The Quizbowl Resource Center

ihavenoidea wrote:The reason our "league" commissioner gave me for not changing the terrible questions into something more acceptable was "Academic League is Academic League. If we changed the questions, it would no longer be Academic League"

Well, at least they acknowledge it >.>

zhao, pull the plug on doing NCAL. Preferrably sometime soon. You're not going to have the mass exodus that you think you will.

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:I'm discussing your refusal to give people who ask you for it the coaches contact information. If my post was somehow ineffective to post on this board as you claim, with somewhat of an implication being that the people who really need to read it won't, then it is insanity to attack me for posting it here when I have been denied the ability to directly contact those people who are in positions to change things.

Oh, so this is about something that's two months old now?

On September 23, Charlie Dees wrote:Hello Dwight,
This is Charlie Dees, and I am doing some prep work for future quizbowl tournaments my club will be hosting. I was wondering if you had any lists of contact information for high schools that you use to send out invitations with, because I am interested in sending out invitations to as many teams as possible, on the off chance that some decide to travel to Missouri and help increase the quality of our fields. If you don't feel comfortable giving out that information, that is perfectly fine, but if you can help me out with this I would be most thankful.
Sincerely,
-Charlie Dees

On September 25, Dwight Wynne wrote:Competition is pretty poor here. It's better than in Missouri, but if teams aren't going to go to both HSNCT and NSC then there's no way that they're flying out to Missouri for a regular tournament.

Dwight

And the similar board followup on the exact same thing.

ANURAG WINS!

al3xWal3x wrote:Let us take a moment to stop the "good quizbowl" discussion to celebrate Anurag's pwnage at day one of Teen Jeopardy finals.

Now let's take a moment to celebrate Anurag's at day two. It wasn't even close.

So who's got next?

I feel like this forum is slowly going to devolve into a quasi-fangirl group for Anurag. Except we're not as crazy. Real fangirls are insane. [I was once trampled upon by a stampeding horde at a Wang Lee Hom concert.] But yeah, ANURAG! How exciting!

Speaking as a non-fangirl, I disagree

Well, Jeopardy's over, so i think the fangirlyness is gonna go down.

tracyclee wrote:Wang Lee Hom concert

tracyclee wrote:Wang Lee Hom concert

tracyclee wrote:Wang Lee Hom concert

In my defense, I only went because my sister wanted to go. I'm not some crazy Asian girl who tries to throw herself all over him [I think he's gay?]...

And for the record, I was STEPPED on by someone else. Someone shoved me down and STEPPED on me. I will never be that kind of crazy fangirl.

Back on the topic of quizbowl....

Anurag and I will be coaching the freshmen at Trojan Warz. We won't get to enjoy the hell on earth that is IS-80A

In related news...a survey has been sent out to the mailing list. Thanks to Tracy, Matt, and Anurag for suggestions. I hope to have a good handle on what the circuit likes by next semester, and then we can focus on what we can change and what we will have a hard time changing. I think one of the biggest issues with this circuit is its insularity - there is not a lot of contact, even at HSNCT, with teams from elsewhere.

I guess now seems as good a time as ever to plug the tournament I'm TDing in the spring. Is there some listserv of high school coaches' e-mails that I could send the announcement to?

Hey everyone, I think I finally figured out why coaches that keep claiming to be on the mailing list aren't getting mail. So hopefully this works. Also, Dees, the mailing list setting is and always has been "anyone can join", so if you're terribly interested in our low-traffic list, send something to [email protected] and you can read the list - we're still a moderated list, but I won't touch any of your messages if you insist on sending polemics out to our circuit.

Ian - same thing. You can try the [email protected] list, but the google group is a better idea. Just join and send.

La Jolla people - are any of you on this list? Do any of you have a contact for Del Rio (even though he left) so we can try to get his new school to show up to things? I tried sending something to the listed address on the mailing list and I'm getting that the address is over quota.

I am uncertain as to whether we're on this list, since one of our coaches has left due to a baby and the other basically depends on me to forward him tournament information. As a matter of fact, I've never heard of this list until now...D: So in order to join, I should just send an e-mail to the [email protected]?

Regarding Del Rio's new school, Bishops is a private school that regularly competes with us in Academic League, although I don't know how good he's made it since the last few years. Here's his new contact information at http://www.bishops.com/faculty.aspx?id=518.

Regarding the demise of good QB in San Diego. No one at La Jolla has any experience running a tournament, and after RB's NNT fiasco I'm not sure that trying to run a tournament of our own would pan out. (But I would be interested in tips about the process of hosting, if anyone has any to provide.) Also, although we are interested in participating in more advanced tournaments, it has been hard enough to find enough people to play well in a NAQT A-Set, let alone ACF or PACE - everyone seems to be involved in either Speech and Debate, Mock Trial, or Science Team. (although with Anurag's ascension, we might be able to attract more people...D:)

-Kaisuopai

Kaisuopai wrote:I am uncertain as to whether we're on this list, since one of our coaches has left due to a baby and the other basically depends on me to forward him tournament information. As a matter of fact, I've never heard of this list until now...D: So in order to join, I should just send an e-mail to the [email protected]?

