The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hello,

I am excited to announce the first Alabama Scholars Bowl Open Tournament (ASBOT)!

ASBOT will be using the TAILS question set, a middle school/easy high school set.

This tournament will be hosted on December 5, 2020, and is open to all Middle Schools within the state of Alabama. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are hosting the tournament on Discord. Players will need to make/use individual Discord accounts in order to avoid confusion regarding statistics.

ASBOT is currently capped at 24 teams at present, but if there is a high volume of waitlisted teams we will expand the field.

Teams will be allowed a maximum of 6 players per team, with 4 competing at once. Substitutions will be permitted immediately after the 10th question.

We are charging $60 a team, and any subsequent teams will be at $45. Payment details will be included in an email sent to coaches

Please register your teams at the following link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

If that link does not work, please email me at [email protected] to register your teams.

We hope to hear from you and stay safe everyone!



Note: Unfortunately, we decided to move away from a housewritten set for ASBOT. The dual-purpose questions we were writing are now only being used at the Madison County Middle School tournament.

If the field is too small by the time the tournament starts, can this tournament open up to teams from other states (maybe states that are geographically close to Alabama or the rest of the South maybe)?

Yes, that decision will be made a little over a month before the date of the tournament, once we can confirm/deny Madison County School System teams’ entrances.

Thanks for the clarification.

This will serve as a field update post.

Current Field:

Westbrook Christian (AL)
Baldwin Arts and Academics (AL)
Monrovia A (AL)
Monrovia B (AL)
Monrovia C (AL)
Hartselle A (AL)
Hartselle B (AL)
Liberty (AL)

Once again, the sign-up link will be attached below:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

We hope to see you there!

If anyone is interested in staffing ASBOT, don't hesitate to sign up on our Google Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

We're looking for 2-4 individuals and will pay $20 for staffing the full tournament, and $10 for half.


EDIT: November 25, all staffing positions are full, thank you to everyone who signed up!

Schools in Alabama are still able to register until December 3rd!

ASBOT was completed Saturday. Although we seemed a bit frazzled at the beginning due to a last-second withdrawal, I think the tournament ran pretty smoothly, and we finished almost an hour and a half earlier than what I had expected. Thank you to all the staffers who read and kept score, y'all kept everyone on track to finish earlier than expected.

We used custom-made scoresheets, designed by myself and Andrew Goetz (@CactusJack). If anyone is interested in using these scoresheets, PM me and we can work out logistics. Additional thanks to Andrew for uploading statistics onto hsquizbowl and getting everything right.

We ran this tournament on the TAILS question set, and the questions themselves read very well and were exactly the level they were described as, so thank you to TAG Magnet School for letting ASBOT use the sets.

Tournament-wise, congratulations to Monrovia A for winning the tournament with a perfect 9-0 record, as well as Liberty, who finished 2nd with a 6-3 record. Congratulations to Tate Osborne (Monrovia A, 205.00), Aditya Pippala (Baldwin, 92.78), Erik Wu (Liberty, 80.56), and Leo Osborne (Monrovia C, 73.53) for being our top scorers by total points for the day! Full statistics are available here. Thank you to all the players and coaches for accomodating the sudden withdrawal, forcing everyone to play less than the previously-guaranteed matches. I hope y'all had a good experience and had fun!

MAJOR KUDOS to Eshan and his fellow Sparkman High School students who organized and ran this tournament. They've stepped up in a big way to keep quiz bowl active in our region. For that, we are very thankful! Eshan and his SHS teammates, along with their SHS coach, have also done a great job running our Madison County Regular Season online. I'm so impressed with these kids!

Great judgement wrt dropping the bonuses. I'd probably be in favor of bonuses for an online district, state, or national tournament. Those are once-a-year events where the stakes are high. However, for more casual, "fun" tournaments, bonuses add too much time to a 7+ round tournament. Everyone ends up with screen fatigue.