The Quizbowl Resource Center

bmcke

Ontario Quizbowl Provincials will be on Sunday, May 5, 2019, at Carleton University in Ottawa. We'll play 10-ish rounds plus finals. We'll use a Canadian edition of an NAQT IS set. We will play timed rounds on clocks, to fit in the most possible games without running late. The tournament is a high-s...

bmcke

Lisgar CI is running Lisgar Novice on Saturday, November 10, 2018. This will use the new SCOP Novice set in a Canadian edition. It is a novice tournament, so all players must be in grade 9 or 10 or else playing in their first quizbowl tournament. Lisgar Novice should run from 9:00 to 4:00. It costs ...

bmcke

By the last few rounds, all the low-bracket teams talked about was how tired they were, how they "wished they could leave," how much they liked Reach better, and how they wanted to hear questions about their own dopey interests instead of about classical music. This tournament had a huge blowout pro...

bmcke

Human Use of Human Beings Scores

TOP ROOM
Rein 595
Ian 220
Leslie 180
Erik 155
Jay 115
Meghan 5

MIDDLE ROOM
Patrick 170
Erik 160
Akhil 155
Aaron 150
Ian 130
Meghan 95
Leslie 75
Jay 75
Adam 55
Brian 45

BOTTOM ROOM
Simone 265
Adam 225
Brian 175
Joe 160
Patrick 130
Aaron 110
Ian 100
Shuying 75

bmcke

College quizbowl is really bloated with grad students, old open players, and players who are undergrads but are already quizbowl veterans. Most of these people are great volunteers and are really nice people, but I worry that they take up a lot of oxygen at every event and club meeting. I would love...

bmcke

I have sympathy for your dilemma -- I often hear people say "quizbowl" to refer to any kind of school quiz game. Sometimes I distinguish by saying "true quizbowl."

bmcke

There will be an Ontario Provincial Championship on Saturday, March 24, 2018. Meghan Torchia will direct the tournament, with help from the Ontario Quizbowl Association and the University of Toronto quizbowl club. The tournament will begin at 9:00 AM, in Sidney Smith Hall on the downtown U of T camp...

bmcke

Stats My recap Lisgar A swept this tournament, winning a one-game final over Lisgar B. All staff and players did an excellent job. I should have ordered more pizza. The Canada questions were hard, but [the USA questions they replaced] would have been harder. I am pleased to see some new schools and...

bmcke

I'll be running a high-school quizbowl tournament with Carleton University on Saturday, December 2, 2017. We will use a Canadian edition of the NAQT 169-A set. The tournament will start at 10 AM on the Carleton campus, on the first floor of Patterson Hall. My plan is to have the official tournament ...

bmcke

I realize now that NAQT has a pretty similar name, for what is also just a business running their own events. So maybe I will back away from my complaints here.

bmcke

The name "International Academic Competitions" seems intended to make IAC sound like an international sports federation or a nonprofit governing body. International Academic Competitions is a consortium of competitions for primary and secondary students I looked up the word "consortium" and it means...

bmcke

You become a moderator just by offering to do it. Most tournaments can use more staff. When there's a tournament near you, message the organizers and offer to staff -- this will usually be a help to them. You also need to be able to read out loud quickly and clearly. If that's difficult, you may wis...

bmcke

This was such a good tournament. Kenji is clearly a good writer and a careful editor.

bmcke

Other schools' teams at tournaments are almost all male. My school's student club has a healthy gender balance.

