Liberty Invitational Tournament (Dunbar mirror) - 10/31/2009

[ScoBo]

The Liberty High School Scholar Bowl team is pleased to announce the Liberty Scholar Bowl Invitational Tournament on Saturday, October 31, 2009. This tournament will be a mirror of the Dunbar Academic Fall Tournament being held in Lexington, KY.

Each round will consist of 20 tossups with rebounding bonuses. The field is limited to the first 24 teams to register and will be divided into preliminary round-robin pools, with the results in each pool determining placement in the playoff rounds. While the exact format of the tournament will be determined by the final field size, each team will be guaranteed at least six games.

Registration is set at $70 per team, while additional teams from a school are welcome at a base fee of $65 each. Teams may deduct the following discounts if applicable:
· $5 for supplying a working buzzer system
· $5 for coaches who are MACA members
· $5 for every 100 miles your team travels to the tournament (one-way, as determined by Google Maps).
The minimum fee for each team is $50.

This tournament has been certified by the Missouri Quizbowl Alliance, an organization dedicated to providing high-quality quizbowl tournaments to all Missouri teams. Visit http://www.moqba.org for more information.

Pending affiliation, this tournament will be a qualifier for the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence National Scholastics Championship, to be held in June 2010 at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Top-finishing teams will automatically qualify for this national tournament, which regularly features many of the nation’s top teams.

Interested teams should contact Rosemary Camp (rcamp AT liberty.k12.mo.us) with the following information in order to register:
· School Name, Mailing Address, Phone Number, and Fax Number
· Coaches’ Name, E-mail Address, and Cell Phone Number (in case of emergency)
· Form of payment? (Purchase Order or School Check payable to Liberty Scholar Bowl)
· Buzzer system?
· MACA membership?

A list of teams that have signed up for the tournament can be found on the Missouri Academic Competition Message Board (http://www.moquizbowl.com) and will be updated regularly by Jeffrey Hill. Additionally, if you would like more practice material similar to the questions we will be using, we recommend that you visit http://quizbowlpackets.com, an archive of high school packets free for practice use. The questions used in this tournament will be posted to that website once all mirrors have concluded.

We hope to see your team in Liberty on October 31!

[ScoBo]

Results:

1. North Kansas City
2. Savannah
3. Holden A
4. Smithville

Full stats
Prelims

Due to the length of the questions and having several new and less-experienced moderators, we budgeted about an hour for each round (after a couple of playtests in practice confirmed that rounds could take 45-50 minutes). Ms. Camp also wanted to ensure that the tournament was done no later than 4 pm primarily because of staffing constraints and the fact that it was Halloween. With 22 teams we ended up swiss-pairing for five rounds, and then took the top 4 teams by record and then points per game into a single-elimination bracket. The other 18 teams had the option to play a consolation sixth game against an opponent with a similar record (which 12 teams did take advantage of). Rounds did end up being a bit shorter than an hour; we started about 8:45, had lunch from around 11:20-12:30, and finished with round 7 by about 3:15.

While I would have preferred a more conventional pooled schedule (believe me, I was pushing this until the end), given the constraints we had this schedule worked out for the most part (though it was unfortunate that Pilot Grove missed advancing to the playoffs on points per game). This was better than most, if not all, nonpyramidal tournaments in Missouri as those tournaments typically rebracket into single elimination after only three preliminaries. At least now that we have run a tournament in the tossup/bonus format we have a better idea of what to plan for the next time Liberty hosts a tournament.

One thing I want to mention is that I believe this is the first time Holden has made an appearance at a tournament in Kansas City so I was quite pleased to see them do so well.

Thanks to all of the teams for coming out to participate and to the staff for graciously volunteering their time! Special thanks to Paul Nelson and Matt Chadbourne for traveling to Liberty to moderate. I hope everyone had an enjoyable experience.

As a reminder, these questions are not yet cleared for specific discussion. The discussion thread for this set can be found here.