Cavalier Classic @ UVA, 10/29/11 (BDAT mirror)

[The Laughing Cavalier]

The Academic Competition Club at UVA will be resurrecting our fall tournament, the Cavalier Classic, this season with a mirror of the BDAT set produced by Norcross on October 29, 2011.

Location: This tournament will be held in New Cabell Hall, and we'll be meeting in room 337 at 8:30 AM.

Parking: We suggest that you park in the Scott Stadium parking lot. There are parking lots closer to the building in which the tournament will be held, but they are very small and may or may not have spots open on the weekend. Thus, I would suggest you only attempt to find parking in those lots if a member of your team would have difficulty with a 10-15 minute walk. Additionally, the building is undergoing renovation and some of the elevators are blocked, so please let me know if that will be an issue for your team and I will place your games accordingly.

Other notes: We currently have enough rooms reserved to support a field of up to 30 teams.

This tournament will be affiliated with the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence (http://www.pace-nsc.org ) and will be an opportunity to qualify for the National Scholastics Championship, which is run by PACE and will occur on June 9-10, 2011 in St. Louis, Missouri.
UPDATE: This tournament has been platinum certified by PACE, which means that the top 25% of the field will qualify for the 2012 NSC.

There is a buffet-style dining hall near New Cabell Hall that will be open on this date. I’ll have a list of other food options available on the day of the tournament as well. We will not be providing breakfast or lunch for teams.

Team size: There can be a maximum number of 6 players on each team’s roster, with substitutions possible at half-time and between games. If you wish to bring 7 or 8 players, we ask that you register a second team, and so on for anyone with larger numbers of players.

Fee structure:
Base fee: $70 per team
Buzzer discount: $5 for each system on which the control box and 8 buzzers work.
Staff discount: $10 for a parent, coach, non-playing student, etc. To qualify for the discount, volunteer staffers must stay through all games, not including finals.
Travel discount (200 miles or more, one way): $10
Minimum fee: $45

To register, please email me (Sarah Angelo) at sea2fj at virginia dot edu. Checks should be made out to “Academic Competition Club,” though we can also accept cash. Please pay either in advance or, preferably, on the day of the tournament. If you wish to pay in advance, please indicate this in your registration and I will send you an address. Likewise, please let me know if you will need an invoice.

We hope to see you all in October as we bring high school tournaments back to UVA!

The field is now closed.
Registered teams:

Blacksburg
Cave Spring (2)
Charlottesville
Chattahoochee
Christiansburg
Cosby (2)
Dorman (2)
Freeman
Howard
Maggie Walker (2)
Monticello
New Kent (2)
Rappahannock
Robinson
Thomas Jefferson (2)

Buzzers:

Blacksburg (3)
Cave Spring (2)
Charlottesville
Chattahoochee (2)
Christiansburg
Cosby
Dorman (2)
Howard (2)
Monticello
New Kent (2)
Rappahannock
Robinson
Thomas Jefferson

[Eric Huff]

Dorman will be there with two teams. We're looking forward to it!

[The Laughing Cavalier]

Dorman will be there with two teams. We're looking forward to it!

Thanks, Mr. Huff! Could you send me an "official" registration email and include whether you qualify for any discounts? The travel one's a bit obvious, but please let us know if you'll be bringing any buzzers or staffers. See you in October!

[RountreeCHS]

Sarah,

Chattahoochee will be there with one team and one buzzer. I will send an official registration form shortly. Thanks!

[The Laughing Cavalier]

Good news! We've been approved for a 15th room for this tournament, giving us a friendlier field cap of 30 teams.

Also, Mr. Rountree, and anyone else besides Dorman who would like to register for this tournament, please remember that I need an email at sea2fj at virginia dot edu to officially register your team. I'll hopefully be able to send out an invitation email within the next week as well, for those who don't check hsqb regularly. Thanks!

[The Laughing Cavalier]

With a little over a month to go before this tournament, let's get back on the first page of announcements.

The meeting room for this tournament will be New Cabell Hall 337. Also, with 9 teams signed up, we still have space for 21 more! I hope to see you in October.

[The Laughing Cavalier]

With about two and a half weeks to go, we still only have 9 teams signed up for this tournament. If you'd like to come, I'd really appreciate at least a tentative registration soon, so I can get an idea of how much staff we'll need. Thanks!

[Howard]

I'd like to bring a team, Sarah, but I don't know whether we'll have enough students to do it. I'm still working on good answers for the Fall Novice on the 22nd. I'll certainly repost/e-mail if we can make this work.