YES. DO THIS. (remove the N, O, S, P, and M, of course)

How do I know who is receiving the email(s) I send out? I'm gearing up for some serious advertisement-whoring in the next couple of months for ACE, but I don't even know who I have and haven't reached. Or should I simply operate under the assumption that anybody worth contacting is already in the list?


Also, on a complete tangent, where's a good place to find "recreational" things that beatniks would do? I figure I could break some out at winter practice. :D Or not.

I'm having trouble posting my announcement on the SocalHSquizbowl google-groups thing. Can someone help me out? When I try to send it it says I don't have permission, at first I thought it was because i was using the wrong e-mail to send from, but I tried all 3 of my e-mail addresses and none of them worked. I was able to post inside the group page, so obviously I am a member of the group, but why can't I send an e-mail?

dinoian wrote:I'm having trouble posting my announcement on the SocalHSquizbowl google-groups thing. Can someone help me out? When I try to send it it says I don't have permission, at first I thought it was because i was using the wrong e-mail to send from, but I tried all 3 of my e-mail addresses and none of them worked. I was able to post inside the group page, so obviously I am a member of the group, but why can't I send an e-mail?

Ian, I'm not sure what the problem is. If you're sending it from your dinoian gmail account, then there shouldn't be a problem - I checked your settings and it's "Member's Posts are Moderated", which means that people like me just make sure that you're not spamming the list before sending it out to everyone.

If there's something gone horribly wrong (yet another problem with this group!), send the announcement to me and I'll send it out to the group.

Also, I've done two things in an effort to alleviate some of the problems with the google group:

1. I've set up a separate account at socalhsquizbowlforwarding@(REMOVE THIS)gmail.com. Interested parties who cannot get announcements directly from the google group should send an email to this address, and I will forward announcements and stuff from it. I've notified most of the people that are on the list of "non-verified" e-mail addresses, and have four coaches signed up here already.

2. Using that account, I've created a fairly basic ("no-frills") Southern California High School Quizbowl Information Center. By "fairly basic" I mean that my knowledge of HTML is limited, and even if I did know more, I'm using Google Sites, which doesn't allow all that much fancy HTML in the first place. The site currently contains a list of local and national tournaments, pages with basic information for each local tournament, and external links of interest. In the future, it will also contain some of my various attempts at a Southern California-only ratings system.

Sign up for Triton Bowl, people.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6907

Speaking as one ignorant to the ways of Mirror Tournaments, does it matter that those questions are on the database? http://quizbowlpackets.com/archive/prisonbowl/

Max, the questions will be newly written. That set was already used last year.

Thanks, I thought there was something I was missing...

When's Baby Anteater gonna be?

I have no idea what's going on with that; it's completely out of my hands. Last I heard we were shooting for January 31, though I have heard nothing on the room availability front. An announcement was supposed to go out sometime last week, but I think finals got in the way.

cvdwightw wrote:I have no idea what's going on with that; it's completely out of my hands. Last I heard we were shooting for January 31, though I have heard nothing on the room availability front. An announcement was supposed to go out sometime last week, but I think finals got in the way.

Announcement is now here!

Please keep in mind that we are using the A set for what A sets are actually "supposed" to be used for, that is, to give new and relatively inexperienced players a chance to compete on difficulty-appropriate questions. By this we mean players in their first two years of competition (for instance, if you're a senior, but you didn't start playing until junior year, you're fine). More experienced players are allowed to play on a case-by-case basis.

The reasons for this are threefold:
(1) I, in particular, do not feel that A-level sets can fairly determine a champion at the varsity level.
(2) We do not have the capacity to staff a large tournament. By keeping most schools' "A" teams out of the tournament, we hope to keep the tournament field to a manageable size.
(3) Schools like Rancho Bernardo and Arcadia would almost certainly not send their A teams to this; I, in particular, do not want to see a school send its four best players out and clean up on a severely weakened field.

SAMO B will probably attend.

cvdwightw wrote: (1) I, in particular, do not feel that A-level sets can fairly determine a champion at the varsity level.

You can't imagine how much I agree with this.

cvdwightw wrote:(3) Schools like Rancho Bernardo and Arcadia would almost certainly not send their A teams to this; I, in particular, do not want to see a school send its four best players out and clean up on a severely weakened field.

