The Quizbowl Resource Center

The Quizbowl Team at the University of Washington will be hosting a mirror of ACF Regionals at our campus in Seattle, WA and online, via Skype.

Despite this being an online tournament, teams still need to follow the ACF eligibility and packet submission requirements (see below). We will use the normal ACF fees for this tournament.

To register, please contact [email protected].

We will allow Skype teams to compete from up to 2 separate accounts. In other words, you could have 1 team of 4 people in one location, or you could have a team of 2 people in 2 different locations. Everyone is required to have a microphone.

Skype tournaments take a bit longer to run than regular tournaments, so we'll likely do fewer rounds than an in-person tournament (my target is around 9 or 10).

Packet Submission:
Every team with at least one person on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament prior to September 1, 2012 is required to submit a packet in order to play in Regionals. Please note that, like last year, this requirement also applies to eligible high school teams. Further information can be found at the ACF Packet Submission Guidelines.

The submission schedule for this tournament is: (note that these are Saturdays, not Sundays)
December 21, 2013: -$50
January 4, 2014: -$25 (-$50 for optional packets)
January 18, 2014: no penalty (-$25 for optional packets)
February 1, 2014: +$25
February 8, 2014: +$50
After that: +$10 for each additional day you're late. Teams that are required to submit a packet and do not won't be allowed to play.

Please submit your packet to [email protected]; the actual email with attached packet should include the phrase "[name of school + A/B/etc. if applicable) PACKET" in the subject line. In order to meet any particular deadline, your packet must be in our inbox by 11:59 pm PST on the stated day.

Packet Penalties: Be sure to fully read the information contained in the Packet Guidelines. Any cases of incorrect formatting, plagiarism, or prohibited question types will result in hefty fees. The editors also reserve the right to send back any egregious cases to be fixed by the team in question, so be sure to do it right the first time.

Please submit all questions/comments/etc. regarding this event to [email protected], or post them in the thread. Running packet list (with deadlines/penalties) will appear below as soon as packets begin to come in.

Distribution:

The distribution for this tournament varies slightly from the required 24/24 distribution on the ACF website. As you can see below, geography and current events have been consolidated into 1/1 and pop culture has been granted its own 1/1.

Literature 5/5
History 5/5
Science 5/5
Religion, Mythology and Philosophy 3/3
Fine Arts 3/3
Social Science 1/1
Geography/Current Events: 1/1
Pop Culture: 1/0 or 0/1
Any Academic Category: 1/0 or 0/1

Field Update - 2/11/14:
UW (2)
Berkeley (3)
Oxford (1)
Stanford (1)

By the way, we'd love to have as many teams as possible, but teams are encouraged to attend an in-person mirror if that's possible for a better overall experience.

Last year we didn't get any online teams registered, so I want to make sure there's actually interest this year. I request that teams planning to play online sign up by 1/26/14 so we can decide at that point if we do the online portion of this mirror or not.

Berkeley is playing, so we'll at least have some online teams. If your travel arrangements change and you find yourself unable to attend a physical site, let me know, as we have space available.

Are you going to need online staff?

Cheynem wrote:Are you going to need online staff?

We'd certainly appreciate anyone willing to staff online and can offer some modest monetary compensation for people willing to do this.

Mike Bentley wrote:Berkeley is playing, so we'll at least have some online teams. If your travel arrangements change and you find yourself unable to attend a physical site, let me know, as we have space available.

I'll just point out that it's sort of uncool to withdraw from a real site to sign up for this one, especially without letting anyone know.

Kenneth Widmerpool wrote:

Mike Bentley wrote:Berkeley is playing, so we'll at least have some online teams. If your travel arrangements change and you find yourself unable to attend a physical site, let me know, as we have space available.

I'll just point out that it's sort of uncool to withdraw from a real site to sign up for this one, especially without letting anyone know.

We don't have the funding to send teams down to San Diego anymore, which is why we made the switch. This was a case of miscommunication (where one person made the switch before another could inform UCSD), and we'll endeavor to be better about this in the future.

I'll just have to agree with Auroni here, since I, too, literally just found out by reading this thread, without which I might have screwed up the tournament planning Vicky and I were doing just now.

No harm done though, all this means is an increased probability that UCSD Auroni will win the California/West site anyway

Yeah, to be clear, my position is that teams should attend in-person versions of this tournament if at all possible. It sounds like this is definitely not possible for Berkeley.

DJCocoPuffs wrote:I'll just have to agree with Auroni here, since I, too, literally just found out by reading this thread, without which I might have screwed up the tournament planning Vicky and I were doing just now.

Hi, Jason--

This morning at 9:05AM (Central), I emailed [email protected] (the address listed in the UCSD site announcement) to let you know that the Berkeley teams wouldn't be attending your site. If there's a better way for me to let you guys know about any further changes to your site's field, could you let me know what that would be? (It might not be a bad idea to list it in your announcement as well, in case any of your teams need to contact you directly about anything.)

Whoops, I see what went wrong here. I didn't see it because my inbox-across-multiple-emails shenanigans sorted it into the wrong place. We would've had two weeks to adjust, so there's no harm done either way; just a lot of miscommunication. Thanks!

We currently have 6 teams signed up. We can support 1 additional team if there are any teams from, say, the Florida mirror that still want to play.

St. Olaf signed up for our final team.

If anyone else is interested in moderating tomorrow it will help us fill out our house teams, but it's not strictly needed.

It seems like St. Olaf probably isn't attending? In any event, we most likely have another spot for a last minute sign up from a team stranded by weather or something.

St. Olaf will in fact not be attending. There was a mix-up in communication on our end, and we're sorry for any confusion.
Good luck to everyone tomorrow!

Stats through Round 5: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... h_round_5/

Just a note to thank Mike, and all the other moderators and organisers for running this. We at Oxford really enjoyed this tournament, despite our bonus conversion noticeably dropping as the night progressed and we ran low on supplies of energy drinks...
It was great to be able to play this set despite a relative lack of UK teams who play regular difficulty tournaments. Hope we can keep "attending" these online mirrors in the future.

Good job, Mike, and thanks to the moderators. Glad you could play, Oxford! Great job to Stanford.

Thanks everyone for attending. It was fun to get to play teams like Oxford.

Congratulations to Stanford which cleared the field to win the tournament.

Full stats are at http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/2148/.

A big thanks to Mike Cheyne, Carsten Gehring and Alejandro Lopez-Lago for moderating.

This was really great fun, many thanks to Mike for organising this and to all of the moderators! Thankfully lag proved not to be an issue for us in the end, though playing on Pacific time was a bit of a struggle after the lunch/dinner time. We were knackered. I think we'll certainly look to do this again in the future if we're unable to get a mirror going in the UK.