The Quizbowl Resource Center

naan/steak-holding toll

If you're going to write a long bonus part, do so first and foremost for a reason that enhances the play experience (not studying experience) for that bonus part. I'd separate these reasons into two broad categories: Technical: Adding more words/clues makes your bonus part easier for the target audi...

naan/steak-holding toll

Agreed that "site" is totally fine for the Aswan tossup. I think it's a good idea, but the writing seems a clue or two too hard for this level IMO. If I had to guess, Abu Simbel probably falls within the realm of "things that many people will visually recognize easily, but may not kno...

naan/steak-holding toll

Maybe I don't know any trash I'm too much of a purist, but to me a dedicated pop culture distribution cuts into part of what makes mACF quizbowl unique. It's a competition focused on academic subject matter and "high culture," with ample distributional space to 1) treat these areas appropr...

naan/steak-holding toll

Are there any concrete plans for mirrors of this tournament in place? Looking forward very much to playing, just want to make appropriate plans.

naan/steak-holding toll

The tossups on specific historical moments (e.g. the Draft Eisenhower movement, the funeral of Napoleon , the crossing of the Rhine ) were very entertaining, but I'd be surprised if the field had the depth of knowledge tested by some of them. I liked these questions. To me, at least, it's easier to...

naan/steak-holding toll

I think it's unfair to single this CO out as having particularly long questions. I certainly don't think CO 2019 and 2021 had shorter questions; rather, they just had fewer rounds and some contributing factors that made rounds take less time - harder answers in 2021 meant more dead tossups and fewer...

naan/steak-holding toll

obviously I would be happy to have a large event but is it perhaps a bit much to expect significant field expansion given that this event was (seemingly to me?) mostly single-staffed rooms of people who were pretty exhausted given how long the event ran? (I tbh thought the event was too big to star...

naan/steak-holding toll

Now, moving from the general to the specific tossup at hand: While it is true that there are many more tossupable Russian authors at this level than at (e.g.) a two-dot difficulty, I can’t think of any additional Russian short-story writers of the pre-Soviet era who are likely to be tossed up at th...

naan/steak-holding toll

Personally, I prefer the long CO experience. Traveling to Chicago on your own dime isn't cheap and CO (rightfully) has pretty high entry fees these days; having any fewer than 13-14 games played would be pretty disappointing. I'm probably in the minority in missing the 16-round COs of yore, but thos...

naan/steak-holding toll

The entry fee will be $325 per team. In the words of the forum smilies, :w-hat: How is this at all worth it for an online tournament? I understand that the set writers and staff need to be compensated, but this seems like a *steep* price for most clubs to pay to send four people to a tournament tha...

naan/steak-holding toll

Yeah, I'd happily play this on almost any other weekend

naan/steak-holding toll

I'll be in Los Angeles for at least another year and am happy to staff collegiate tournaments in the area. Hopefully will get to play another open out here in CA at some point - hmu if you want to team!

naan/steak-holding toll

I will say, though, that the accessibility of most of the answers made some of the truly hard answers feel more jarring than they usually do, sort of in the way people said VCU Open 2015 could feel uneven. I would probably recommend capping the difficulty of the outlier questions if the median answ...

naan/steak-holding toll

Could I see the question on Loyalists? I think I heard “Haldimand Proclamation” and said “the Iroquois supporting the British” which I was negged for, so was wondering if this was just an incomplete answerline or I misunderstood what I was buzzing on Sorry for my late response - here's the tossup o...

naan/steak-holding toll

1. Matt Bollinger 2. Itamar 3. Jason Golfinos 4. Clark Smith 5. Tracy Mirkin 6. Chris Ray 7. Caleb Kendrick 8. Matthew Lehmann 9. Tim Morrison 10. Natan Holtzman 11. Vincent Du 12. Lia Rathburn 13. William Golden 14. Geoffrey Chen 15. Grace Liu 16. Hari Parameswaran 17. Charles Hang 18. Adam Fine 19...

naan/steak-holding toll

E.g. "Upper and Lower Egypt" got clearly Egyptian very quickly, "the Christianization of the Kievan Rus" became clear it was about some choice in religion on the clue about what Islam forbade Just taking these two examples - the late clues, indeed, were intended to narrow the an...

