Summer 2016 History Tournament (for CO or another event)

[naan/steak-holding toll]

On the back of the relatively positive reception of SHEIKH, I'd like to announce a packet-submission history event to be played at open tournaments during the summer of 2016. I'd prefer if this tournament were run at CO, but it doesn't necessarily have to be if people aren't interested in having a history tournament at CO every year. That being said, if people are interested in having this be the history tournament for CO, then I'd be honored for that to happen. I plan on editing this myself unless somebody who knows a lot of US history volunteers to help me write tossups and check over questions for that category.

UPDATE: The tournament's difficulty will be roughly equivalent to last year's incarnation of CO Arts. It will be tossups-only, with all tossups (after edits) being seven to eight lines long in 10 point TNR. Tossups will be marked for superpower and power as per CO Arts.

Since I want to make sure I hit every area of history well, I want submitted packets to adhere to the following distribution:

1 US History, through the signing of Constitution
2 US History, post-Constitution through World War I
2 US History, post-World War I
1 Any US History (pre-colonization/exploration history of Native Americans in the US goes here)
1 Continental Europe, fall of Rome to 1492
1 Continental Europe, 1492 to 1870
1 Continental Europe, 1870 to present
1 Any post-classical Continental Europe
2 Classical and/or Ancient Near Eastern History (please write questions about two different periods and/or cultures)
2 British History
1 Commonwealth OR Colonial/Imperial History (ANZAC and Canada questions go here)
1 South or Southeast Asia (this includes Vietnam and the Philippines; put questions on Polynesians here too)
1 East Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and the steppes near China)
1 post-classical Middle East (including Central Asia and North Africa)
1 Africa
1 Americas (non-US, non-Canada)
1 Additional Asian history (anywhere on the continent of Asia is fine, as are nearby islands i.e. Japan, Indonesia, etc.)
1 Historiography
2 Your Choice (Write whatever you want for this category, including areas not covered above. Trash is prohibited, but questions on disciplines closely linked to history are fine - art history, music history, literary history, historical geography, and the like are all highly encouraged and should go here.)

Don't go overboard with answerline difficulty. I can and will include a number of tossups on hard things which may be worth 15 points for answering by the end ala Gaddis and some older COs. However, no more than 25% of your answers should be on things you wouldn't feel comfortable with showing up at ACF Nationals, or even in a set like 2015 VCU Open. Like CO Arts, I want this tournament to be accessible to and playable by non-experts.

Please make an effort to vary your non-Western history tossups by time period while adhering to the geographic distribution. Don't let more than two-thirds of your questions in these areas focus on the 19th and 20th century. Thematic coherence is encouraged - writing a question on Nigeria that talks about the Kano Sultanate in the early clues and Goodluck Jonathan in the late clues is kind of lame, since at this difficulty you don't need to do that to make a playable question.

Packets should be submitted up to three weeks before the tournament's first mirror. People who submit packets will not pay a tournament entry fee; people who do not will pay $15 each (to encourage packet submission). I want a lot of questions to work with.

As an additional fun incentive for people to submit early packets, if this tournament ends up being run at CO, I will buy lunch of some kind (probably Harold's, though I can change this upon request) for the team that ended up submitting their packet first. I won't disclose who has submitted packets until five weeks before the tournament in order to encourage a race for free fried chicken before then, by which time I hope at least one team will have made the wise decision of submitting questions. I won't accept any submissions before ten weeks prior to the tournament, so don't try to game the system too hard by submitting in February.

Your bonuses should be linked to your tossups in theme and should be of "middle part" difficulty (for a very hard tournament). If your tossup is on Hispania, then a bonus part on Cantabria or some historian who described Hispania would be perfectly reasonable, a bonus part on Cambyses II would be questionable, and a bonus part on Ion Antonescu would be wholly inappropriate (if possibly amusing for me to read).

Asking all of this is pretty rigorous, I know, but Jordan and I managed to pulled it off. I'm sure the community as a whole can come up with plenty of great questions on a wide variety of topics, and I'll be excited to see them.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Early results seem to overwhelmingly suggest that people want this tournament to be around CO Arts level difficulty. I've edited the tournament announcement accordingly to reflect what I'm looking for in packet submissions. Expect the final product to have a good balance of easy, medium, and hard answers.

