/Ray
Hart/Davis
Alston/Wang/Golimlim
Cheyne/Minarik/Peterson
Borglum/Beyer/Hughes

Nediger/Moyen
Carson/Jose
Bentley/Adams
Holub-Moorman/Reed
Lee/Vinokurov
Casalaspi/Hothem
Hang/Ebner/Kern
Lafer/Asher

EDIT: Actually, Jerry's dropped out so stay tuned for the actual brackets.

I also have the following people staffing:

Me
Eric Mukherjee
Ashvin Srivatsa
Richard Yu
Tejas Raje
Andrew Nadig
Joe Su
Derek So
Patrick Liao
Jonathan Magin

If you're staffing and you don't have your own laptop to read from, please let me know ASAP! You can use the email on my profile.

[Masked Canadian History Bandit]

Rounds after 7 preliminary rounds. The last round will consist of crossover games between teams with the same new seed (i.e. Pizza1 vs. Fire1)

[Masked Canadian History Bandit]

Final stats are here.

Kelly Tourdot and Mike Sorice defeated Will Nediger and Saajid Moyen in a one game final to win the event. The top scorers for this event were Will Nediger with 95.71 PPG (as well as 8 superpowers), Jordan Brownstein with 87.14 PPG, and Matt Bollinger with 75 PPG.

After the seven prelim rounds, the new seeds played the corresponding seed in the other bracket (e.g. Pizza1 played Fire1, Pizza2 played Fire2, etc.) The final standings are as follows.

1. Kelly Tourdot/Mike Sorice
2. Will Nediger/Saajid Moyen
3. Matt Bollinger/Tommy Casalaspi/Daniel Hothem
4. Jordan Brownstein/Chris Manners
5. Ike Jose/Rob Carson
6. John Lawrence/Auroni Gupta
7. Mike Bentley/Evan Adams
8. Matt Lafer/Chris Grubb/Ryan Westbrook
9. Jacob Reed/Will Holub-Moorman
10. Trevor Davis/Andrew Hart
T11. Dylan Minarik/Mike Cheyne/Greg Peterson and Will Alston/Kenji Golimlim/Andrew Wang
13. Chris Ray/Matt Jackson
14. Athena Kern/Jasper Lee
15. Chris Borglum/Foster Hughes/Billy Beyer
16. Charles Hang/Seth Ebner

If there's any mistakes, feel free to email or PM me.

[Smuttynose Island]

This tournament was excellent and easily the highlight of my CO weekend. Thanks Stephen, Doug and everyone else who had a hand in producing this wonderful side event.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I'll echo Daniel's sentiment - even though I'm substantially better at history than visual arts and had a great time at CO History, this tournament was my favorite to play on Sunday. It did a great job of balancing accessibility with introducing new material and was an absolutely perfect side event for a tournament like this one. I think future open side events (and possibly just open events in general) would do well to imitate this one both in difficulty and style.

[vinteuil]

I'll echo Daniel's sentiment - even though I'm substantially better at history than visual arts and had a great time at CO History, this tournament was my favorite to play on Sunday. It did a great job of balancing accessibility with introducing new material and was an absolutely perfect side event for a tournament like this one. I think future open side events (and possibly just open events in general) would do well to imitate this one both in difficulty and style.

Plus or minus a few (very few relative to the total number) questions with playability issues, this set really was wonderful, with a "solid core," lots of fun and interesting clues, and a great/refreshing amount of "things people actually care about." Big thanks to Stephen and Doug. (Also to Will H-M for being a super teammate for this.)

[gyre and gimble]

Thanks to everyone who played this, and a big congratulations to the 2015 CO Visual Arts champions, Mike Sorice and Kelly Tourdot! I was very impressed by the buzzes I was seeing all day, and I hope everybody had a lot of fun. It seems like people did indeed enjoy the questions, and I must say nothing could be more gratifying than seeing positive feedback for something you spend hours and hours working on.

I wasn't the only one to put in good time into this, though. Doug Graebner wrote 27 questions (all of the pre-1870 sculpture and architecture, the non-Western art, plus a handful of others). Nathan Weiser and Benji Nguyen contributed around half of the film. They were all very thorough with their clue research and I certainly learned a whole lot from editing their questions (mostly cosmetic, because they were generally very on-point with their cluing). Thanks is also due to Seth Teitler, who gave me some great last-minute feedback on difficulty control. This set would not have been nearly as refined or aesthetically complete as it was (some of you may have heard that I wrote the last remaining tossup for this set on the car ride to the tournament) without the hard work of everyone involved, and I couldn't express my gratitude enough.

