Gonzaga Tournament (2/03/07) at GCHS (Washington, DC)

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Magister Ludi
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Gonzaga Tournament (2/03/07) at GCHS (Washington, DC)

Post by Magister Ludi »

I am happy to announce that Gonzaga in Washignton Dc will host its fourth annual tournament on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007. We usually draw a competitive field from the DC Metro area.

The format has changed from last year. This year the format will be untimed house-written tossup bonus, with 20 tossups with unrelated bonuses. The difficulty level will be approximately ACF Fall.

The price breakdown:
$50 for the first team
$45 for each subsequent team
$5 discount for bringing buzzers
$5 discount for payment sent before February 3rd

Trophies will be given to the top four teams and the top three individual players will also receive prizes.

E-mail invitations will be sent out later this week. To register e-mail me at [email protected]

If you any questions or comments please feel free to e-mail me or post them on this thread.
Last edited by Magister Ludi on Wed Jan 10, 2007 7:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Magister Ludi »

The date should read February 3rd 2007, not 2006. Could a moderator please fix that on the title of the thread. Thanks.
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Post by Guest »

Field so far?
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Post by Magister Ludi »

Field Update:
Baltimore Poly x2
Bishop Ireton x2
Blake x1
Calvert Hall x2
Dorman x1
ER x2
GDS x2
Maggie Walker x1
McNamara x1
Mount Vernon x1
Perry Hall x2
James Madison x1
Rockville x2
Severna Park x2
Sidwell x2
Spalding x2
State College x2
Stuyvesant x2
TJ x3
Wilson x2
Total: 35 teams

So far it looks like the making of a very competitive field. We are capping the field at 48, so please get your registration in as quickly as possible. If you would like to register, please email me at [email protected]
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Post by Magister Ludi »

Field Update:
Baltimore Poly x2
Banneker x 2
Bishop Ireton x2
Blake x1
Bullis x 1
Calvert Hall x2
Centennial x 3
Dorman (SC) x1
ER x2
GDS x2
Goretti x 1
Hammond x 2
Howard x 1
Hunter (NY) x 1
Kellenberg (NY) x 2
Maggie Walker x1
Maret x 3
McNamara x1
Mount Vernon x1
Perry Hall x2
James Madison x1
Robinson x 2
Rockville x2
Seton Hall (NJ) x 1
Sidwell x2
Spalding x2
State College (PA) x2
TJ x3
Walter Johnson x 1
Wilson x 2
Total: 51

We need three more teams, and we will cap at 54. If you have expressed interest but have yet to confirm please email be ASAP to finalize.
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Post by Wall of Ham »

arg... we have been snowed in.
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Post by Magister Ludi »

We had 60 teams compete Saturday. Maggie Walker defeated Dorman 370-185 in the finals. In the semis Dorman beat RM A 320-220, and Maggie Walker defeated TJ A 380-150.

The Final Standings:
1- Maggie Walker
2- Dorman
Semi-finalists: RM A & TJ A

Quarter-finalists: GDS, Centennial A, RM B, and Hunter.

I'd like to apologize for how disorganized the torunament was. We had some problems with slow readers and we had a stat system crash midway through the day, which delayed the individual stats. I hope that despite the administrative problems everyone was still able to enjoy themselves. Full stats with individual stats will be posted next week.

The top high scorer will receive a first edition signed copy of Ray Bradbury's S is for Space that I will mail to you. I will also mail awards to the other top three scorers.
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Post by PapierMacheSatan »

Aside from the long waits between rounds, I thought it was a very well-written, good tournament. I liked the science questions, but as far as I recall, there were no math questions at all.

I also had some problems with inexperienced/parent readers not understanding rules, but the issue was handled reasonably well, if slowly.
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Post by aestheteboy »

I liked the questions very much. The distribution I thought were rather unique, but I personally liked it.

