The Quizbowl Resource Center

While I don't have the time to compile a master list of tournaments for each region and keep that updated throughout the year, I do have time to recreate Will Alston's thread from last year that attempted to chart scheduling for the upcoming year's tournaments. If anyone is currently working on any projects for next year / is interested in collaborating with others but not necessarily writing a whole set, please announce it below!

Sets that are confirmed will have their links posted. Hypothetical sets that have happened in the past are italicized and underlined for your attention. Confirmed sets without tournament announcements will be underlined.

Fall 2017
July and August: NASAT (Regular)
Early September: NAQT Collegiate Novice (Novice)
Late September to early October: Early Fall Tournament (Regular-Minus)
October 21st: Penn Bowl (Regular)
November 4th: ACF Fall
Mid November: Delta Burke (Fall)
Late November: WAO II

Spring 2018
January 20th: ACF Regionals
February 3rd: SCT
Late February: something regular or regular+?
Early March: something regular-, similar to EMT or MUT?
Mid March: SUN II
Late March to Early April: ICT
April 21st and 22nd: ACF Nationals

There are spots in the calendar available for at least four different tournaments this next year, so nobody be shy now!

Am free to write/edit lit/phil/VFA for anything regular difficulty or harder. If you enjoyed my WAO work feel free to PM or FB me to discuss.

Two questions:

1/ Is Penn Bowl occurring again this year? This seems like the kind of thing that the Penn team should announce relatively soon.

2/ When will ACF Regionals be? This season, the date for Regionals changed suddenly and without warning from what it was the past two years. This almost proved catastrophic for our team because we'd already scheduled our high school tournament for the same weekend, which meant that we almost missed out on qualifying for Nationals.

Along those lines, could someone in ACF confirm what weekend (or even pair of weekends, like "the second half of January") Regionals will be? I don't think people should be in the dark as to when it will be, especially given that it's the only important tournament* whose date seems to wander year to year.

* Assuming, like most people, that you treat Fall, Regionals, Nationals, SCT, and ICT as the 5 core tournaments of the year.

Charbroil wrote: 2/ When will ACF Regionals be? This season, the date for Regionals changed suddenly and without warning from what was the past two years. This almost proved catastrophic for our team because we'd already scheduled our high school tournament for the same weekend, which meant that we almost missed out on qualifying for Nationals.

Details for Regionals are currently being hammered out, and it will be announced by the end of the month.

Auroni wrote:

Charbroil wrote: 2/ When will ACF Regionals be? This season, the date for Regionals changed suddenly and without warning from what was the past two years. This almost proved catastrophic for our team because we'd already scheduled our high school tournament for the same weekend, which meant that we almost missed out on qualifying for Nationals.

Details for Regionals are currently being hammered out, and it will be announced by the end of the month.

Sounds great; thanks for letting everyone know!

Charbroil wrote:Two questions:

1/ Is Penn Bowl occurring again this year? This seems like the kind of thing that the Penn team should announce relatively soon.

Penn bowl will be happening again this year. The official announcement will be posted within a month or so once we finalize everything.

Not that it matters too much for most folks here, but Delta Burke's Valencia (Orlando) iteration will be November 10-11. I hope ACF Fall will be the previous weekend, as it usually is.

Anyone interested in collaborating on a WAO-style packet sub tournament? I'd be interested in organizing/editing AFA+History+(If necessary) random other stuff.

Sigurd wrote:Anyone interested in collaborating on a WAO-style packet sub tournament? I'd be interested in organizing/editing AFA+History+(If necessary) random other stuff.

I would submit for this.

Beevor Feevor wrote: Early February: SCT

The 2018 SCT will take place on Saturday, February 3.

Sigurd wrote:Anyone interested in collaborating on a WAO-style packet sub tournament? I'd be interested in organizing/editing AFA+History+(If necessary) random other stuff.

I'm helping Isaac organize this. We're aiming for the mid-to-late November slot. We're still finalizing the editing team, so final details won't be announced until we figure that out, but a full announcement should be up by the end of June.

I probably can't take on any editing commitments, but I have a decent stockpile of questions in different subjects (primarily visual art, history, literature and current events) that range from regular difficult to open difficulty that I can contribute to some set if anyone's interested.

Cambridge will write a regular difficulty mNAQT set in late February/early March slot. Drop me a line if you'd be interested in helping put it together/ adapt it for the Atlantically-challenged

From what I can tell, it looks like there are currently 5 regular difficulty events (counting Regionals and SCT) planned and no regular+ events. Are there any planned regular+ events? Or would any of the writers of regular events be interested in writing them for a harder difficulty?

