RESULTS! Patriot Games at George Mason University (3/31/07)

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Post by Frater Taciturnus »

I dont think Freeman B will be able to make it, but I can check today to make sure.

EDIT:

Also, what is the format, so we can prepare for it?
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Re: Patriot Games at George Mason University (3/31/07)

Post by No Sollositing On Premise »

E.T. Chuck wrote:The format will be untimed tossup/bonus, and we will likely use UMR's and/or Vanderbilt's set (allluded to in this thread). But the search for authors continues...
Basically untimed ACF format, it would seem.
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Post by First Chairman »

Untimed standard tossup/bonus.

Thanks... please let me know so I can change the schedule before I send it to the copiers.
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Post by Lapego1 »

Wait, so is it just full round-robin with the winner being the team with the best record? Or will there be playoffs?
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location of the "Lecture Hall"?

Post by Robbie Ram »

Can anyone give me some simple directions from Braddock Road to the GMU "Lecture Hall"? I know it's not *that* big a campus, but I don't want to have to go look at every building either...

--Robbie Ram
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Post by First Chairman »

Lapego1 wrote:Wait, so is it just full round-robin with the winner being the team with the best record? Or will there be playoffs?
I would prefer to have the team with the best record win unless we have to break ties. I'm also flexible but I want to be sure that if teams have to leave early that we can accommodate it.
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Re: location of the "Lecture Hall"?

Post by First Chairman »

Robbie Ram wrote:Can anyone give me some simple directions from Braddock Road to the GMU "Lecture Hall"? I know it's not *that* big a campus, but I don't want to have to go look at every building either...

--Robbie Ram
Directions to Fairfax campus: http://www.gmu.edu/welcome/Directions-to-GMU.html

The campus map with lecture hall highlighted:
http://coyote.gmu.edu/map/maphtml/lh1.html

Robinson Hall:
http://coyote.gmu.edu/map/maphtml/rha1.html for building A, next door is building B.
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Re: location of the "Lecture Hall"?

Post by Robbie Ram »

E.T. Chuck wrote: Directions to Fairfax campus: http://www.gmu.edu/welcome/Directions-to-GMU.html

The campus map with lecture hall highlighted:
http://coyote.gmu.edu/map/maphtml/lh1.html

Robinson Hall:
http://coyote.gmu.edu/map/maphtml/rha1.html for building A, next door is building B.
Thanks Dr. Chuck...

By the way, your schedule lists Lake Braddock as a "Cinderella" entry, but the coach emailed me last week (Thursday) saying she didn't think her team could make it. Have you heard from her since then and confirmed LB's attendance?
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Post by First Chairman »

Well, that's why I'm doing a run-through to be sure I have everyone's entries down. Running comps with real-job stuff is challenging.
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Post by Frater Taciturnus »

Dr. Chuck,

Due to critical apathy levels and scheduling conflicts, we will not be attending at all. Support for this tournament was much less than it was thought to be. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Post by MLWMathStar »

Oh man, this is the first time in 2 years that I get to be a punching bag and PPG-raiser (for the other side) at a tournament...
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Post by First Chairman »

No problem... thanks for letting me know that DF isn't going to come. Time to change the schedule again.

Next year maybe we'll try again. Otherwise, hopefully there will be a HSCS event at GMU in the fall... stay tuned.
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Post by First Chairman »

Revised the Cinderella schedule. View here.
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Post by BuzzerZen »

In the interest of disclosure:
Since Michael and I will both be missing yet another tournament, TJ's A and B teams have been set up to be approximately equal strength, since both are already qualified for PACE.
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Post by jbarnes112358 »

When is registration and when are games scheduled to begin? Any projection on finish time? Where should we park? Are we still meeting in room 1 of Lecture Hall?
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Post by First Chairman »

Registration 8:30 to 9:00 am at Lecture Hall 1. In terms of parking, unless you're driving a large bus, I have been told that the lots are "still active" on Saturday until 3pm (argh). So the closest lot for vans and cars is the Mason Pond parking lot. If you have a bus, there is probably space in the parking lots nearest the Patriot Center, though this week the circus is in town (yes, I'm serious).

