The Quizbowl Resource Center

Mike Bentley

I suppose I'll sign up for this. Someone has to get last place.

Mike Bentley

There was an effort to write some earth science, but we were pretty behind on science so we went with what was easier to write quickly. Essentially I wrote a 3rd CS tossup rather than researching some Earth Science subject.

Mike Bentley

The "Mike Bentley et al" team mentioned in the CO team thread is the same as the Matt Weiner team.

Mike Bentley

Wow I didn't know that she was involved in quizbowl, much less Jeff Hoppes' wife. Congrats to her.

Mike Bentley

I wrote a Nintendo packet, it's on the Stanford archive.

Various This Tournament Goes to 11s have featured videogame rounds.

Jeremy Eaton is writing a videogame tournament for the Minnesota Open.

Mike Bentley

I hope this isn't breaking some big NAQT trade secret, but it seems like some of the more egregious questions were ones written several years ago when various tropes like 30-20-10 bonuses and "list all the members of X" bonuses were more in vogue than today. On the positive side, it shows ...

Mike Bentley

Other than that though, it was a very educational tournament with lots of awesome questions (the Greg Graffin tossup was one of my favorites) and I'd like to thank Jonathan, Ahmad, Gautam, Eric, Dennis, and Shantanu (I think that's everyone) for putting it together. Well, actually, Jerry, I think t...

Mike Bentley

I'm pretty sure that you can talk about specific questions from this tournament and that people playing the mirrors are suppossed to just stay away from these discussion threads. But someone from NAQT should probably give the go-ahead before you actually do this. Anyways, congrats to TJ for their wi...

Mike Bentley

I updated the field. Now that people probably have an idea of what they're doing during the summer, it is a great time to register for this tournament if you're around.

Mike Bentley

I updated the field for this tournament. We'd still like to see some more teams sign up for the event. Let me know if you're interested.

Mike Bentley

I think we learned it as

"Kyle, please come over for good spaghetti" but I always suspected that it was dirtier than that.

Mike Bentley

Yeah one of the issues of plain text is you lack some really useful quizbowl features in Word: Spell checking (depending on the editor you use) Line counting (i.e. how many lines in Word with 1 inch margins does this question take up?) These aren't deal breakers, but they can certainly make the proc...

Mike Bentley

I figure I'll get into this as well. Is there any QB in NJ besides Rutgers? And what about in New York? Well, Rutgers New Brunswick and Rutgers Newark both have a team, as does Princeton. I don't think any other schools really have a team in New Jersey. In the New York City area Columbia is really ...

Mike Bentley

Can someone give me an overview of exactly what we're tryiing to accomplish here? Is it just to parse questions into "tossup text", "answer text", "underlined answer text", etc.? If so, having people use a non-Word solution seems excessive. I don't really see why we nee...

Mike Bentley

At Maryland we have practices twice a week for 3 hours each. When we were gearing up for nationals we also had a Friday practice that lasted about 2-3 hours.

In high school it was like twice a week for about 1.5 hours.

Mike Bentley

I dunno, I think with most Word formatted stuff you can still relatively easily parse out tossups, required answer parts, etc. It's certainly more complicated than having plain text, I've at least partially done this for some parsing programs I've written for parsing packets for scobowl. You essenti...

Mike Bentley

Deesy Does It wrote:Quizbowl.

I think you mean law school.

Mike Bentley

Haha, hilarious.

Mike Bentley

I'll be in Seattle and will likely continue to play open tournaments. It's possible that sometime in the near future I might enroll in some classes at the University of Washington or some other Seattle based university, so maybe my efforts will be as part of some school's team, but probably not (at ...

Mike Bentley

everyday847 wrote:
theMoMA wrote:Would this be the day of the competition, or are you staying at the hotel Friday night?
I thought staffers had to show up Friday afternoon--the email Joel Gluskin sent me said as much--but I could be wrong.

I don't think this is a requirement for staffers not being flown in.

Mike Bentley

I don't think reading trash packets at the end of the year is any great evil. We're doing that a lot, and it gives the chance for some of our newer players not to get crowded out by the more experienced people. Even if these people are only coming to practice for the trash (which they're not), they'...

Mike Bentley

Alright, here is some of the stuff I've written in the past year or so. The Titanomachy, MUT and TTGT11 pretty much reflected what was selected, while the rest of it was edited generally. Titanomachy - Round 8 - "MAGIN" -Tossups: Plautus, Helios, Breugel the Elder, Sicilian Expedition, Kos...

Mike Bentley

As a reminder, a mirror of this tournament is being held as late as 6/21, so teams should not talk about the questions here. If there is a demand, I might be able to set up another private message board thing like I did with Sectionals.

Mike Bentley

Last year, lunch at the HSNCT involved about a 5-10 minute walk to a Mexican restaurant where people at. This 10-20 minutes of travel time would really eat into how much time you had. Another factor is rooms ending at different time periods, which was the case last year (some people were arriving at...

Mike Bentley

Would "Mr. Kwartler" and "Mr. Westbrook" be willing to provide the same type of feedback who weren't mentioned in the original post? I would certainly be interested in hearing some about my writing, and I'm sure there are other people who would as well.