Maryland is planning to write Terrapin XXX for an early spring slot, either late January or mid-February. More details to come soon.

sarangyeola wrote:Terrapin XXX

Aha, bringing Puma back?

Beevor Feevor wrote:Spring 2018
January 18th: ACF Regionals

That's a Thursday; do you mean the 20th?

Edit: the Penn Bowl date is a Tuesday.

AKKOLADE wrote:

Beevor Feevor wrote:Spring 2018
January 18th: ACF Regionals

That's a Thursday; do you mean the 20th?

Edit: the Penn Bowl date is a Tuesday.

Quizbowl is on weekdays now.

Rococo A Go Go wrote:

AKKOLADE wrote:

Beevor Feevor wrote:Spring 2018
January 18th: ACF Regionals

That's a Thursday; do you mean the 20th?

Edit: the Penn Bowl date is a Tuesday.

Quizbowl is on weekdays now.

My bad, y'all. As you can clearly see, I moved things a date in the wrong direction to account for new years; my mistake!

1992 in spaceflight wrote:

Sigurd wrote:Anyone interested in collaborating on a WAO-style packet sub tournament? I'd be interested in organizing/editing AFA+History+(If necessary) random other stuff.

I'm helping Isaac organize this. We're aiming for the mid-to-late November slot. We're still finalizing the editing team, so final details won't be announced until we figure that out, but a full announcement should be up by the end of June.

And the announcement is up!

Looking at the current schedule, it looks like the only thing we're currently lacking (I've heard from another channel that NAQT is bringing back Collegiate Novice) is a MUT/EMT style tournament for the spring (the rest of the EMT people and I will hopefully finish our conversation about it soon) and a nats-prep tournament for the spring, a la This Tournament is a Crime and "stanford housewrite."

Collegiate Novice will be available to mirror this fall, although we are not bringing back the level-3 version of the tournament. The only set available for mirror will be the one derived from level-4 questions (roughly equivalent to an IS set or DII SCT).

Can anyone from ACF confirm when the bid form for ACF Nationals will be up? It seems like it should be up by now, and it's not.

Also, I believe the only thing we're really missing from the schedule is the nationals-prep college tournament*, a la "stanford housewrite" and This Tournament is a Crime. Does anyone have plans for a set of this difficulty and needs some help getting it done?

*The regular-minus "MUT-esque" spring event will be returning, but I'll let the project organizer post about it later. Some of the EMT people are joining this effort, but it's not EMT II.

Hi,

Who can I email about mirroring collegiate novice on 11/18. It will be hosted at UCI.

Thanks,
Fernan Lukban
flukban(at)uci(dot)edu

Has there been a discussion among anyone about next year's traditional pre-Nationals open? I've heard rumors of the UVA team doing one, but I'm not sure as to the veracity of these. To my knowledge, Terrapin Invitational is not happening next winter, either.

It seems there is a serious dearth of tournaments. Without trying to volunteer anybody to write, I will say that I find it disappointing that a large number of quizbowl's top teams these days do not produce tournaments to any significant degree. Compounding this problem is the fact that, among the population of active writers, an extremely large number of them have been absorbed into writing for Penn Bowl, which now has experienced writers from Maryland, Chicago, Stanford, and Penn on the project!

Most of last year's crop of new collegiate writers came from solid, but not top-10 teams - players from WUSTL, UVA, and Duke (plus Alex Damisch and whoever else I'm forgetting) worked together to make EMT happen, and Jason Cheng from UCSD involved in a few writing projects as well. These people have mostly stayed involved, which is awesome. People from top teams who have been involved in writing for a while have kept it up, but there hasn't been much new fruit there.

I understand that there have been some abortive attempts by some teams to produce tournaments, and it's hard to write a tournament. Honestly, though, it's a bit disappointing to see large numbers of people who do know how to write questions sitting around and not doing so. This is especially true given the fact that there are only two tournaments (not counting ACF Fall) that top active collegiate players play that require packet submissions, and one of these was reduced to a half-packet just this year.

If the issue is that the talent and motivation required to produce a tournament is dispersed across a lot of teams, then to me this seems like the entire reason that packet submission tournaments exist in the first place. I recommend we bring these back - getting a few packets' of ideas for editors/replacement questions and getting a bunch of decent half-packet submissions isn't as much effort as a full-blown housewrite. Half-packets aren't that tough to write, either (certainly better than wrangling with a full packet where you have to write for categories that you don't really care about) - and heck, as noted, teams got a half-packet lopped off their writing requirements for Regionals this year anyways! WAO II is bringing together a lot of different writers to produce a tournament - sure, they're relatively less experienced, but striking out on your own is a good thing, and criticism is honestly a lot less brutal these days than it used to be. I certainly commend its writers for boldly venturing forth.