Our games are in Robinson, which is close by. Food: Johnson Center and Student Union I have food. JC has Burger King and a food court on the top floor, the basement floor has a coffee shop and the Bistro. SUB I (as it's called) has a Damon's which I think is open on Saturday for lunch, but I'm not sure about that.

Projection to finish: I want to be done by 5pm to 6pm. As it stands, the plan is straight-up round robin for everyone, with possible playoff rounds for Cinderella bracket ony. Nine rounds with teams staying on their floors should be expedious unless my readers take a lot longer than they should. If there is sufficient time and teams "want more matches," I have the rooms until 7pm... and am making a few extra rounds just in case.
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Post by bigmac »

We are sorry for the late notice, but RM needs to cancel its registration. We would have been short-handed anyway and lost another player today. Had there been playoffs we might have been able to field a team that would come close to the caliber of a national qualifier by the afternoon. My only regret is that we should have seen that a spring break tournament had only a limited chance of working out.
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Post by bigmac »

My only regret is that we should have seen that a spring break tournament had only a limited chance of working out.
for us, I mean, not the whole tournament in general. EDIT

Good luck to all.
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Post by aestheteboy »

E.T. Chuck wrote:Projection to finish: I want to be done by 5pm to 6pm. As it stands, the plan is straight-up round robin for everyone, with possible playoff rounds for Cinderella bracket ony. Nine rounds with teams staying on their floors should be expedious unless my readers take a lot longer than they should. If there is sufficient time and teams "want more matches," I have the rooms until 7pm... and am making a few extra rounds just in case.
I'll tell you right now that WJ (or at least I am) is always looking for more matches to play.
By the way, I've talked to Whitman to see if they wanted to come. Apparently there was a tournament at Johns Hopkins that was cancelled.
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Post by First Chairman »

Well, we have an opening with RM not making it... again when we really have this party organized next year...

Otherwise, it's cherry blossoms for everyone. :)
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Lake Braddock unable to attend

Post by rkmielec »

Unfortunately, neither myself or my co-sponsor will be able to accompany the team tomorrow. I have to go out of town and my co-sponsor can not attend either. I apologize for the late notice.
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Post by First Chairman »

Argh... thanks though for telling me. None of your kids want to attend?
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Post by First Chairman »

The update for those who are wondering:

Lake Braddock in Cinderella has been replaced with a second Georgetown Day JV team.

Richard Montgomery in Nationals has been replaced with a third Thomas Jefferson team (even though they didn't qualify for nationals).
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Post by First Chairman »

The stats will be posted as soon as I can get back to a wireless on campus... but here's how it went:

Questions used for records: ABCXXXIII from Vanderbilt March 17, 2007.

Cinderella Bracket
Winner: Maggie Walker JV A (8-1) avenged its only loss to a then-undefeated James Robinson team (8-1) in the final: 185 to 95.

Semifinals results:
James Robinson 240, Stone Bridge (3-5) 70
Maggie Walker JV A 160, Georgetown Day JV A 95


In the Nationals Bracket, the full round-robin finished with the top 3 teams as
1st Maggie Walker A (9-0)
2nd State College A (7-2)
3rd Gonzaga (6-3)

Top 4 scorers (aliases were allowed and somewhat encouraged):

Cinderella bracket (out of 7 games)
77.14 Commander Cody (Robinson)
66.43 Greg (MW JV A)
38.33 Moji (GDS JV A)
37.14 Matt (GDS JV B)

Nationals bracket (out of 9 games)
68.33 Soren (Gonzaga)
55.22 Phil (TJ B)
43.33 Akara (State College A)
36.11 Andrew (Walter Johnson)


P.S. Oh yeah, you TJ kids need to get me some cash money... :cool:
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Post by BuzzerZen »

I think our finance office lets purchase orders ferment for a few months before mailing checks.
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Post by Zip Zap Rap Pants »

Dr. Chuck, I propose we team up to raid TJ's finance office ninja style one night, they owe us $195 too.
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Post by First Chairman »

Well, at least I know what the principal looks like... I met him... honest! ;)

Stats at http://mason.gmu.edu/~echuck/PG2007/PG_standings.html .
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Post by aestheteboy »

It was a lot of fun playing many of the best teams out there.
My only regret is that no one seemed to have enjoyed our aliases . . . not even my teammates :cry:
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Post by MLWMathStar »

A job well done running this tournament, but no less to be expected from Dr. Chuck, of course. It becomes quickly apparent in the standings that we were completely asleep the first few rounds, but then managed to partially make up for it at the end of the day. Personally, I was quite dismayed at our overall performance.