naan/steak-holding toll

I trust some of quizbowl's data scientists to do some more analysis on this, but here's some statistics on bonus conversion that I put together using some janky Excel and excluding all bonuses which had 10 or fewer teams play them: Easy parts with 100% conversion: 26.6% in prelims, 19.4% in playoffs...

naan/steak-holding toll

May I see the tossup on Chicago? Here you go: 5. A protest march in this U.S. city ended with a man nailing a list of fourteen demands to the door of its city hall. This city’s Blackstone Rangers street gang turned to nonviolent protest in the mid-1960s. A riot in this city began after two policeme...

naan/steak-holding toll

I'm very pleased to hear that comment about economics subdistribution! At higher levels of quizbowl, I sometimes find the opposite of what you said to be true, that people go really deep on applied areas or specific economists without doing much of the basics; at lower levels of difficulty, people f...

naan/steak-holding toll

Hi all! Thanks for playing ACF Nationals. It was a privilege to get a chance to edit one of the year's most prestigious tournaments and watch you all get excellent buzzes. I edited this tournament's History, Religion, Geography, and Current Events questions and ended up writing and editing the most ...

naan/steak-holding toll

I don't necessarily disagree with the reasoning here but I do strongly believe that classroom significance is not enough to establish easiness. It can form the basis for a hypothesis but if people keep saying it is too hard then regardless of if it "should" be that hard I think it ought t...

naan/steak-holding toll

Athena's editorial work on the Religion category remains excellent, expansive, inclusive, and a joy to play; I hope to see similar great efforts from them and the other writers who produced this set of Religion questions in the future. It's awesome to see thoughtful inclusion of dharmic religion con...

naan/steak-holding toll

I think it's pretty safe to say that "guessable" isn't quite what we should be aiming for at this level for middle parts, or indeed at any level, save perhaps CO where even some of the better teams are getting a decent number of middle parts through informed guesses. With the caveats that ...

naan/steak-holding toll

Substitute vs. complement goods is one of the few things I learned in my (bad, rushed) Econ 101 class, I think it's reasonable for an easy part. Yeah I think substitute is totally fine to ask for as an easy part. The main thing I'd focus on in this bonus is the hard part on constant elasticity of s...

naan/steak-holding toll

In other words, this tossup is primarily on material that music pupils, at least in Canada, would be expected to learn in elementary school, which hardly seems ideal for a tournament like ACF Regionals. Fair points to bring up, but I think translating this kind of knowledge into buzzes at game spee...

naan/steak-holding toll

I think one of (Ike, Matt Jackson) is a no-brainer. I would also very strongly endorse a UK candidate, with Edmund being around long enough that he might reasonably be a fit for the "older" Carper? I know that's largely intended for folks from bygone QB eras, but Edmund seems more than des...

naan/steak-holding toll

I thought this set had one of the most expansive and (to me, at least engaging) sets of philosophy questions at three-star difficulty that I've seen in recent memory. This included both interesting experiments, such as the question on the Scotland cluing the No True Scotsman fallacy, questions touch...

naan/steak-holding toll

About the type Ia supernova tossup - I could tell that the clues were pointing toward a specific kind of supernova, but I feel like it should clarify what it's looking for by saying "these specific events" somewhere at the beginning. That would eliminate the danger of someone buzzing on &...

naan/steak-holding toll

I really like the idea behind this Haydn tossup's clues, reflecting him being a towering figure among contemporaries, including the other leading Germanic composers of the era. That being said, I think there are a couple of issues: 1) Evasiveness. Ophir's guide on this topic is instructive here. Is ...

naan/steak-holding toll

You're right, that statement is extremely misleading; I'm sorry about that. I was aiming to concisely get across that the title is used for both ancient Egypt and Muslim empires, since I thought people would have likely encountered it in that context, but I should have been more precise about the w...

naan/steak-holding toll

While browsing some questions today, I had a quibble with one of this set's tossups: 8. Note to players: The answer is a political office, not an occupation like “soldier” or “painter.” A text on this office’s “Installation” was illustrated with its characteristic white robes for its holder Rekhmirē...