Much thanks also to all of the staffers. I apologize for not being the most organized tournament director. But everyone knew what they were doing, we were able to start on time despite a lot of things that needed to get done in the morning, and I think my room was generally the slowest one, which means the tournament ran as efficiently as was possible given my own limitations. A lot of times in the past I've had a hard time getting people to staff tournaments I was in charge of, so it was awesome to see people enthusiastically helping out. Special thanks goes out to Patrick Liao for some very efficient control room work.

I'll be setting up a discussion thread (probably public, pending a mirror). In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you didn't discuss specific questions.

[Auroni]

I'll add onto the heap of praise for this set. Future open difficulty tournament writers should look to this set as a model for answer selection, clue selection, and difficulty control.

[theMoMA]

Joining in the chorus of praise. This tournament was well-written and fun to play. Thanks for putting it together, Stephen! (And to the other contributors for their questions, as well.)

[Ike]

This set was really fun. I think it was the best arts tournament that I have played, and there were numerous things that I have been waiting to come up in quizbowl for a decade that finally came up in this tournament. Thanks to you all for writing it.

Ike

[Taiwan Wren-Babbler]

Is there any chance there could be an online mirror of this tournament for those of us who didn't go to CO?

[Bensonfan23]

Is there any chance there could be an online mirror of this tournament for those of us who didn't go to CO?

I second this suggestion.

[Maury Island incident]

People seem to want online mirrors of just about every side event being played this summer. Perhaps we could have some kind of a side event day in which several online mirrors get run, maybe including the SHEIKH online mirror.

[gyre and gimble]

You guys are welcome to run an online mirror, but I will neither be organizing nor staffing it.

[Maury Island incident]

I'd be fine organizing logistics for online mirror things if people wanted, especially since I wasn't planning on playing this one (though while we're on that topic, I'd like to play SHEIKH and RILKE.)

[vcuEvan]

This tournament is on the short list of greatest side events of all time. I was especially impressed with the large number of inventive answers that were new but still accessible to the field. The clues chosen were also almost always interesting and useful. This is a tournament to emulate.

[Cheynem]

Yeah, I really enjoyed this tournament, particularly because it did a good job of being interesting while also not oppressive in difficulty.

[hydrocephalitic listlessness]

This tournament was fantastic. As others have said, it should definitely be used as a guide by future open side event writers. More specifically, I'd say that it also can and should be a model for how to write questions on modern and contemporary art, even at lower difficulties. For example, I really liked the questions on entities that used clues about artists; both of those guys were really important artists, and this tournament found a way to ask about them without sacrificing playability.

Uncleared answers redacted --Mgmt.

[gyre and gimble]

Thanks Will, but those questions aren't clear for discussion!

[Important Bird Area]

Edited accordingly.

[ThisIsMyUsername]

Add my voice to this praise song: this may be the strongest set of upper-difficulty visual arts questions I've played to date.

[Auks Ran Ova]

This was killer stuff. I wish I hadn't been so rusty on this subject so I could've enjoyed it even more, but even as it was I had a great time and loved the set. Fantastic work.

[gyre and gimble]

Can I get a private discussion forum set up for this? Thanks. (Or alternatively, people thinking about maybe doing a mirror, let me know as soon as you can because at some point I'm just going to post the questions.)

[Captain Sinico]

Thanks very much for such a great tournament, Stephen! To repeat what others have said: this is one of the best subject tournaments ever written and I hope you'll all read it if you haven't already.

[ktour84]

Thank you Stephen, Doug, Nathan, and Benji for a great tournament. The difficulty and answer selection were great. It was nice being able to buzz on clues that I've researched and written about.

I thought the distribution was great. The questions on 20th century art were well written, especially on the post WW2 subjects.

[gyre and gimble]

I'd like to reiterate my request for a private discussion forum. Thanks!

[Important Bird Area]

I'd like to reiterate my request for a private discussion forum. Thanks!

This has been created.

[ktour84]

Will the question set be posted soon?

[Bosa of York]

Will the question set be posted soon?

[gyre and gimble]

Sorry for the delay, everyone. I've finally got around to proofreading the set and just uploaded it, so it should appear on the database as soon as it's approved. Thanks again for all your interest, and for those of you who haven't seen them yet, I hope you enjoy the questions.