As for the questions? Compare from here the amount of negs people have to the amount of negs people have at other tournaments. Either these questions were notoriously good at leading you to the wrong answer, or everyone (not just us) was dozing off. An example of the latter would be me missing a country named at the beginning of the question and saying the leader of a completely different one midway through (are these questions discussable?). An example of the former was a math one that had critical information in the last few words of a 4-line tossup. You can not do that. Math questions need to follow pyramidal rules to some degree if you're going to use them.

Now that we have the negatives out of the way, the questions weren't really that bad. Writing pyramidal tournaments isn't the easiest thing to do correctly, keeping in mind everything from distribution to difficulty to balanced bonuses, and they did a lot of that well. These were Vanderbilt's questions, right?

Hmm, I guess that's all the post mortem I have.
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Post by First Chairman »

Yes, and for the record this link goes to their RR stats.

Unfortunately, they did not keep individual stats. My interest certainly focused on the team stats. All I can say is that if you see the points-per-bonus statistics for the Nationals bracket, I'm in complete awe. Obviously TJ C was a late add and should have belonged in the lower bracket, but to have 9 of 10 teams average around 18+ bonus points per opportunity, and five of them 20+ per bonus, it says a lot about the strength of that group.
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Post by Magister Ludi »

I think that Points per bonus might be wrong for us (Gonzaga). The stats have us answering 20 tossups in Game 6 and negging twice and TJ answering 7 TUs and negging three times. And us having a P/B of 7.25 for that game.

It may be to difficult to fix, but if there were any way I could see our P/B would really appreciate it. Thanks.

Congrats on a well run tournament. It was fun to play a lot of close games with really godd teams throughout the day.
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Post by MLWMathStar »

The error is caused by the fact that one of your players, who had 40 points in all of the other 8 games, is listed as earning 90 points that game. If I had to guess, a slip of the finger typed a 9 instead of a 0. The program thus thinks you got all 9 more bonuses and 90 less bonus points than is actual.
EDIT: While I'm at it, the correct values are the following (BPts/BHrd/PPB)
235/11/21.4 for the round in error
2205/104/21.2 for the whole tournament, a dramatic difference from what is shown in the standings

I also noticed in one of the rounds that the tossup scores for me and another person on my team were flipped. If I really cared about individual stats, I would get this fixed. And I'm pretty sure I saw someone (MW JV A?) with over 30 PPB in one game.

What program is used to generate these stats? Typos are completely understandable, but the program ought to have mechanisms for checking these things. Just giving an interface and doing calculations in a program without any features like error checking is analogous to memorizing a bunch of lists instead of learning in-depth material about a subject in quiz bowl. And I see from that previous sentence that I really need to go to bed.
EDIT: This didn't quite come out right. I'm not blaming the tournament, but mostly the software.
Last edited by MLWMathStar on Sat Mar 31, 2007 10:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Frater Taciturnus »

would it be possible for us to acquire a copy of the questions? (we need some practice material, so I may also want a few old PACE sets as well)
That would be greatly appreciated.
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Post by yangsta »

Matt Morrison wrote:Dr. Chuck, I propose we team up to raid TJ's finance office ninja style one night, they owe us $195 too.
Perhaps we should start a TJ debt collection thread; they also owe us $285 ;)
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Post by vandyhawk »

MLWMathStar wrote:As for the questions? Compare from here the amount of negs people have to the amount of negs people have at other tournaments. Either these questions were notoriously good at leading you to the wrong answer, or everyone (not just us) was dozing off. An example of the latter would be me missing a country named at the beginning of the question and saying the leader of a completely different one midway through (are these questions discussable?). An example of the former was a math one that had critical information in the last few words of a 4-line tossup. You can not do that. Math questions need to follow pyramidal rules to some degree if you're going to use them.