LOL. LIKE I'D SEND OUT DEREK TO CLUB BABY SEALS. I don't think anyone is going to try to break out the clubs on relatively new players...that's just kind of sad. =/

Out of curiosity, why is Baby Anteater always run so late in the year? You'd think a novice tournament, with A packets, would make more sense in October or November.

ihavenoidea wrote:[quote="cvdwightw"
(1) I, in particular, do not feel that A-level sets can fairly determine a champion at the varsity level.

My sentiments exactly

It's funny that we agree that playing A-sets is not a good way to determine a champion, but play them regardless. Funny, funny.


TANGENT: I think you, or SOMEONE, need to make a facebook group for your ticket on the PROM KING ballot, DWIGHT.

Come on: you know you want to be Prom King! You'll probably get a spiffy crown and all!

tracyclee wrote:It's funny that we agree that playing A-sets is not a good way to determine a champion, but play them regardless. Funny, funny.


TANGENT: I think you, or SOMEONE, need to make a facebook group for your ticket on the PROM KING ballot, DWIGHT.

Come on: you know you want to be Prom King! You'll probably get a spiffy crown and all!

The prom king contest is between Charlie Dees and Eric Mukherjee, hands down.

Serious part: Dwight, I still think IS sets are better for providing a reasonable introduction to quizbowl than A-sets will be, considering that many of the tossup answer selections can be found in either.

I believe IS sets are worse than IS A sets. IS sets, in my experience with IS 79, have more cutesy giveaways and tossups on things that are way too hard or really trivial. Anurag thought that IS 78 A was better than IS 79.

ihavenoidea wrote:I believe IS sets are worse than IS A sets. IS sets, in my experience with IS 79, have more cutesy giveaways and tossups on things that are way too hard or really trivial. Anurag thought that IS 78 A was better than IS 79.

I'm not sure I agree. In my experience, A sets have ridiculously wild difficulty swings and poor leadins. For example, the actual leadin for a question on Kepler at SCAT last year was "This man's laws of planetary motion..." or something to that effect. A sets also have some terrible giveaways. Granted, the last time I played an A set was last year, but, unless something has darastically changed, I would not recommend using them for anything about a new player tournament.

If IS sets are actually worse than A sets this year, that is jsut sad. I moderated both 78A and 80A and they are not good to say the least.

Auroni: I had no control over what IS set we got. I have no idea how we got it, either. Given that (a) we don't have the staff for a large tournament and (b) we have an A-level set, it made sense to both me and the Baby Anteater TD (Matt Johnston, who played at Edison last year) to restrict eligibility.

Tracy: seeing as any sojourn I make to ACF Nationals this year would almost certainly be as a solo team (I've started a packet, just in case I do actually show up), I would prefer not to take votes away from more deserving people who would almost certainly be there. Also, I have a reputation to uphold as someone who is too prudish to go along with any of Meigs' schemes.

Zhao: Given that you weren't at our tournament, how did you get a hold of the IS-79 packets, or was this comparison made from secondhand accounts from other teams? With the exception of some awful clunkers (LOL TERRIBLE LIST BONUS), I thought IS-79 was passable.

NAQT's website informs me that Trojan Wars has been moved to January 24.

Lastly, it is my opinion that we need to have some kind of pre-nationals "warmup tournament" in early-to-mid May, seeing as there are several teams who could conceivably make a deep playoff run this year. The best date to run this appears to be May 16, which is before nationals but after AP Exams. Since Irvine is a roughly central location for the "nationally contending" teams, I would prefer to host the tournament at Irvine, though if there were compelling reasons to host elsewhere I would consider moderating and/or TDing at another school. There are enough good teams this year that we could reasonably run "national competitor or equivalent skill level" and "non-national competitor" divisions, and then we'd have all the good teams playing each other every game to prepare for the nationals grind and all the less-good teams not worrying about getting stomped by them.

These are my preferences:
(A) If everyone is going to HSNCT and not anywhere else, I would like to run either a timed tournament on IS-81 or an untimed tournament on HSAPQ ACF#4.
(B) If teams are going to NSC, I would like to run a tournament on HSAPQ PACE#2.

However, given club dynamics (Ray appears to prefer NAQT to all other forms of quizbowl, and I like NAQT as well as other pyramidal forms of quizbowl, so it is more likely that I would accede to him than the other way around), right now the most likely tournament would be an untimed tournament on IS-81, which I don't think would benefit any nationals participants to the degree that either timed IS-81 or untimed HSAPQ sets would.

