NorCal Summer Side Event Weekend (Stanford, August 20-21)

[ryanrosenberg]

Hello! I am excited to announce the return of the NorCal summer side event weekend, to be held at Stanford on August 20 and 21. The last NorCal side event weekend, I was visiting from Chicago, we played sets like Unanswered Question and RULFO, and no one had ever heard of the novel coronavirus, so it's good to be bringing back what promises to be a fun weekend of quizbowl. Natan Holtzman and I will be organizing the weekend; please contact one of us with any logistical questions.

Scheduling is flexible: this promises to be a fairly small event and so the format will depend on what the attendees want to play. Please indicate interest by putting your name down on this sheet under the events you'd be interested in playing by Friday, August 5th. Once we've done an initial solicitation of interest, we'll choose the most popular events and draw up a schedule.

[Mike Bentley]

Any chance you can nail down the events earlier than August 5th? I'm theoretically interested in attending this but it's heavily dependent on what events get scheduled and when they're run. Two weeks isn't a ton of runway for booking a flight.

[gyre and gimble]

Scheduling is flexible: this promises to be a fairly small event and so the format will depend on what the attendees want to play.

If attendance is expected to be relatively low, I would suggest not doing a full tossup-bonus quads event (or to consider running tossups-only singles or doubles events with those sets). For example, right now NASAT has the second-most interest, but the interested people would be able to fill out only three teams.

[ryanrosenberg]

Any chance you can nail down the events earlier than August 5th? I'm theoretically interested in attending this but it's heavily dependent on what events get scheduled and when they're run. Two weeks isn't a ton of runway for booking a flight.

We've gotten a quick response so far in terms of interest in different sets, I'll try to confirm availability before the 5th if it's clear that a particular set has strong interest.

Re: Stephen's point, once the sets are confirmed I'll sent out a poll about tournament format. I personally would prefer fewer tossup-bonus events to allow a wider variety of sets to be played.

[ryanrosenberg]

I've added a video game audio set by Anthony DiCarlo to the signup sheet.

Exact number of tournaments will depend on format/length, but I imagine we'll probably do 2-3 events per day.

[Bosa of York]

Now that CO is over, do the folks organizing this have an idea of when what sets are being played will be finalized?

[ryanrosenberg]

Now that CO is over, do the folks organizing this have an idea of when what sets are being played will be finalized?

The plan will be to run NASAT, JAVASCRIPT, and Eyes on Saturday, and Logomachy, MUSES, and Eminent Victorians on Sunday. NASAT will be run tossup-only to allow time for JAVASCRIPT and Eyes. I've added signup sheets for each event to the interest sheet. Assuming sufficient interest (i.e. at least 4 teams), all events will be in quads except for JAVASCRIPT and Eyes, which will be multi-room shootouts.

[ryanrosenberg]

Per Stanford policy, minors will be allowed to play these tournaments if they are chaperoned by an adult at all times.

[gyre and gimble]

JAVASCRIPT and Eyes, which will be multi-room shootouts.

Do you guys have a sense of what the format will be for these?

Assuming not too many people are playing just Javascript or just Eyes, the field's shaping up to be pretty strong. If logistically feasible, I'd suggest having three rooms with the upper two rooms limited to 6 players each (with 2 moving up or down between rounds). Rooms of more than 6 on 20-question packets would leave a lot of room for variance.

[ryanrosenberg]

JAVASCRIPT and Eyes, which will be multi-room shootouts.

Do you guys have a sense of what the format will be for these?

Assuming not too many people are playing just Javascript or just Eyes, the field's shaping up to be pretty strong. If logistically feasible, I'd suggest having three rooms with the upper two rooms limited to 6 players each (with 2 moving up or down between rounds). Rooms of more than 6 on 20-question packets would leave a lot of room for variance.

That's the plan, yes -- we have up to four rooms depending on staff and would like 5-6 players per room.

On another note, for the non-shootout events, I'll be assigning free agents to teams late tomorrow, but people should feel free to form teams (or partial teams) in the meantime.

edit: to be clear, I will be using a random number generator to assign teams so if there's anyone you'd like to play with you should indicate that on the sheet.

[ryanrosenberg]

The logistics email that was just sent out:

Hi everyone,

Thanks for signing up for the NorCal side event weekend! If you're receiving this email, you're a contact for one of the teams this weekend; please send the email to your teammates since this contains important logistical information for the weekend. If you were assigned a free agent and don't have their contact information, no worries, I'll post this email publicly as well.

Timing and Location
Check-in will start both days at 8:30 outside the Thornton Center (at the tables next to the building on Santa Teresa St). There will be a brief opening meeting at 8:45 where we'll go over the format and schedule for the day's events, and Round 1 will begin at 9:00. Bagels and cream cheese will be provided for breakfast.