Now that we have the negatives out of the way, the questions weren't really that bad. Writing pyramidal tournaments isn't the easiest thing to do correctly, keeping in mind everything from distribution to difficulty to balanced bonuses, and they did a lot of that well. These were Vanderbilt's questions, right?
I really don't see an inherent problem with the questions leading to the negs. With few exceptions, they all contain only uniquely identifying facts with very little vague content. Maybe there were a lot of negs because our questions are longer than NAQT's, beginning with most likely harder clues, and almost all matches were in a very competitive environment? I will say some of the math tossups didn't turn out that great, and there were a few questions where I could understand why someone would neg, but still wouldn't be a hose (e.g. Emeril for Elzar). Anyway, don't mean to come across as too defensive here, but we didn't see a neg problem at our tournament, so just throwing out some ideas. Feel free to discuss specific questions.
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Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

After playing a Vanderbilt tournament, I would have to say it would take some drastic decrease of effort to make the tossups notably not as good. I think the Vanderbilt team did an amazing job with the fall tournament.
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Post by First Chairman »

MLWMathStar wrote:The error is caused by the fact that one of your players, who had 40 points in all of the other 8 games, is listed as earning 90 points that game. If I had to guess, a slip of the finger typed a 9 instead of a 0. The program thus thinks you got all 9 more bonuses and 90 less bonus points than is actual.
EDIT: While I'm at it, the correct values are the following (BPts/BHrd/PPB)
235/11/21.4 for the round in error
2205/104/21.2 for the whole tournament, a dramatic difference from what is shown in the standings

I also noticed in one of the rounds that the tossup scores for me and another person on my team were flipped. If I really cared about individual stats, I would get this fixed. And I'm pretty sure I saw someone (MW JV A?) with over 30 PPB in one game.

What program is used to generate these stats? Typos are completely understandable, but the program ought to have mechanisms for checking these things. Just giving an interface and doing calculations in a program without any features like error checking is analogous to memorizing a bunch of lists instead of learning in-depth material about a subject in quiz bowl. And I see from that previous sentence that I really need to go to bed.
EDIT: This didn't quite come out right. I'm not blaming the tournament, but mostly the software.
I used the latest SQBS with auto-calculation of bonus statistics. Heck, we were using standard toss/bonus with 20 questions... it should be easy to determine that. Of course, you have the luxury of checking my typos against your notes this way. :)

Shoutouts to the following folks:

Matt at Vanderbilt for usage of the ABC rounds from two weeks ago as the basis of questions for this event.

Charlie at NKCHS for supplying some of the questions from UMR's event that were sources of tiebreakers (which never came) and scrimmage fodder.

Dan and Tricia for braving through accident traffic around I-495/I-270 near Bethesda to read.

All the coaches who were recruited to reading rounds. I think everyone liked the chance to see everyone, and with the small field and larger number of potential readers, the coaches could take a break once or twice to see their own kids. Nice surprise to see Debbie Wells appear, since I didn't realize she moved down to the metro area too.

All the University Scholars and APO kids who helped out, including one University Scholar who was elected student body president Friday morning (to recognize the presence of greatness).

Of course all the teams for making it out instead of playing hooky looking at the cherry blossoms. Next year, if we make this a more serious event on the calendar, I may wind up publicizing the cherry blossom aspect for a team that wants to travel up for spring break "for a good time." :)

Trophies will be sent out as soon as I have to order them (when we decide the NC all-star team), but all remaining monies will help support this webboard and other projects that we want to develop in the future.
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Post by First Chairman »

Made corrections to stats... if there's anything else you discover that's weird, let me know. Also added the JV playoff games into stats.
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Post by First Chairman »

dsfcaptains2005 wrote:would it be possible for us to acquire a copy of the questions? (we need some practice material, so I may also want a few old PACE sets as well)
That would be greatly appreciated.
The PACE sets will be easy... but the sets from this weekend might be a bit more difficult. I have to pay Vanderbilt for use of the questions so if you were willing to pay the $20 to me/them, I can accommodate.
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Post by Frater Taciturnus »