Therefore, I'm asking for one of three things to happen: (1) someone else provide an acceptable alternative site and make the decision as to the questions; or (2) someone confirm that we'd have enough clocks to run an acceptable timed tournament, at least in the upper division (I have been involved with tournaments that have borrowed clocks from NAQT and my conclusion is that it was more hassle than it was worth); or (3) someone run a tournament on IS-81, so combined with IS-85 being used for the "State Championship," this would "force" us to look elsewhere for difficulty-appropriate questions, which would likely result in the use of either ACF#4 or PACE#2 sets. There is a non-negligible chance that I could convince Ray that I would run the whole thing and we would be able to use an HSAPQ set, but having any of the above three things happen would be a huge step in getting a worthwhile "pre-nationals" tournament happening.

cvdwightw wrote:Zhao: Given that you weren't at our tournament, how did you get a hold of the IS-79 packets, or was this comparison made from secondhand accounts from other teams? With the exception of some awful clunkers (LOL TERRIBLE LIST BONUS), I thought IS-79 was passable.

The examples some teams gave were pretty atrocious.

cvdwightw wrote: NAQT's website informs me that Trojan Wars has been moved to January 24.

Do tournaments love to be right after one another? As of right now, I don't think there's a good possibility that RB may be able to go to Trojan Warz.

cvdwightw wrote: (A) If everyone is going to HSNCT and not anywhere else, I would like to run...an untimed tournament on HSAPQ ACF#4.
(B) If teams are going to NSC, I would like to run a tournament on HSAPQ PACE#2.

DO THIS PLEASE

Would Rancho Bernardo be too far away for teams to drive? I'd love to play HSAPQ and this would be a great chance.

ihavenoidea wrote:

cvdwightw wrote: (A) If everyone is going to HSNCT and not anywhere else, I would like to run...an untimed tournament on HSAPQ ACF#4.
(B) If teams are going to NSC, I would like to run a tournament on HSAPQ PACE#2.

DO THIS PLEASE

Would Rancho Bernardo be too far away for teams to drive? I'd love to play HSAPQ and this would be a great chance.

If you could get the non-San Diego "nationally relevant" teams (e.g. Arcadia, Sa Mo, Edison) to agree to come down and play, and I am free on the weekend you choose, I will come down and help moderate. Another option would be to hold it at UCSD, which I think is a slightly shorter drive for those teams. One potential issue with either of these options is that May would probably be part of the "summer" season and the 5 South south of San Clemente might be packed on a Saturday morning.

I'd definitely play the ACF

NAQT's website informs me that Trojan Wars has been moved to January 24.

Weekend before finals + SAT day.
the only way it could be worse is if it was on the SAT weekend right before APs
>.>

Yeah, uh. I don't know why anybody would pick an SAT date the weekend before finals. I don't think anybody would go to this, unless s/he could afford to fail a final or two. Or was just so damn awesome that failing was never in the picture. I would normally pick QB over something else, but first semester grades count. -_-

Also, PERIODIC PLUG FOR ACE! Sign up for Carnal Embrace now!

Dwight, are you in anyway involved with bidding for State Champs? What would people think of playing State Champs in San Diego?

Should we even call it State?

ihavenoidea wrote:Dwight, are you in anyway involved with bidding for State Champs? What would people think of playing State Champs in San Diego?

No, Irvine has not put in a bid for State Champs, and I don't know if anyone has. Your best bet might be to send out an inquiry/interest check to see if anyone has bid for the tournament.

warpoet wrote:Should we even call it State?

I have always felt that the packet set used for these tournaments is slightly harder and slightly better written than other IS sets of that year. NAQT divides California into NorCal (which is mostly the Bay Area) and SoCal (which hasn't had a team outside LA, OC, and SD since J.W. North from Riverside stopped playing circa 2002), and runs what it calls a "State Championship" in both places. It's just "another tournament" for just about everyone around here, though, since there's no "prior qualification" rules.

We (Caltech) sent in a bid, and got an email YESTERDAY that says we're hosting it. It is most likely on 4/4, but input would be appreciated. We were taken a little by surprise, seeing that we put our bid in almost a year ago and just got a response back now.

So yeah. Caltech is hosting the NAQT state championship on most likely 4/4.

Micah Manary

cvdwightw wrote:

dinoian wrote:I'm having trouble posting my announcement on the SocalHSquizbowl google-groups thing. Can someone help me out? When I try to send it it says I don't have permission, at first I thought it was because i was using the wrong e-mail to send from, but I tried all 3 of my e-mail addresses and none of them worked. I was able to post inside the group page, so obviously I am a member of the group, but why can't I send an e-mail?

Ian, I'm not sure what the problem is. If you're sending it from your dinoian gmail account, then there shouldn't be a problem - I checked your settings and it's "Member's Posts are Moderated", which means that people like me just make sure that you're not spamming the list before sending it out to everyone.

If there's something gone horribly wrong (yet another problem with this group!), send the announcement to me and I'll send it out to the group.

I just tried again and I got this error:

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to it. There are a few possible reasons why this happened:

* You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly.
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The message I was trying to send out is exactly the same as the tournament announcement, I'll forward that to you tomorrow if you want.