Visitor parking on campus is free on weekends and is available nearby in the Roble Field Garage (parking map). If Roble Field is full, there is also the Via Ortega parking structure nearby.

Format and Schedule
For Saturday, NASAT will run from 9am-1pm, followed by a lunch break, and then JAVASCRIPT and Eyes after lunch (approximately 2pm-7pm). There are two options for the NASAT format, which we'll decide via straw poll at the opening meeting: either we can do a single round-robin (5 games + a placement game) running rounds with tossups and bonuses, or we can do a double RR (10 games + a placement game) running tossup-only rounds. Both JAVASCRIPT and Eyes will be multi-room shootouts: players will be seeded into rooms of 5-6 players each, and after each round, the highest 2 scorers in a room will be sent to the higher-seeded room, and the lowest 2 scorers will be sent to the lower-seeded room.

On Sunday, we'll be running Logomachy, MUSES, and Eminent Victorians. All are tossup-only. Logomachy will run 9am-1pm, MUSES 2pm-5pm, and Eminent Victorians 5pm-8pm (all times approximate).

Free Agents and Teams
Everyone who signed up as a free agent was assigned to teams yesterday. In order to keep a good number of teams (i.e. 6 teams is much easier to schedule than 7), one team for each of NASAT and Logomachy was assigned a 5th member. Those teams will play 5-on-4; no substitutions will be required. This was done to allow people to play the most quizbowl possible, avoiding byes and not penalizing players on 5-person teams by making them sit out.

Price
Each event is $15, and staff for each event will be paid $15. Please pay me via cash or Venmo (@Ryan-Rosenberg) for all events except Eyes, Eyes payment goes to Mike Bentley (venmo: @Michael-Bentley-5 or paypal: [email protected]).

Mask Policy
Per Stanford policy, masks are required indoors except when speaking. Accordingly, all attendees will be required to be masked indoors, except moderators actively moderating a game, or people speaking at an opening meeting or wrap-up ceremony.

Please let me know if you have any questions -- excited to see you all this weekend!

Best,
Ryan Rosenberg

[ryanrosenberg]

27 rounds of quizbowl were played today. Tejas Raje, Weijia Cheng, Vivian Malouf, and Eric Wolfsberg won NASAT, and Stephen Liu won both JAVASCRIPT and Eyes. Stats are up for NASAT; full stats for the visual tournaments and detailed stats for NASAT will be available this week. On to more quizbowl tomorrow!

[Mike Bentley]

For Eyes, we split into two rooms.

Scores for the top bracket:

Stephen Liu / 12 / 28 / 20 / 25 / 735
Aseem Keyal / 5 / 9 / 13 / 10 / 315
Natan Holtzman / 8 / 4 / 11 / 13 / 265
Taylor Harvey / 5 / 6 / 6 / 7 / 215
Tim Morrison / 1 / 2 / 6 / 7 / 75
Tejas Raje / 1 / 2 / 5 / 6 / 70
PC / / 1 / / 2 / 5

Bottom bracket:

Marianna / 2 / 3 / 26 / 6 / 315
Ryan / / 4 / 20 / 14 / 190
Stephen / / 6 / 11 / 3 / 185
Ankit / 1 / 3 / 11 / 5 / 150
Swapnil / / 1 / 16 / 6 / 145
Eric W / 1 / 2 / 5 / 5 / 75
Eric C / / / 7 / 1 / 65
Anuttam / / 1 / 3 / 7 / 10
John / / / / 2 / -10

Thanks everyone for playing! I'll create a Discord discussion server soon.

[ryanrosenberg]

Thank you everyone for coming out to Palo Alto this weekend!

Congratulations to our winners of the Sunday tournaments: Pluma Piluma (Naveed Chowdhury, Taylor Harvey, Mike Bentley, Tim Morrison) won Logomachy; Team 2 (Benji Nguyen, Stephen Liu, Aseem Keyal, Taylor Harvey) won MUSES; and the assassination of august von kotzebue by the coward karl sand (Eric Chen, Vivian Malouf, Taylor Harvey, Aseem Keyal) won Eminent Victorians.

Stats for the above events are posted at this link. I'll compile full JAVASCRIPT stats and detailed stats for NASAT and Logomachy sometime this week.

[Mike Bentley]

Thanks Ryan for organizing this, it was a lot of fun!

[ryanrosenberg]

Apologies for the lateness, but I've put together an app displaying detailed stats for NASAT and (all but two lost games of) Logomachy.

[gyre and gimble]

It would be nice to see the stats for JAVASCRIPT posted on the database, if they're still around.

[ryanrosenberg]

I've uploaded the stats from the top room, I can't find the other stats but I'll upload them if I get them.