The Quizbowl Resource Center

The Academic Buzzer Team at UIUC is pleased to announce that we will be hosting the 2018 Great Lakes mirror of ACF Regionals on January 20th. I, Bradley McLain, will be serving as tournament director. More information about this set can be found here. We are softcapping this at 20 teams but will expand if we have enough staff and interest.

Logistics
Registration will begin at 8:30 in room 114 of David Kinley Hall. We want to have matches started at 9:00 at the latest.

Fees
Base fee: $135
Buzzer: -$5/functional system
Staffers: -$10/staffer
Shorthanded fee (teams of 1 or 2 players): $60
New to quizbowl discount: -$100

Registration
To register, fill out this form.

Field (26/28):
Chicago (6)
Illinois
Illinois Wesleyan
Louisville (2)
Michigan (3)
Michigan State (3)
Northwestern (2)
Ohio State (2)
Truman State
Wisconsin
Wright State
WUSTL (3)

Waitlist:

Update: I have learned that more staff will likely be available for this so the field will almost certainly expand again so please do not hesitate to sign up more teams.

Thanks to Illinois for hosting this tournament -- it ran long, but that didn't seem like the fault of the organizers. My only complaint was that no paper copies of schedules were provided.

I don't know who won overall, but Michigan A won the D2 title by virtue of being the only such team in the top bracket, and MSU A won the undergrad title by virtue of being the only such team in the top bracket with any wins against other top bracket teams.

CPiGuy wrote:I don't know who won overall, but Michigan A won the D2 title by virtue of being the only such team in the top bracket, and MSU A won the undergrad title by virtue of being the only such team in the top bracket with any wins against other top bracket teams.

Northwestern A defeated OSU A in one semifinal; the other semifinal (MSU A vs. Chicago A) and the final were called off due to force majeure. So, I suppose, there's a three-way tie at the top overall.

Thanks to U of I for stepping up to host!

cornfused wrote:Thanks to U of I for stepping up to host!

Echoing this, despite some initial skepticism about bracketing that I'll admit I shared in and delays from inexperienced readers, this tournament was run very well. Thanks to Brad for doing an excellent job as TD!

Thanks to UIUC for hosting. My apologies for the circumstances that curtailed the tournament's conclusion. And so, an even larger heap of thanks to Northwestern and MSU A for choosing to resolve things in such a generous fashion; and I'm sorry that OSU A was disadvantaged by this too.

However, at the risk of marring the otherwise laudatory tone in which the tournament's execution has thus far been discussed, I'd like to draw attention to one unfortunate fact. And that is that the semi-finals were (and the finals were to be) moderated by members of our B team. This was because every other moderator left after the playoffs, despite knowing that a semi-final + final series was about to commence.

Now, most of us have been in the position of staffing a tournament while having a pressing evening obligation. In such cases, one alerts the TD that one needs to be done by X time, and the TD finds a way to ensure there will be some moderators on hand to handle finals if the tournament goes long. Now, it may be the case that many of the people who left were in that situation, and I don't blame those who did so for such reasons. But I am led to believe that some did not have a specific engagement to get to; they just wanted to leave. If this is true, this was pretty crappy on the part of the more experienced among them. You should know better than to just abandon players to staff the rest of the tournament themselves.

I'm assuming that in this case the lack of a regionals champion won't matter in terms of getting a bid to ACF Nationals, but if it had mattered, who would be getting the automatic bid?

Unicolored Jay wrote:I'm assuming that in this case the lack of a regionals champion won't matter in terms of getting a bid to ACF Nationals, but if it had mattered, who would be getting the automatic bid?

It's irrelevant on Michigan state's end as the UG champions at least

CPiGuy wrote:Thanks to Illinois for hosting this tournament -- it ran long, but that didn't seem like the fault of the organizers. My only complaint was that no paper copies of schedules were provided.

I don't know who won overall, but Michigan A won the D2 title by virtue of being the only such team in the top bracket, and MSU A won the undergrad title by virtue of being the only such team in the top bracket with any wins against other top bracket teams.

I do apologize for this, I have been generally making a move towards digital schedules as an environmental and economical choice, but I admit that for an event of this size and importance it was a mistake on my part not to provide them. Thank you for the feedback!