To my knowledge, Terrapin Invitational is not happening next winter, either.

For the time being, the Maryland team has decided against writing Terrapin for next winter because we have occupied with writing our high school set, and our writing team this year is considerably smaller and less experienced relative to last year's (most of the "experienced writers from Maryland" that you mentioned earlier would not be able to contribute in large volumes to a hypothetical Terrapin set this year). For whatever it's worth, I apologize to everyone for any disappointment or inconvenience that this might cause.

wcheng wrote:

To my knowledge, Terrapin Invitational is not happening next winter, either.

For the time being, the Maryland team has decided against writing Terrapin for next winter because we have occupied with writing our high school set, and our writing team this year is considerably smaller and less experienced relative to last year's (most of the "experienced writers from Maryland" that you mentioned earlier would not be able to contribute in large volumes to a hypothetical Terrapin set this year). For whatever it's worth, I apologize to everyone for any disappointment or inconvenience that this might cause.

I don't think anyone would blame you at all, as a team that's in a bit of a rebuilding mode, for not taking on the task of a whole set. I would ask, though - have you considered reaching out to other schools? Again, not to volunteer others, but just to consider some hypotheticals - Columbia may have some material lying around from the never-completed MCAT set. Minnesota's players (at the time people realized MUT wasn't gonna happen) indicated last year that they may not have the resources for a full set, but would be able to contribute questions. Teams that have shied away from question production before might have more confidence if they had a partner team to work with.

As a community, if we are going to keep having more tournaments besides just the standard ACF and NAQT sets, then we collectively are at some point going to need to develop the human capital necessary to have more head editors of collegiate tournaments. Undoubtedly, this is going to take some individual initiative, as well as collective initiative to develop this human capital. But we have to face the facts - editorial giants/major high-level writers have been phasing out every year for the past several years and I wouldn't predict this to slow down any time soon; this, I think, is perhaps the major unfortunate consequence of the replacement of "dinosaurs" with a wider range of strong, but not super-dominant collegiate players, with I otherwise regard as a positive development.

EDIT: Without wanting to blast people for writing side events (which are fun to play), I did want to note that there were well over 20 side events this summer. I question whether some of that effort could have gone into writing more full tournaments instead - perhaps with a "curator" of some sort. (As a side note/excuse - I considered this myself when I wrote Bork, but as a retired player, I wanted to play the available opens instead of staffing/writing them, and some of the ideas were kinda kooky anyways, so I put them into a side event).

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: As a community, if we are going to keep having more tournaments besides just the standard ACF and NAQT sets, then we collectively are at some point going to need to develop the human capital necessary to have more head editors of collegiate tournaments. Undoubtedly, this is going to take some individual initiative, as well as collective initiative to develop this human capital.

I've been wondering if this is a good signal for ACF and/or NAQT to increase the number of college sets they produce (with the obvious caveat that this might be more trouble than it's worth for either organization). Maybe it's just an artifact of this particular season, but NAQT seems (already!) to have had no problem rustling up questions for this year's SCT, for instance.

(I understand that this would only take care of the "make sure that some force is organizing these tournaments" part of the problem; but both organizations do have a good track record of mentoring editors and writers.)

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:But we have to face the facts - editorial giants/major high-level writers have been phasing out every year for the past several years and I wouldn't predict this to slow down any time soon.

I don't think this is as much of a worry as you make it out to be; Auroni and Will Nediger, for instance, have shown every intention to continue writing at high volume.

To tie this in with the previous point: the population of graduated high-level writers and editors interested in writing questions as a part- or full-time job has grown substantially over the past few years. I think it's pretty understandable that they'd rather get paid for writing, and ACF and NAQT both make that possible (or at the very least easier).

EDIT: Let me put this in broader perspective (one heavily influenced by Matt Jackson's vision). Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that most college quizbowlers probably agree that, in the future, they'd like for the college game to be more widespread and more "institutionalized"—this doesn't mean sacrificing the "by players, for players" mentality, but it might mean that the majority of sets (all sets?) come from well-respected, permanent, dedicated quizbowl institutions like ACF and NAQT, with writer development happening through packet submission and NAQT's programs.

That would be great, of course. But in the short term, we're (probably) not getting any new ACF or NAQT sets next year. And if neither of them expands more (it has to be sure its new college set is profitable, for one) then we still need to build this human capital.