E.T. Chuck wrote:
dsfcaptains2005 wrote:would it be possible for us to acquire a copy of the questions? (we need some practice material, so I may also want a few old PACE sets as well)
That would be greatly appreciated.
The PACE sets will be easy... but the sets from this weekend might be a bit more difficult. I have to pay Vanderbilt for use of the questions so if you were willing to pay the $20 to me/them, I can accommodate.
Thanks, that should be doable.
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Post by Frater Taciturnus »

BuzzerZen wrote:I think our finance office lets purchase orders ferment for a few months before mailing checks.
Wait, finance office? You mean the school, like, foots the bill for this? No wonder you can always have so many teams!
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Post by ieppler »

I guess I need to introduce myself, so I'm Ian from GDS A (also known as Brick Tamlin in this tournament)

Thanks to Dr. Chuck for an excellent tournament. It was a chance (for the nationals bracket) to play an entire day against the great Mid-Atlantic teams, whereas at most tournaments that I have been to I have only been able to play one really great team the entire day (usually knocking us out of the playoffs.) For my school's B and C-teams, it was an excellent opportunity for novice players to gain tournament experience without spending all day losing to teams far above their experience level. In the future, I honestly don't think this event needs to expand into some sort of PACE regional championship. In my opinion, the small size and relaxed atmosphere were the best qualities of this tournament. A relaxed "spring break tournament" would be a nice addition to the DC Metro quizbowl calendar. For the most part, question quality was excellent. However, bonus difficulty seemed a little inconsistent, tending towards extremes of difficulty (too hard or too easy.)
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Post by First Chairman »

Thanks... I'm glad to be able to run something like this, and I would like to see an opportunity present itself next year.

One more thing for participating teams: if you have not received the complete set of Vanderbilt questions from this year's comp, please let me know so I can email the set to you.
Emil Thomas Chuck, Ph.D.
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Post by BuzzerZen »

dsfcaptains2005 wrote:
BuzzerZen wrote:I think our finance office lets purchase orders ferment for a few months before mailing checks.
Wait, finance office? You mean the school, like, foots the bill for this? No wonder you can always have so many teams!
No, the school finance office controls the money for every club in the school. It's like a bank with no interest, iffy service, and weird rules. We're funded partly by our tournaments, partly through donations via the school Academic Boosters, who also give money to math team, chess, etc. The advantage is we're not dealing with owing money to people and having a box of cash sitting around somewhere; the disadvantage is that getting checks mailed takes a long time and we need purchase orders for everything. I believe most FCPS schools operate the same way.
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Post by jbarnes112358 »

BuzzerZen wrote:I think our finance office lets purchase orders ferment for a few months before mailing checks.
Someone should tell them that a purchase order is not like a fine wine; it does not get better with age. A more apt analogy would be making habitually late payments for the power bill or car loan. If you or I did this our credit score would plummet and the repo man would be hauling away the BMW.
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Post by STPickrell »

BuzzerZen wrote:No, the school finance office controls the money for every club in the school.
I guess at the HS level you are not allowed to operate your own checking account.

Perhaps you and your teammates could be equally remiss in making needed payments to the school.
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Post by First Chairman »

Well, it is Fairfax County and the school system will take its time. It's not like the government can be penalized for miscalculating your taxes or delaying in sending you a refund.
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Post by jbarnes112358 »

I don't think Fairfax County policies are to blame. This late payment problem from TJ is a relatively new phenomenon. I believe they said they had a new person taking care of this. Maybe someone could help them figure out what to do to expedite the process.

Personally, I just found it easier to write a personal check, get a receipt, and get reimbursed from school funds later. Maybe some schools disallow this method.
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Post by BuzzerZen »

OK, if anyone hasn't been paid by us, please inquire with our treasurer, Allan Fan: fan_allan SPAM yahoo SPAM com. He will be able to find out if your check has been written for you.
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