However, other aspects of the tournament were frustrating. You acknowledged the problem in your post, but fundamentally the problem might have been that 60 teams are just too many to handle. We had a reader who took 45 min per round, (which is not good but tolerable) but we had to wait 15 more minutes for the next round to begin.
The lack of communication to us about lunch, on which I hope you heard from your coach, was probably one of the manifestations of you simply having too many teams to manage. (it was partly our fault . . . but we were HUNGRY)
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Post by BuzzerZen »

The questions were all excellently written, but I feel like the answer selection on the science questions was lacking in depth and excessively biography-focused. It was really noticeable by the playoffs, when we had Armenian-American and South African literature alongside a bonus soliciting the SI units for force, energy, and...something else easy. Other than that complaint, the questions were pretty much exemplary, and I'll take any amount of delay in stride as long as the questions and the competition are worth my time. Thanks to Ted, Fr. Meehan, and our various worthy opponents.
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Post by jbarnes112358 »

If I had known there was such a delay I might have jumped into my car and driven up for the finals after our local tournament. :smile:

I suppose these are the teams one might have predicted in the final four. I was glad to see that Dorman came up to the DC area hotbed of quiz bowl. They should be commended for their strong showing. I know how difficult it is to get by Richard Montgomery A (or B even for that matter).

Was this Dorman's usual A-team? I believe I noticed a Dorman team competing down in Georgia today. I thought we were only ones crazy enough to do two tournaments in the same day.

It is a shame State College was once again kept away by weather.
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Post by Magister Ludi »

This was Dorman's full A team. I was most impressed with Nick' s deep knowledge in literature and Arsaalan's depth of knowledge in history and geography. On a different note; Dorman's B team has had great success this year, and is perhaps one team that is running under the radar in the national scene as they were a semi-finalist at Vanderbilt and at UGA's winter tournament.
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Post by Zip Zap Rap Pants »

jbarnes112358 wrote: It is a shame State College was once again kept away by weather.
Don't worry, they're actually busy building their secret weapon, to be unveiled at nationals (some say it's the Antlantean deathray predicted by Edgar Cayce, some say it's a Stephen Hawking clone made by Penn State bio students, others say it was discovered that Ivan Drago is actually the high school's janitor and they're getting him back to true form).
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Post by Wall of Ham »

Matt Morrison wrote:
jbarnes112358 wrote: It is a shame State College was once again kept away by weather.
Don't worry, they're actually busy building their secret weapon, to be unveiled at nationals (some say it's the Antlantean deathray predicted by Edgar Cayce, some say it's a Stephen Hawking clone made by Penn State bio students, others say it was discovered that Ivan Drago is actually the high school's janitor and they're getting him back to true form).

How wonderfully insightfully you are, Mr. Morrison.

But I am afraid that the disclosure of such information simply will not be tolerated. While it is true that you have a free rein ever since we hired you to create our new musical WMDs, another such slip up will make you very popular with our ninja squads. Plus, Drago is actually in hiding as our superintendent, who apparently will not let us use school vans especially when there less than one inch of snow on the ground.

Sincerely
:twisted: :chip: :twisted: :chip: :twisted: :chip: :twisted:
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Post by Lapego1 »

Getting back on topic here....I thought the questions were very well-written. I was pleased that you were able to pull off (mostly) pyramidal science questions, even though, as you admitted, that's not your strength. Each round's distribution was very good. There was a little disparity in terms of difficulty (such as the bonus Evan mentioned above), but sometimes that's how it goes. Despite the delays and some buzzer issues in a few rooms we played in, the tournament more than made up for it in the questions and level of competition. We managed to play several teams we don't usually get to play.
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Post by The Toad to Wigan Pier »

While I really liked the questions, I thought the distribution was a little strange. I thought there were too many biographical author questions(maybe this was just a side effect of having so many lit questions). Also, most of the TRASH type questions seemed to be sports and very little pop culture(as in modern movies and music). As to the science questions, I did have a few problems. The one I had the biggest problem with was the sugar bonus. We really did not know which sugars you wanted us to say because all the information that you supplied was their formulas which is not enough information(For example C5H10O5 could be ribose, Xylose, Arabinose, and etc). Having not seen what was directly written on the page, maybe all of the correct possible answers were listed, but it still is not a good idea for a bonus.
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Post by Magister Ludi »

I agree that the science lacked depth and wasn't consistent in the quality or breadth of the other questions. I hope the science was still passable.

