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This is a preliminary announcement for what I'm calling the Chicago Open History Bee. Assuming there is interest, this tournament will use a RILKE-style guerilla format, like It's Lit (since I haven't seen a history tournament done like that) - however I'm also open to other formats. I've picked out a majority of the answers to be used in this tournament and am willing to write in its entirety, though I would be willing to take on a co-writer who is interested in writing some American history. Tossups will be "very challenging" in difficulty, but will include a large number of accessible and canonical answers to balance the large number of less-explored topics I plan on sticking in; they'll also be marked for power and superpower.

My proposed distribution contains 32 tossups per packet (no bonuses) in order to cover a wide range of topics, including a large number of "non-traditional" history topics ala National History Bee and Bowl tournaments:

US to Con
US, Con-WWI (x2 per packet)
US, WWI-Present (x2 per packet)
Any USA (incl. Native)
Roman Classics
Greek/Other Classics
British History
Commonwealth and British Empire
EU Justinian to Plague
Europe to 30YrsWar
Europe to 1870
Europe, 1870 On
Miscellaneous Europe + more intellectual history
Religious History (any)
Historiography
Archaeology and Exploration
Thought/SS (mainly economics, anthropology, and sociology)
Visual Arts (painting, film, sculpture, architecture, photography)
Auditory Arts (music, opera, ballet)
Literature (x2 per packet - novels with a history focus, literary history, etc.)
"Listory"
Americas
Africa
East Asia to 1500
East Asia, 1500-on
South Asia
Middle East to 1400 (including Ancient Near East, but not Roman/Hellenistic)
Middle East, 1400-on
SE Asia / Misc

The large distribution encompassing non-traditional topics is meant to encourage everybody with any interest in the human past to play, even if you're not good at standard history questions on politics, institutions, etc. I'll probably be incorporating a higher-than-average amount of historiography into this tournament besides the strict historiography distribution.

I really don't care, but I have not enjoyed any of the RILKE format tournaments I've played (although probably being awful at them has something to do with it), mainly because at some point you just end up in a No Exit style room filled with hundreds of people (although the incomparable Mike Sorice reading last year helped), whereas a doubles or quads tournament at least means even if you're getting annihilated, there's still the possibility for meaningful buzzes.

That said, one tournament a year with such a format isn't the worst thing in the world, and I'm sure for people who are good, it's pretty fun.

I'll put out a poll for format style, then.

EDIT: OP has been updated with a poll.

Due to a wide variety of reasons, I'm postponing this tournament until summer 2018 at earliest.

EDIT: A bit more context now that I'm a lot more awake - I want adequate time to make this tournament of sufficient quality while writing it (almost) entirely myself; in the meantime, I don't want to commit to something of this scale within a year when I can't be positive about my real life commitments and other (quizbowl) work I plan on doing.

It would be kind of cool to straight-up do whatever schedule format the high school National History Bee does, with minimal modification. I think that involves quasi-randomly seeded prelim rooms of equal size for several rounds, then elimination rounds which slowly whittle the field down.

Adventure Temple Trail wrote:It would be kind of cool to straight-up do whatever schedule format the high school National History Bee does, with minimal modification. I think that involves quasi-randomly seeded prelim rooms of equal size for several rounds, then elimination rounds which slowly whittle the field down.

THREE WAY TIEBReKer?!

Now that I think about it, I like Matt's idea a lot actually.

Bubalus Period wrote:

Adventure Temple Trail wrote:It would be kind of cool to straight-up do whatever schedule format the high school National History Bee does, with minimal modification. I think that involves quasi-randomly seeded prelim rooms of equal size for several rounds, then elimination rounds which slowly whittle the field down.

THREE WAY TIEBReKer?!

If implemented, this wouldn't be a History Bowl, so it's probably okay.

I am interested in this idea - possibly even lending the National History Bee name to this, though not interested in overseeing question production for it or having our usual writing team do so. For what it's worth, at HS Nationals, we have 6 prelim rounds. At regionals we have 3. At IHO and Asians, Canadians and Euros we have 4. Prelim rounds are indeed seeded, but not for all students.

I'm retired from quizbowl and have no stake in this, but I'd in general love to see more serious academic side events or serious academic open tournaments adopt rules variations from outside of the mACF world. It would have been really fun to play an academic summer open on Ann B. Davis rules, for example, or on some 4 quarters format.

I've updated the distribution to include "Listory" and Archaeology/Exploration. It's now 32 tossups. I'm going to try to keep length as constrained as possible (8 line soft cap) on account of this.

Note that this is probably better targeted at the second summer open/side event tournament, since CO Sunday 2018 is already spoken for.

Auks Ran Ova wrote:Note that this is probably better targeted at the second summer open/side event tournament, since CO Sunday 2018 is already spoken for.

That's just not going to be possible because this tournament is predicated on having all the best people in the country present. It's tossups only so it should be able to fit into the schedule if things go smoothly?

I could alternatively try to finish this for the big open for early 2018, presumably to run at the traditional "main site."

Hey, so this year, we played CO and CO Trash and one, very small, very fast event in Will's thing.

A number of people still had to leave during trash. Our car didn't get out of Chicago until maybe like 7 or 8 PM. I just don't know if even a tossup only event can really co-exist alongside two full tossup/bonus tournaments. On the other hand, maybe we just suck things up.

We haven't had a Friday night event in a while; perhaps with over a year's notice, we people could arrive on Friday for this event. But yeah, I don't think you'll be able to run this with a good field on Sunday, based on recent Sundays.

This event is not going to be written as I'm no longer sure how I'll be able to fit this into my writing timeline. My apologies. I hope to edit a CO history event, ideally packet-submission of some kind, in the future.