Mike Bentley

Interesting list, although I'd probably disagree with some of the choices. For example, I've seen only a very limited amount of work from Trevor Davis (his packet for TIT), but that was downright excellent, and I'd be willing to place him on the Top 12 list or at least top amongst the honorable ment...

Mike Bentley

Yeah, presumably you're going to the VCU Open, right? That would probably have time for such an event. Although I am thinking about writing something for that, but we'll see if I end up actually doing that.

Mike Bentley

If this tournament is only going to use two packets per year, I don't see why using packets from a tournament is going to be an issue. Just find someone to write the 2 packets. It's not like 2 packets takes a ridiculous amount of time to produce.

Mike Bentley

A league might be a bit much, but a few periodic Goldfish "tournaments" (probably only a few packets to make things reasonable) throughout the year seem like a good enough idea to me. At the very least, it helps teams figure out where they stand against competition they'd never get a chanc...

Mike Bentley

I will show up for whatever doesn't conflict with work, which I may not be able to predict very far in advance if I end up working at the Apple Store, so this post probably isn't too helpful, but whatever. Man if I worked in a place with a Genius Bar I would probably have to kill myself. Edit: Here...

Mike Bentley

It is likely that I will be there and probably pretty likely that other Maryland people will be there.

Mike Bentley

UMD summer practices will also be open to everyone. Stay tuned for dates and times.

Mike Bentley

CasanovaFrankenstein wrote:I'm too awful for CO and too ineligible for the novice tournament, but I might be able to moderate.

I believe Matt was making the novice tournament open to everyone and potentially splitting things into divisions if there was enough interest.

Mike Bentley

Hey Jerry, the questions used on scobowl are all formatted in a standard way so they should be easily importable into your database. Let me know if you're interested. The only caveat is that they're tossup only, but tossup are probably better than nothing.

Mike Bentley

DJ Shadow wrote:OK, I'm stupid. We're talking about different Gaddises -- I thought you meant John Lewis Gaddis for some reason.

Are you talking about his Cold War book?

Mike Bentley

I plan on coming to most of these tournaments (although I probably won't be able to make Friday ones). I guess I'll either be playing by myself or looking for teammates for the main tournament, and I'll be playing with Eric Mukherjee in the videogame tournament. I'll likely moderate the literature t...

Mike Bentley

Most likely, some kind of team with Ted Gioia and I on it will be going. Feldman was saying that he was going to have you on his team, but Feldman does have a habbit of saying people are on his team without asking them first. And yeah, I got your message Dan. I just forgot to add you to the list. I...

Mike Bentley

See below for field update.

Mike Bentley

See below for field update.

Mike Bentley

I think Matt Weiner and I are forming a team.

Mike Bentley

By the way, I really liked the trash in this tournament. It managed to cover things I was interested in and was probably the right difficulty, although that Led Zeppelin and MASH bonus was really easy.

Mike Bentley

Most of the questions in the Bot are taken from Scobol Solo. They are appropriate for 7th and 8th graders who are serious about quizbowl. The questions are definitely easier than any ACF questions. Some of you may be referring to other channels run by moderators who use questions around ACF Fall Le...

Mike Bentley

Well, Stanford was taking way too long to update their archive so here are the packets for the previous two Maryland tournament:

ASS: http://www.doc-ent.com/quizbowl/ASS.zip
Chris McCray: http://www.doc-ent.com/quizbowl/cmkfinalpackets.zip

Mike Bentley

Yeah I guess if anyone out there is looking for someone who sort of knows American, Ancient and to a lesser extent European history, let me know.

Mike Bentley

Can you confirm the date and the packet deadline dates soon? There is some ambiguity about having deadlines due "a month before the tournament date".

Mike Bentley

If the program just told you where to put the questions, given an input of 20-24 categories for both tossups and bonuses, that would save lots of time. For example, you would select off of the tossup menu: 4 lit, 4 science, 5 history, 3 arts, 2 RMP, 1 trash, 1 social science, and the program would ...

Mike Bentley

I'll also add that the randomization was in general really bad in this tournament. One packet contained 5 science tossups in the first 10 questions and also didn't have a non-HSL question until question 12. Other packets also featured things like 3 history tossups in a row, etc. These things really...

Mike Bentley

As for difficulty, give me a break. Too easy I understand, maybe, given lack of guidelines, and we'll correct that next year, but "don't write on things you really know are too hard to be tossupable" shouldn't be something we need to tell people. If you're not sure whether it's too hard, ...

Mike Bentley

Well if we're going to start the "these questions weren't so great" train, here are some of the ones that stuck out in my mind: IPV6 - This clue established that it was a network protocol that was being delayed implementation. That pretty much leads us down to one path, which is IPV6. I h...

Mike Bentley

Well if we're going to start the "these questions weren't so great" train, here are some of the ones that stuck out in my mind: Chandrasaker Limit - The Champagne Supernova is pretty much a stock clue at this point, and it was the first clue in that tossup. Even if you don't know what it i...

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