However, I disagree with the assertion that the author questions focused on biographies. All of the writer questions were written in the ACF style with the majority of the clues about the writer's works and almost none of the clues about the writer's bio.
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Post by The Toad to Wigan Pier »

Sorry, what I meant was that there were a lot of questions about authors as opposed to questions about particular works. There was an adequate number of tossups about particular works, but because the number of literature questions, it seemed like there was a lot more tossups on authors than normal.
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Post by NotTheGoose »

I believe there is a reason for the lack of trash questions concerning movies/music and the surplus of sports questions. It seems that the questions used at the tournament were written by Gonzaga students, whom are all boys. Thus, it reflects the main interests of the writers. Many of the literature/history/science questions also seemed to follow a set pattern in terms of subject, because I believe I heard Gustave Mollier's name at least three times. At the end of the day, I left with a pretty good idea of what Gonzaga's curriculum is.
My only complaints were the shaky organization, the hour-long toss-ups, the still longer intervals between rounds which were only made long because of the painfully slow readers, and the fact that suggestions not intended as answers given people other than the captain were taken as answers.

Other than that, it was an okay tournament.
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Post by Captain Sinico »

NotTheGoose wrote:I believe there is a reason for the lack of trash questions concerning movies/music and the surplus of sports questions. It seems that the questions used at the tournament were written by Gonzaga students, whom are all boys.
What?
NotTheGoose wrote:...I heard Gustave Mollier's name at least three times.
Who?
NotTheGoose wrote:...hour-long toss-ups...
What?

Puzzled,
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Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

NotTheGoose wrote:the hour-long toss-ups
The tournament directors openly posted on here that the tournament was modeled off of ACF fall. ACF fall uses longer tossups than some events. If you weren't expecting that format (as was announced) than that is your own problem. Those tossups are designed to reward the best teams, which they do.
-EDIT- I just want to clarify, do you mean Gustav Mahler? If that's the case, I doubt he has much influence on any school's curriculum unless it's a music magnet.
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Post by Gonzagapuma1 »

[/quote]"I believe there is a reason for the lack of trash questions concerning movies/music and the surplus of sports questions. It seems that the questions used at the tournament were written by Gonzaga students, whom are all boys. Thus, it reflects the main interests of the writers. "

As a Gonzaga student who wrote questions for this tournament that doesn't make much sense cause I go to a lot of movies, and listen to a lot of music. While I like sports I don't think there was a "surplus" of sports but maybe we didn't include as many movies as we could have. I don't think this was intentional it just turned put that way. I don't even know what to make of your whole curriculum thing or what u meant by the "set-pattern in terms of subject". All i can say to that is you must think we have an awesome school if we read Chabon and Saroyan.
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Post by Magister Ludi »

NotTheGoose wrote:I believe there is a reason for the lack of trash questions concerning movies/music and the surplus of sports questions. It seems that the questions used at the tournament were written by Gonzaga students, whom are all boys. Thus, it reflects the main interests of the writers. Many of the literature/history/science questions also seemed to follow a set pattern in terms of subject, because I believe I heard Gustave Mollier's name at least three times. At the end of the day, I left with a pretty good idea of what Gonzaga's curriculum is.
We followed strict distribution requirements for all of our packets so the questions covered a broad range of topics. For example in literature it was 1/1 American, 1/1 European, 1/1 British, 1/1 World, with at least one question on drama, one on drama, 5 questions of works, and 3 on writers.

To claim that our questioms followed some set pattern in subject matter from our curriculum is just wrong. When is the last time a high school English class read Rilke's Duino Elegies or you studied Malinowski in a high school class. Maybe the "set pattern" you were refferring to was the ACF question style where the focus is on works and actual accomplishments as opposed to pointless trivia such as: This writer was childhood freinds with Harper Lee.

BTW, there was one bonus on Gutav MAHLER and no other references to him through out the tournament (but there was a noticeable lack of gustave mollier questions.).
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Post by jbarnes112358 »

Ted, do you have the results/stats? Thanks
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Post by bigmac »

Congrats to Gov for winning this event; they seem to be making a strong case for themselves so far. This is really the first time we had a look at the latest edition of Dorman. They are back in a huge way. In particular, they dominated the literature tossups, of which there were many at this tournament.

The questions were quite good at this tournament, though perhaps a little long. Some of the middle clues did not always narrow down the answer any more than the opening clues. The tossup on Bergson, to give one example, provided his full definitions for both intelligence and instinct in the opening three lines. Educational perhaps, but spelling out both were probably unnecessary.

This tournament was fairly billed. It will be curious, however, to see what the average scores for rounds were. Our C team took the 15th seed (out of 60 teams) and I do not think they cracked 200 points the entire day.