Someone posts this sentiment like every year. I probably said it a lot in my day too.

bmcke

I think the academic rankings in this thread are mostly accurate. I probably have Ian Dewan in my top 5, and then I might have Andrej or a Toronto B player in my top 10 right now. If I made a top 25, it would have two high-schoolers and Jack from Queen's. I think the gap between Derek and Rein is no...

bmcke

This went well. 6 teams, all Lisgar and Colonel By, basically all destroyed the IS-A set. Stats . My recap . I want to speak up for two TD decisions I made. 1. I used clocks. Even though we didn't have enough scorekeepers, the rounds still averaged over 21 TUH, so the clocks enabled "more quizbowl."...

bmcke

Only Lisgar teams so far.

bmcke

Please note that this is not a literal novice tournament -- it is open to ringers, seniors, high school students of any age. The use of the word "novice" is just to convey a sense of the new knowledge and new frontiers that the players are sure to enjoy.

bmcke

UOttawa and I will run a high-school tournament on December 3. We will use an NAQT's 159-A set, modified into a Canadian edition. Fees and discos: $60 for a school's first team $45 for other teams -$10 for bringing working buzzers -$5 for bringing staff The tournament will take place at 10 AM in a b...

bmcke

Classic stats are here or here . All my announcements described doing the standings by a 4-2-1-1 points system, so I'll go by that system and say that Lisgar Shamrocks officially came second. This grid gives more info about the teams' performances. Teams' paths up and down the ladder are shown in th...

bmcke

When I direct or do any control-room for a tournament, I bring nametag stickers and make the staff all wear nametags. I can't usually control how people dress, but I think the nametags are a nice cue to show people that all the staff are real staff of a real event.

bmcke

Details of Ladder Format This will be similar to a tennis ladder -- win and move up a room, lose and move down a room. So after a round in Room 2, the winning team would advance to Room 1 for their next round, and the losing team would move back to Room 3. We'll do standings (and decide a winner) o...

bmcke

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nqxDzXQQeSc/Vj10NwD5FbI/AAAAAAAABG8/GRZrHz6GiQ8/s320/IMG_20151014_174548634%2B%25282%2529.jpg Stegosaurus Bowl will be a quizbowl tournament at Lisgar Collegiate in Ottawa , on December 5, 2015. It will be run by ONQBA and Lisgar. Schedule Teams should be at Lisgar by 8:30...

bmcke

It's not that bad if a new moderator pronounces something phonetically, but it is very bad if a new moderator stumbles on every question and delays the round. I still think the interpunct method is best here.

bmcke

How secure is the college contact list (in the top post), and what is it normally used for? I collected contact info for some Ontario clubs, but I'm not sure about posting people's email addresses in the open.

bmcke

eldermaas wrote:Do we know if the Ottawa set will be posted?

The set isn't public, but I just emailed it to you. Anyone else who played it can email me for a copy. I'll upload it to the database in August, after any potential Florida mirrors.

bmcke

Kind of reminds me of "Best in Show" in that nobody watched that for dog-show content. It makes a lot of quizbowlers look weird and anti-social. The pie-eating contest metaphor is strained at best. But all in all, about as positive a spin on highest-level quizbowl as can be done. I loved the pie-ea...

bmcke

If a word is really going to baffle most readers, I like just adding hyphens between the syllables. "Its C cells produce cal-ci-to-nin, while its follicular cells use ty-ro-sine to make a namesake hormone." This method looks a bit silly, but it sounds smooth when people read aloud, and it doesn't ca...

bmcke

This is its own thread and not the hijacking of a tournament discussion. I'm just here because I like the conversation. You could move it to off-topic even.

That John Ibbitson article made me pretty angry. Drink every time he says "urban elites."

bmcke

In before FZ. Usually it's a parade of Liberal triumphalism, teleological interpretations of confederation as a natural end, all identity conflict solved by Trudeau (until the recent appearance of the dread Harper), and a succession of potted "trials" like Red River gestured toward by way of glorify...

bmcke

Player poll is cool because great quizbowl play is good and cool, and it's nice to recognize the people who are good at playing quizbowl -- they've all done work to build up their quizbowl game, and they all have a really impressive level of cultural literacy. I enjoy seeing any kind of awards for t...