[The Laughing Cavalier]

I'd like to bring a team, Sarah, but I don't know whether we'll have enough students to do it. I'm still working on good answers for the Fall Novice on the 22nd. I'll certainly repost/e-mail if we can make this work.

Thanks, Mr. Gilbert!

[The Laughing Cavalier]

I'm pleased to announce that this tournament has been platinum certified by PACE, so the top 25% of the field will qualify for the NSC. With 15 teams registered, we still have plenty of room for more!

[Howard]

I'd like to bring a team, Sarah, but I don't know whether we'll have enough students to do it. I'm still working on good answers for the Fall Novice on the 22nd. I'll certainly repost/e-mail if we can make this work.

I've got two confirmed and several more reporting probable. At this point, I don't foresee a situation where we won't have a team, so go ahead and put us down for one team, two buzzers, one moderator. E-mail to come shortly.

[The Laughing Cavalier]

I'd like to bring a team, Sarah, but I don't know whether we'll have enough students to do it. I'm still working on good answers for the Fall Novice on the 22nd. I'll certainly repost/e-mail if we can make this work.

I've got two confirmed and several more reporting probable. At this point, I don't foresee a situation where we won't have a team, so go ahead and put us down for one team, two buzzers, one moderator. E-mail to come shortly.

Glad to hear it, Mr. Gilbert. Also, for anyone else out there still interested but unregistered, we've got plenty of room left for more teams and I'd love to hear from you.

[The Laughing Cavalier]

All registered teams should've gotten an email from me last night. If you haven't, please contact me at sea2fj at virginia dot edu.

[The Laughing Cavalier]

Stats through round 6 are up.

[Smuttynose Island]

We are about to enter a non-advantaged finals between Dorman A and Hothem/Hariharan A (TJ A), with the third place game between Christianburg and Maggie Walker A.

[sir negsalot]

who won this?

[Smuttynose Island]

who won this?

Dormant A defeated TJ A in a one game final.

[BlueDevil95]

I hope everyone enjoyed the tournament, and I hope the questions were to everyone's liking. Please keep in mind that this tournament will be mirrored in the future, so if anyone has any specific comments/questions, then please email me at mostafa0104 AT gmail DOT com.

Thanks!

[The Laughing Cavalier]

So, my phone died and I couldn't post brief results on the way to dinner as I'd hoped to. Sorry! As Daniel said, Dorman A defeated "Hothem/Hariharan High A" in the final. The other three teams who have qualified for the PACE NSC are, respectively, Christiansburg, Maggie Walker A, and Chattahoochee.

I posted full prelim results here before I left to eat.

As promised, the crossover games are now posted here.

Thanks so much to everyone for braving the (at least threatened) weather and coming out today. I really enjoyed the chance to bring the Cav Classic back, and I'm hoping we can continue the tradition of this being an annual event. Thanks also to Mr. Powers of Cave Spring, Dave Porter and George Berry of Freeman, and Matt Weiner and Sean Smiley of VCU for helping us staff this event. I hope everyone had a good time, and thanks again to everyone for coming!

[The Laughing Cavalier]

Ok, the placement games have been posted at the link above, but I can't get the stat report to accurately reflect final standing because of the crossovers, so here's a list:

1. Dorman A
2. Hothem/Hariharan High A
3. Christiansburg
4. Maggie Walker A
5. Chattahoochee
6. Blacksburg
7. Dorman B
8. Robinson
9. Cave Spring A
10. Hothem/Hariharan High B
11. New Kent A
12. Maggie Walker B
13. Cave Spring B
14. Charlottesville
15. Monticello
16. Cosby A
17. Freeman
18. Cosby B
19. Howard
20. New Kent B

[RountreeCHS]

I will reserve discussion of the questions since there are several iterations of this set still to be played, but overall I thought they were above average, especially for a first effort from Norcross.

As far as the tournament goes, we were pleased to be able to play 11 games and still be finished by 5pm. I congratulate Sarah and her crew for running a fine tournament. I am also thankful that the "error" in tie-breaking was caught before the crossover games began.

Perhaps this is better for a separate thread on tournament formats, but our only real complaint was that the initial brackets appear to have been very unbalanced (especially among the top teams). Let me say upfront that Dorman was clearly the class of the field; they dominated their division and the winner of the other division (TJ A) in the Championship, so I am not taking anything away from them. However, even a cursory glance at the stats shows that the top half of the Lovelace division was considerably stronger than the top half of the Dove division (PPB, PPG, Powers, etc.).