The excessive length of the morning (round two ended just before noon) seems to me becoming too much of a common experience for Saturday tournaments. I do not think it is unreasonable for people to be expect to be free by 5 pm on the day of a tournament. If anyone has any ideas about establishing some expectations for running tournaments efficiently, I would be interested to hear from you after I start a post in the theory forum.

All in all, a well-written tournament with some national-caliber teams. Readers in the playoffs were knowledgeable and made good decisions.
RM coach
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Post by NotTheGoose »

As a Gonzaga student who wrote questions for this tournament that doesn't make much sense cause I go to a lot of movies, and listen to a lot of music. While I like sports I don't think there was a "surplus" of sports but maybe we didn't include as many movies as we could have.
I'm not saying you don't listen to music or movies. All I'm saying is that there weren't many questions on those topics.
Maybe the "set pattern" you were refferring to was the ACF question style where the focus is on works and actual accomplishments as opposed to pointless trivia such as: This writer was childhood freinds with Harper Lee.
Yes, it is the pattern I was talking about.
I just want to clarify, do you mean Gustav Mahler? If that's the case, I doubt he has much influence on any school's curriculum unless it's a music magnet.
My apologies, I meant Mahler.
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Post by DumbJaques »

I'm not saying you don't listen to music or movies. All I'm saying is that there weren't many questions on those topics.
That seemed to be exactly what you were saying. Wasn't your point that "boys" are more inclined to like sports than music or movies, hence your logically-challenged "thus is reflects the main interests of the writers" statement?
I believe there is a reason for the lack of trash questions concerning movies/music and the surplus of sports questions.
You began the statement with "I believe there is a reason." Your claim that all you were saying is that the questions weren't there is difficult to accept. What you were saying remains a mystery to me, but your language would imply you were going after some kind of a reason.
Quote:
Maybe the "set pattern" you were refferring to was the ACF question style where the focus is on works and actual accomplishments as opposed to pointless trivia such as: This writer was childhood freinds with Harper Lee.


Yes, it is the pattern I was talking about.
How was this the pattern you were talking about? Again, I don't claim to understand your post, but you seemed to be talking about the answer selection and making some case that it was tied in with the Gonzaga curriculum. The pattern Ted referenced was using clues that reward actual academic knowledge of an author, a work, a historical event and its significance, a scientific principle, etc., without relying on stock information they throw at you on jeopardy. Clearly, this style difference has nothing to do with answer selection and is in no way related to the Gonzaga curriculum. If that was your complaint, how is the fact that Gustav Mahler (by the way, been through the set, only came up once) appears in a question relative to anything?

Maybe you're wondering why people are giving you such a hard time. It's because you criticized a tournament's question quality and made absolutely no sense doing it. Then you made some comment that, whether you intended it or not, came off as incredibly sarcastic, rude, and generally immature. When you list like 5 things you hated about a tournament in such negative language, then say "other than that it was a good tournament," it's going to be read a certain way. If you didn't mean it to be read that way, that's unfortunate, but that's how it came across.

Also, I echo Charlie's quite appropriate point. I'm pretty sure this tournament had the word's "ACF Fall" in it's announcement on this board. Do not go to a tournament that has those words in its announcement and then complain about a "pattern" of resembling ACF Fall.
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Post by Zip Zap Rap Pants »

BLiu wrote:
Matt Morrison wrote:
jbarnes112358 wrote: It is a shame State College was once again kept away by weather.
Don't worry, they're actually busy building their secret weapon, to be unveiled at nationals (some say it's the Antlantean deathray predicted by Edgar Cayce, some say it's a Stephen Hawking clone made by Penn State bio students, others say it was discovered that Ivan Drago is actually the high school's janitor and they're getting him back to true form).

How wonderfully insightfully you are, Mr. Morrison.

But I am afraid that the disclosure of such information simply will not be tolerated. While it is true that you have a free rein ever since we hired you to create our new musical WMDs, another such slip up will make you very popular with our ninja squads. Plus, Drago is actually in hiding as our superintendent, who apparently will not let us use school vans especially when there less than one inch of snow on the ground.

Sincerely
:twisted: :chip: :twisted: :chip: :twisted: :chip: :twisted:
I'll consider not defecting with my musical WMD knowledge if you all will come to the Col. Ebirt. :wink: How's that for blackmail? :twisted: :arminius: :twisted: :arminius: :twisted:
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Post by Lapego1 »

Will stats be made available online?
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