[theMoMA]

Although I don't see anything wrong in principle with having one-part related bonuses, I do wonder whether it's appropriate to lengthen a summer side event, given the surfeit of such events in recent years and the small windows of time in which they can be played. Perhaps if the tossups were strictly length-limited to around six lines, one-part bonuses would have minimal impact on other events. But if the tossups are of normal length, I would personally rather have more time for multiple events at a summer open than have one-part bonuses at the history event. (Although a single part seems pretty short, if they take 15-20 seconds each on average, that extends an eight-round tournament something like 40 minutes to an hour, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations.)

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I'd be comfortable doing a limit of seven lines at this event, but not six. Also, isn't the CO Trash set going to be 20/20? It seems like it will be hard to fit in three events in any case, though if we think it's doable I can acommodate.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Update: I'm planning on sticking with my initially announced format, since I think that's going to be fun and allow some interesting material to sneak into the distribution, since not everything can always fit into a tossup. Given some recent thought and the success of relatively limiting answerline difficulty at SHEIKH, I'm going to be expanding the vaguely outlined difficulty quota for this tournament, which I think will also have the additional positive effect of making the tournament more accessible to more players:

Category 1 - 50% (roughly). Answerline that could conceivably generate a playable tossup at ACF Regionals or lower difficulty.
Category 2 - 25% (roughly). Answerline that could have comfortably showed up at ACF Nationals (this does not mean Parson Pendleton!)
Category 3 - 25% (roughly). Answerline that should only show up at CO level events.

All bonus parts should be about the same difficulty and be the equivalent of a CO bonus part. I'd use a relatively mild CO set like 2009 for reference.

Submitted tossups should adhere to the guidelines outlined in the ACF Regionals announcement - try to hit at least seven lines with your tossups. If you can't find seven lines of solid, buzzable clues for your answerline, then it probably shouldn't be an answerline.

[Cheynem]

1. When is this tournament going to be run? I don't think there's any time at CO this year.

2. So you want all of the submissions to be in the category 1 frame? Does that mean then that you're going to write 50% of the set yourself or are you just banking on quizbowlers writing harder stuff as usual?

[Auks Ran Ova]

There's probably time for a short or simple Sunday evening event after trash, but I don't know if a large packet-sub history tournament is the way to go for that.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Is the trash tournament going to take the whole day? (I guess so, since the announcement thread says it will have 12 packets). I suppose I can scale things back a bit and just do tossups-only while keeping a reasonable length cap in order to accommodate the schedule. In any case, I planned on writing 3 to 4 packets myself or with a collaborator and having submissions make up the rest of the tournament, which probably wouldn't go past 10 rounds.

Alternatively, I wouldn't mind this being run as a side event at VCU Open or something and sticking to the original format.

Also, I meant to indicate that I want people to submit packets with roughly 50% Category 1 answers, 25% Category 2 answers, and 25% Category 3 answers, or at least that's what I'd plan for the final set to look like. Make of this as you wish.

[theMoMA]

Trash should be ten rounds plus finals. We'll try to trim down the questions for streamlined play. Ten rounds would end sometime between 3:00 and 3:45 if rounds averaged 30-35 minutes and play began at 9:00am (with a one-hour lunch break). It seems reasonable to assume that, depending on the status of finals, 4:30 is an early-but-realistic starting point for an after-trash event (which organizers could bring forward a bit if necessary by starting a bit earlier and tightening up the lunch break).

[naan/steak-holding toll]

OK - I think I'll just revise my initial plan to just write a tossups-only event, if time is of concern.

I should reiterate that my submission guidelines are just that - loose guidelines, and indicative of the sort of tournament I'm looking to produce. To use Persian-speaking kings as rough examples of what I'd consider "appropriate" for each difficulty level:

Category 1: Darius I of the Achaemenid Empire
Category 2: Ismail I of the Safavid Empire
Category 3: Mahmud of the Ghaznavid Empire

[Cheynem]

I'd still like to see this run not as the late Sunday event at CO, although tossup only events have been successfully run after a trash tournament.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

On account of apparent lack of interest so far, I'm not gonna end up running this at CO. I may run it later, and will ideally adhere to my originally proposed format (20/15/10 tossups, single-part bonuses).

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I've decided to move this to 2017. Since I'm going to have a revised format, I'll be creating a new thread at some point. In light of the relative success of Christmas Present and my taking more interest in other topics more and more, I plan on creating a History Bee style tournament with a more expansive distribution accompanying a wide variety of history-related topics, though it will be run in a format like RILKE - top scorer goes up, bottom scorer goes down. This, however, is subject to change depending on what people are interested in playing, of course.