Also - it's not hard to make a good amount of money off a housewrite. If you have a standard 15 packet set (600 questions plus some tiebreakers) with a $40 mirror fee, then if you can get 100 teams to play your tournament (not unreasonable for a regular set) then you have $6.67 per question. Cut out 25% of that for paying editors' fees, logistics people, packetizers, etc. and you are paying $5 per tossup, which I think is what HSAPQ pays. Granted, you have a lot of work to do, but you can totally pay your writers competitively for a housewrite. A $50 mirror fee (give or take) seems reasonable for a harder open set to compensate for the fact that fewer teams play.

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:Columbia may have some material lying around from the never-completed MCAT set.

I asked Ben Zhang about this when I was in New York earlier this summer, since I wrote 30/30 for MCAT and would like those questions to see the light of day at some point. He said that he wants to turn MCAT into a project for Columbia's newer players to learn to write questions, and that he hopes the tournament will appear in some form in the future, just not this school year. If, after this school year, it's not looking like MCAT will appear in the next school year, I'll just yank my questions and donate them to some other tournament. (Many Columbia players and some Michigan players have seen them, so there'd be that to work around.)

An actual announcement thread about this will come in the next week or so, but some current and former players from Stevenson High School (Ali Saeed, me, Govind Prabhakar, Deepak Moparthi, Conrad Oberhaus, and Olivia Lamberti) and some writers from last year's EMT (Jacob O'Rourke and Charles Hang) will be writing a regular-minus set for the early March slot tentatively called Stevenson Housewrite Stevenson Memorial Tournament, with Jordan Brownstein head editing, Ewan MacAulay, Kai Smith, and Anderson Wang editing, and Brad Fischer advising as quality control.

Let's consider the top-ten teams in last year's postseason poll that haven't lost a majority of their scoring:

#3 Yale: currently not writing a tournament
#4 Stanford: currently not writing a tournament
#5 Chicago: currently not writing a tournament
#6 Columbia: currently not writing a tournament
#7 Northwestern: currently not writing a tournament
#8 Penn: currently writing Penn Bowl!
#9 Berkeley: currently not writing a tournament
#10 Oxford: currently writing Oxford Open!

I find it impossible to believe that none of the teams listed other than Penn and Oxford have the ability to put together a playable college tournament, particularly given that they even have the option of collaborating. One would think that the ability to make money while also getting better at quizbowl would be inducement enough to teams to convince them to write tournaments, but maybe top programs in general receive so much money from their universities that monetary compensation is no object.

In that case, we still have the issue that there are no tournaments, and that too many teams this year seem content to be free riders, playing tournaments without writing anything in return. If money doesn't matter, hopefully the health of the community should; there's not going to be much reason for a quizbowl club to exist if there are no quizbowl tournaments to play. Last year quizbowl was bailed out by Ike Jose and Will Alston between them writing for nearly every tournament; that state of affairs isn't sustainable and it's not fair to them to expect it. It's admirable that Michigan State has stepped up to edit a tournament this year, but the circuit needs experienced teams to put together high-quality tournaments. Right now it's deeply distressing that nobody is willing to do that.

To be fair, Chicago and Stanford are both contributing to Penn Bowl.

1.82 wrote: #5 Chicago: currently not writing a tournament

I find it impossible to believe that none of the teams listed other than Penn and Oxford have the ability to put together a playable college tournament, particularly given that they even have the option of collaborating.

Um, then maybe you should actually read the announcements for these tournaments to discern whether some of them are collaborations? Unless I'm mistaken, Penn Bowl is not being written/edited by Penn alone. Among the listed writers/editors are three members of Chicago's team. And I'm pretty sure that a fourth person from Chicago's team is listed as being on the editing team for the Stevenson Housewrite scheduled for the spring. I'm also not sure why you're focusing on teams to begin with, when most collegiate tournaments these days involve editors working independently, apart from their teams.

EDIT: Eric beat me to this.

1.82 wrote:Let's consider the top-ten teams in last year's postseason poll that haven't lost a majority of their scoring:

#3 Yale: currently not writing a tournament
#4 Stanford: currently not writing a tournament
#5 Chicago: currently not writing a tournament
#6 Columbia: currently not writing a tournament
#7 Northwestern: currently not writing a tournament
#8 Penn: currently writing Penn Bowl!
#9 Berkeley: currently not writing a tournament
#10 Oxford: currently writing Oxford Open!

I find it impossible to believe that none of the teams listed other than Penn and Oxford have the ability to put together a playable college tournament, particularly given that they even have the option of collaborating. One would think that the ability to make money while also getting better at quizbowl would be inducement enough to teams to convince them to write tournaments, but maybe top programs in general receive so much money from their universities that monetary compensation is no object.
.