This was further reinforced in the crossover games where, other than the Championship, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place teams from the Lovelace division destroyed the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place teams from the Dove division. The average margin of victory in those games was over 300 points. I am not really sure how this happened. Certainly, this being a fairly early tournament in the year contributed to a dearth of stats available to better anticipate the overall strength of the field. Perhaps MLW A, Blacksburg, TJ B, and Robinson were overrated? Perhaps Christiansburg, Chattahoochee, Dorman B, and Cave Spring were underrated? Again, I don't know why the divisions were unbalanced, but they were.

So, my "theory" questions are these:
1. How can TDs prevent creating uneven divisions, especially at a fairly early event?
2. Should a different initial tournament format have been used at this event? If so, what are the community's recommendations so that other TDs can learn about them?
3. Should a different playoff format have been used at this event to allow more teams the chance to move up in the final standings? If so, what are the community's recommendations so that other TDs can learn about them?

[dtaylor4]

I will reserve discussion of the questions since there are several iterations of this set still to be played, but overall I thought they were above average, especially for a first effort from Norcross.

As far as the tournament goes, we were pleased to be able to play 11 games and still be finished by 5pm. I congratulate Sarah and her crew for running a fine tournament. I am also thankful that the "error" in tie-breaking was caught before the crossover games began.

Perhaps this is better for a separate thread on tournament formats, but our only real complaint was that the initial brackets appear to have been very unbalanced (especially among the top teams). Let me say upfront that Dorman was clearly the class of the field; they dominated their division and the winner of the other division (TJ A) in the Championship, so I am not taking anything away from them. However, even a cursory glance at the stats shows that the top half of the Lovelace division was considerably stronger than the top half of the Dove division (PPB, PPG, Powers, etc.).

This was further reinforced in the crossover games where, other than the Championship, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place teams from the Lovelace division destroyed the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place teams from the Dove division. The average margin of victory in those games was over 300 points. I am not really sure how this happened. Certainly, this being a fairly early tournament in the year contributed to a dearth of stats available to better anticipate the overall strength of the field. Perhaps MLW A, Blacksburg, TJ B, and Robinson were overrated? Perhaps Christiansburg, Chattahoochee, Dorman B, and Cave Spring were underrated? Again, I don't know why the divisions were unbalanced, but they were.

So, my "theory" questions are these:
1. How can TDs prevent creating uneven divisions, especially at a fairly early event?
2. Should a different initial tournament format have been used at this event? If so, what are the community's recommendations so that other TDs can learn about them?
3. Should a different playoff format have been used at this event to allow more teams the chance to move up in the final standings? If so, what are the community's recommendations so that other TDs can learn about them?

1) The best bet is for teams to communicate who they have lost to graduation/bumped up from the prior year.
2) With 20 teams, it's difficult to come up with a better format. The only thing I could think of off the top of my head is 4/4 cross-over, while the 9/10 teams from each bracket do a full RR. However, this adds two more rounds to an already long tournament, and I do not know if there were enough packs in the set to do this.

[RountreeCHS]

2) With 20 teams, it's difficult to come up with a better format. The only thing I could think of off the top of my head is 4/4 cross-over, while the 9/10 teams from each bracket do a full RR. However, this adds two more rounds to an already long tournament, and I do not know if there were enough packs in the set to do this.

That is what I suspected too. There were 12 packets total, and most teams heard 10 of them at the tournament. With 12 packets available instead of 15 (now 14) available with an NAQT set (for example), there was some limitation of the different kinds of formats available. I also thought about a larger number of crossovers, but I think 3/3 would have been the maximum with the 12 packets available. Not a bad idea though.

Any other ideas/suggestions?

[Eric Huff]

20 is just a weird number to deal with. I've always been a fan of fewer preliminary matches and more "playoff" matches. Perhaps 4 preliminary brackets of 5 (round robin with a crossover match) followed by another 4 brackets of five (RR with crossover:top 10 in brackets A & B/bottom 10 in brackets C & D) and a final? That's ten matches plus final. It's a bit of an odd solution, that is not without its drawbacks, but it would allow more matches against similar-strength opponents.