naan/steak-holding toll

I'll post more later, but wanted to quickly note that lower difficulty open tournaments have existed for quite some time in the form of the online playtest mirror. In practice, most of the events end up having very stacked fields that wouldn't be fun to play against for casual quizzers. But it woul...

naan/steak-holding toll

Seconding the thanks for Cody's insightful post and analysis.

naan/steak-holding toll

The packets have been uploaded to the archive. I hope you all enjoy perusing them as much as we enjoyed compiling this set for you.

naan/steak-holding toll

I enjoyed playing this set - a lot of fresh, challenging material that I'm excited to learn about! I particularly appreciated this set's crisp prose and very detailed "explanatory" clue style, which sacrifices putting in a zillion clues in exchange for fewer, meatier ones which are easy fo...

naan/steak-holding toll

I negged on the Sistine Madonna tossup in round 2 with Lamentation of Christ, mistaking an article I read on Holbein's Dead Christ with Mantegna's painting. Here's an article that references Dostoyevsky standing on a chair to view Holbein's Dead Christ (I think I first read a different article a wh...

naan/steak-holding toll

We're also looking for a player, ideally literature focused

naan/steak-holding toll

That said, I still do not believe it is appropriate or right to report someone due to political disagreements. There is nothing to politically disagree regarding that question. The tossup in question contained factual information, presented in an apolitical way. If you have disagreements with it, t...

naan/steak-holding toll

This is a random late-night thank you post, but seriously, thank you ACF for providing an amazing in-person nationals at the time the community needed it most. As noted by previous posts, this tournament provided some of the most poetic stories ever seen at a Nationals, a much-needed bonding experie...

naan/steak-holding toll

The video game analogy is the best piece of aesthetic quizbowl writing theory I've ever read.

naan/steak-holding toll

goin' up on a Tuesday

naan/steak-holding toll

Apologies to those who played today's tournament who noticed a few mistakes still in the music questions - I'll be fixing those before public release of the non-finals/play-in packets.

naan/steak-holding toll

All packets from Chicago Open, except for Editors 7-9, are now clear for public discussion. We will be looking to host several different types of events on Editors 7-9 in the near future. After some clean-up and mistake-fixing, we will post the clear packets.

naan/steak-holding toll

Since it looks like the field will be limited, we will instead run this as a "ladder" format with rooms where the top player from each room will be "promoted" each round and the lowest player will be "relegated." We will use two rooms, then three if there are more than ...

naan/steak-holding toll

Hi all, This is the announcement for the Chicago Open tossup-only online mirror, to be held this Saturday. You can sign up here and email me at william [dot] t [dot] alston [at] gmail [dot] com to register. The cost for playing this event will be $20 per player - higher than usual, but I think it's ...

naan/steak-holding toll

Ambedkar was way overdue to be a CO-level tossup, good work Well, Eric beat us to the punch in 2015: After seeing a photograph of this man, Surai Sasai was inspired by a vision of a holy figure to go to his home and build several places of worship. A temple and memorial to this figure contains a st...

naan/steak-holding toll

While there are a few questions that I thought were too easy and/or transparent, I'd like to focus on two tossups, one with what I believe to be an incomplete answerline and the other a factual error. The first is the terraces tossup. I buzzed in fairly late with "agricultural fields" and...

naan/steak-holding toll

OK, some more editorial thoughts now: General This tournament would have been a lot better if I hadn't written as much for it / edited so many categories and spent more time head editing, tuning things across the board, etc. It probably would have been better if we brought in another editor, but a l...

naan/steak-holding toll

The set definitely needed a week of polish and it's mostly my fault that it didn't get this. Re:Japan - in the packets played, I count two literature, two history (counting Andamans), one myth/legends, and one geography tossup on Japan, and you can arguably count the Hiroshima tossup but that's soli...

naan/steak-holding toll

For what it's worth, none of the stuff in that bonus was from class, but I think it could stand to be a bit more explicit without giving away the farm. It saddens me that people with serious knowledge couldn't get it. Hopefully people enjoyed some of the other business relevant content - it's hard t...

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