bmcke

I'll revive this thread to say that the standards of "writing good tournaments" have gotten a lot higher in the last few years. Ike's post in the Nationals thread shows an elite writer spending "hours on every question" for a tournament. It is obviously great that the big college tournaments have su...

bmcke

NAQT is doing live stats.

bmcke

Credits and Thank-Yous - I wrote or did a full edit on about half the tossups in this set, and on a significantly smaller fraction of the bonuses. - Rodrigo Morante did the next-most work after me, probably followed by Ian Dewan. Rodrigo was particularly dedicated and reliable on this project. He w...

bmcke

Update: We have 11 teams submitting + 3 editor packets. The plan now is to do an 11-team round-robin, plus finals.

Update: Also, some portion of the science is being written/edited by me and is likely to be of very poor quality. We hope you don't mind this.

bmcke

Let's cap this tournament at 13 teams, since that's all we have space for. UPDATED: We have received packets from 9 teams, and we've heard interest from 3 others -- Carleton B (with Patrick), an Ottawa team, and America's Will Alston. If any other teams were hoping to submit and play this thing in O...

bmcke

Were there supposed to be pencil-and-paper questions in the tournament?

bmcke

Please do not delay the tournament by eating lunch at a buffet.

bmcke

It was very clear that the tournament had some "scholarship" to it, more than most tournaments. I don't know if this hurt new teams at all (comparative stats might show that), but it certainly made the questions more meaningful. The bonuses were very good at asking about the content and significance...

bmcke

I was generally happy with everything I heard. The questions were obviously of a lower quality than Regionals, but certainly of a high enough quality that it was worth the travel / money, and it was interesting and meaningful to sit down and play them all. The British stuff all played worse than the...

bmcke

RECEIVED
-50: Colonel By, Toronto, "Waterloo A"
-25:
0: McMaster A, Huma's team
+25: Waterloo B, Carleton A
+50: McMaster B, MSU, Ottawa, Carleton B (with Patrick)

bmcke

A fun question: Can I play this tournament if I've already talked about the set with someone? Some friends played this in November. I probably asked "How was the tournament?" and got exposed to info about 5 tossups. If playing, I obviously wouldn't answer any questions I remembered hearing about. Is...

bmcke · Re: Ottawa Quizbowl Tournament X (U of Ottawa, 15 Nov 2014) Stats.

Stats.

bmcke

Anecdotally, I thought most of the dead tossups I saw were in lit and arts. Richard Sheridan, Mahfouz, Millais, Gericault. Even Auden went dead in my room somehow. I think for ACF Fall (and ICCS and high school tournaments), there's a very narrow answer space of "easy" lit / arts / music to ask abou...

bmcke

1/1 Trash lit (genre literature, comic books, comic strips, popular fiction) Journalism! Trash lit is kind of a narrow answer space, but you should absolutely stretch it to include some non-fiction. Write about famous magazines or famous websites with articles. Packets should be formatted according...

bmcke

Does Jacob or any other Quinterest person see what I search for on Quinterest? I'd like to use Quinterest when I write questions, to see if certain things have come up before. However, I don't want to spoil any upcoming tournaments in Jacob's server logs or anything. Is it safe to use Quinterest whe...

bmcke

I feel comfortable saying that people's work with Reach is a result of having other priorities than promoting good quizbowl. I care lots about promoting good quizbowl, but I've staffed Reach a few times because friends asked me to, and I care about seeing friends and helping out friends. Presumably ...

bmcke

Might or might not matter: - On R4 TU18 (Sartre), maybe just add "it's not Kant." People will all still buzz with Kant. - On R5 TU15 (Nile), players said they heard "Khartoum" early and didn't buzz because they weren't sure if it was Blue Nile or White Nile. - On R8 TU18 (Marlowe), maybe "it's not G...

bmcke

Jordan Palmer isn't playing tomorrow.

bmcke

Ted Gan made a pretty nice difficulty index.

Search found 185 matches