[The Laughing Cavalier]

Yeah, I really wasn't a fan of using only two brackets myself, but it was all I could come up with given the packet limitations that I thought wouldn't be horribly confusing to people. We lost team 21 pretty late because of the weather and unfortunately wound up with a yet more awkward number. I really didn't like the idea of having crossover games that would have to not count in order to keep brackets of common opponents, and 5 brackets of 4 would've required rebracketing twice. I also in theory could've run a card system to account for the lack of data, but those don't work optimally with numbers that aren't powers of 2 and take a lot of effort to prepare, so I wasn't willing to risk choosing to use one and then losing teams to weather the morning of the tournament. I hope my guesswork wasn't deleterious to anyone's experience; it just seemed like the best thing to do given the packet constraints.

Also, Mr. Rountree, thanks for pointing out the discrepancy between what I wrote on the schedules and what I meant to write on the schedule (and thus had in my head) re:tiebreakers. Thanks also to MW, Blacksburg, and Christiansburg for their cooperation as we fixed that.

[mithokie]

A possible alternative format for a 20 team tournament on 12 packets with little information for seeding.

AM: Rounds 1-4

Randomly seeded teams playing a 4 round card system as described below, with A and B teams from the same school separated as discussed.

http://www.charterschool.org/clubs/acad ... sintro.php

Early Lunch --> Rebracket as follows:
Rank teams first by W-L, then PPB from AM rounds
Group as follows,
Group A: 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12
Group B: 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11
Group C: 13-20

Groups A and B play a 5 round round robin with records reset to 0-0 with packets 5-9. Group C plays a 7 round round robin with packets 5-11.

Packets 10 and possibly 11 are used to play off ties for 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in groups A and B. Packet 11 or 12 is used to play cross-bracket matches; (A1 vs. B1), (A2 vs. B2), etc...

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

The difficulty in seeding tournaments early in the season is that there is a lack of information about the strength of teams. Even assuming you have perfect information about who is returning and their performances the previous season, it's virtually impossible for TDs to know how to for account things like subject coverage, summer improvement, and shadow effects when seeding.

I would advise against anything involving random seeding under any circumstances. Blindly following random seeding can result in top teams facing each other in the prelims and unbalanced schedules. I think it's preferable to have schedules be unbalanced out of an error on the TD's part than to let it go to random chance and almost assure this would happen.

Ideally, a good format for an early tournament like the Cav Classic would rely less on preliminary games and more on playoff games. 20 teams is a difficult number to work with to achieve this goal. Adding a chimera team would give you 3 prelim groups of 7 and then could fold into groups of 6 plus a group of 2. This would take 12 packets, though, so for this event it's not viable. 4 groups of 5 going into 5 groups of 4 might be the best option here.

As for the actual seeding - I'm making assumptions for this scenario - if I were to tell you that I was putting these two groups of three teams as the top three seeds with no results to go next to their names, would you find it ridiculous?

Dorman A, Maggie Walker A, TJ B
vs.
TJ A, Dorman B, Chattahoochee

I can't imagine that it would pop too many eyeballs.

Part of the "problem" is that I would consider Christiansburg a surprise team this year. Perhaps Cave Spring was seen as the 7th team in the bracketing?

Seeding would be particularly muddled by the fact that Dorman and Maggie Walker graduated a lot of talent this past year, with TJ and Chattahoochee having key losses as well.

I guess my point is this: these things are going to happen any time you have a tournament in October. TDs do their best to make everything as fair as possible. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work out as well as everyone hopes. The results of this tournament can be used to determine the seeding of these teams for the next event, and hopefully give that tourney a leg up in this situation.

[mithokie]

Fred,

I see your point about random seeding, and agree with you. I was going with the hypothetical idea that we didn't know the relative strength of the teams heading in, so we would place them randomly. Obviously, we all have a pretty good idea that Thomas Jefferson, Dorman, and Maggie Walker are going to have solid teams coming into a tournament. Random seeding is not necessary to my proposal, as even with power matching you can arrange initial card numbers so that expected top teams do not meet in the first few rounds.

I would like to see other feedback on my idea. I think the power matching gives a relatively quick way for the surprise stronger teams to percolate to the top without eliminating too many teams right off the bat. In 4 matches I am eliminating only the bottom 8 teams from contention form the title (They would all have 2 or more losses), and then we have a real basis from which we construct the balanced pools of 6 teams for playoff contention. Even an unlucky but good team that got saddled with 2 losses would still be in the top 12 based on their presumably higher bonus conversion rate.

After those 4 early matches, the tournament would proceed with much more balanced brackets than we got at this year's Cavalier Classic. If the number one goal is to make sure that the top N teams (that get nationals qualification) are identified, then I think that my proposal would have better chance of correctly identifying the top N teams than the 2 pools of 10 teams method that is highly susceptible to problems with unbalanced brackets.