I'll note here that Yale's Stephen Eltinge will be working on ACF Regionals, and that Adam Silverman (now most of Northwestern's scoring, barring a drastic change) writes many questions for PACE and HSAPQ. Strong, experienced science writers/editors are in no small part a major constraining factor here. Also, Stanford has indeed lost most of its scoring from last year, so they shouldn't be on the list either.

That leaves Columbia and Berkeley, neither of which have ever written a college tournament apart from Ben Zhang's participation in ACF Fall 2014 and Bruce Lou's participation in ACF Fall 2016 and This Tournament Is A Crime.

Columbia has some amount of existing material for a lower-difficulty set, which could hypothetically be re-tuned to higher difficulty (a MUT level hard part is probably a fair middle at a traditional open level).

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:
I'll note here that Yale's Stephen Eltinge will be working on ACF Regionals, and that Adam Silverman (now most of Northwestern's scoring, barring a drastic change) writes many questions for PACE and HSAPQ. Strong, experienced science writers/editors are in no small part a major constraining factor here. Also, Stanford has indeed lost most of its scoring from last year, so they shouldn't be on the list either.

Yep. Also: Jennie's editing ACF Fall, and I'm working on Penn Bowl (and a time-consuming thesis paper), and two of our incoming freshmen are working on the Stevenson set. Given our loss of personnel over the summer (plus our commitment to hosting multiple tournaments this year), I'm offended by the implication that we (Stanford QB) aren't pulling our weight.

Yep. Also: Jennie's editing ACF Fall, and I'm working on Penn Bowl (and a time-consuming thesis paper), and two of our incoming freshmen are working on the Stevenson set. Given our loss of personnel over the summer (plus our commitment to hosting multiple tournaments this year), I'm offended by the implication that we (Stanford QB) aren't pulling our weight.

To tack onto this, another one of our freshmen is also editing ACF Fall this year. We might not get the manpower to produce another iteration of "stanford housewrite" anytime soon, but a depleted Stanford is definitely still active on the editing scene this year.

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:

1.82 wrote:Let's consider the top-ten teams in last year's postseason poll that haven't lost a majority of their scoring:

#3 Yale: currently not writing a tournament
#4 Stanford: currently not writing a tournament
#5 Chicago: currently not writing a tournament
#6 Columbia: currently not writing a tournament
#7 Northwestern: currently not writing a tournament
#8 Penn: currently writing Penn Bowl!
#9 Berkeley: currently not writing a tournament
#10 Oxford: currently writing Oxford Open!

I find it impossible to believe that none of the teams listed other than Penn and Oxford have the ability to put together a playable college tournament, particularly given that they even have the option of collaborating. One would think that the ability to make money while also getting better at quizbowl would be inducement enough to teams to convince them to write tournaments, but maybe top programs in general receive so much money from their universities that monetary compensation is no object.
.

I'll note here that Yale's Stephen Eltinge will be working on ACF Regionals.

I'm also working on SCT again, otherwise I would absolutely be planning out a housewrite of some kind.

Speaking for Berkeley here.

We are currently discussing the idea of writing the annual pre-Nationals tournament. This is not an official announcement for anything, nor is it a confirmation that we are planning to write one, but we are simply floating the idea out there.

On that note, we would be far more likely to write a tournament if we had experienced editors (especially in science and RMPSS) on board who are willing to oversee production. We have a large pool of able writers in all categories, but since none of them have edited for a tournament before, let alone a tournament of this difficulty, it would be very helpful if we could have some help and expertise.

Edit: PM me if you're interested

I'd just like to post an update on the spring open, of which a full announcement should be coming in the near future. Our current list of editors for this tournament is:

Science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics): Ryan Humphrey
Science (Math, CS, and other): Aseem Keyal
Literature: Will Nediger
History: Bruce Lou
Fine Arts (Visual and other): Aseem Keyal
Fine Arts (Auditory): Jennie Yang
Religion: Weijia Cheng
Mythology: Aseem Keyal
Thought (Philosophy and Social Science): Will Nediger
Geography: Bruce Lou and Michael Coates
Current Events: MIchael Coates

If anyone is still interested in editing physics and math specifically, please PM me.

I'd like to informally announce that a sequel to last spring's Spring Undergraduate Novice is in the works, tentatively called SUN II. This set's target difficulty is around that of ACF Fall and is not strictly for novices or undergrads, despite its present name. It is being written by members of the University of Florida, University of Central Florida, Auburn, and New College of Florida clubs. A full announcement will be made soon, but it will likely available for mirrors in mid March 2018. It is presently ~%40 written.