2022 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 5)

[krollo]

This is the official announcement for 2022 ACF Winter, which will be held on November 5th, 2022. Like last year’s set, this set will target a difficulty halfway between ACF Fall and ACF Regionals. The tournament will be head edited by me, Joseph Krol. The subject editors will be:

Eric Mukherjee – Biology
Justin Zhang – Chemistry
Joseph Krol – Physics, Other Science, Current Events
Henry Goff – British Literature, American Literature, Popular Culture
Eve Fleisig – Visual Fine Arts, Auditory Fine Arts, European Literature
Athena Kern – World Literature, Religion, Social Science
Ani Perumalla – Other Fine Arts, Geography, General Knowledge
Hari Parameswaran – American History, European History
Govind Prabhakar – Other History, World History
Ethan Ashbrook – Mythology, Philosophy

REGISTRATION:

The team registration form is available here.

The staff registration form is available here.

The fields for each site are available here.

SITES:

We are looking for hosts in the regions listed in the “Hosts” section below. The host bidding form is here. If you have questions about hosting, please email ACF’s Site Coordinator at [email protected] and CC me at [email protected]. Hosts must abide by ACF’s Hosting Guidelines.

FORMAT:

We hope that ACF Winter can be held in person. However, we acknowledge that some schools remain uncertain about the possibility of allowing large events due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, it is possible that some mirrors of ACF Winter will be held online, and we will work to create the most authentic and engaging quizbowl experience possible under these circumstances. We will continue to post updates as we learn more.

DISTRIBUTION:

The subject distribution is listed at this link. Winter will be using the same distribution as Regionals.

FEES:

Fees and discounts for this tournament are structured as follows:

Base fee per team: $150
Shorthanded discount (teams of 1-2 players): -$75
Buzzer: -$10/functional system
Staffers: -$15 per staffer with functional laptop. Staffers must register with ACF in advance
Travel discount: -$10 per 200 miles traveled one-way
Packet submission discounts: As noted below
New to quizbowl discount: -$100

The new-to-quizbowl discount is for schools that have not sent a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (exclusively Novice tournaments do not count) since September 2021, and have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school.

Host sites will bill teams as soon as possible after the teams register. Teams should pay their host sites by whatever method is convenient for the hosts, who will in turn pay ACF by check, cash, or PayPal.

PACKET SUBMISSION:

Any team with at least two people on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or high school student) prior to September 1, 2021, is required to submit a half-packet, unless it is a high school team attending a high-school-only mirror. Please email [email protected] if you are unsure whether your team is required to submit a half-packet. A team that is not required to submit a packet may submit an optional packet by the no-penalty deadline for a $50 discount.

* For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT SCT (Division I or Division II), NAQT ICT, and typical college-level academic invitationals count as regular collegiate academic tournaments. Pop culture or “hybrid” tournaments, HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT’s Collegiate Novice series sets do not.

Here is the submission schedule.

September 4th, 2022: -$50
September 18th, 2022: -$25
October 2nd, 2022: no penalty
October 16th, 2022: +$25
October 23rd, 2022: +$50

There is an additional $10/day penalty for each day after October 23rd. If teams required to submit a half-packet have not submitted by October 30th, they will be dropped from the tournament, with no exceptions.

If your team is going to submit a half-packet, whether required or not, email [email protected] to request a distribution. All finished packets must be sent to that email before 11:59 Pacific time on the day listed to receive the discount or penalty. Please format the half-packet in .doc or .docx before sending it. The email subject line should list the name of the school, the team number (if applicable), and the words “half-packet.”

Your assigned half-packet may ask for questions from more specific categories within the distribution. For instance, instead of being assigned an “American Literature” tossup, you might be asked to write a question on a 20th-century American poem, or an Economics bonus instead of “Social Science/Philosophy.” This should reduce redundancy in submissions and maximize the number of submitted questions we can use, without being too constraining.

If a team wishes to outsource part of its packet to a player not expected to play on that team (e.g., a student who has graduated), it must first receive approval from the head editors. Non-playing students are welcome and encouraged to help their newer club members write, but it's useful to know the contributors for both credit and logistical reasons.

If multiple teams from one school are submitting packets, they should NOT be aware of each others’ questions.


TIPS AND GUIDELINES:
- Please make sure your questions are harder than questions in ACF Fall and easier than at ACF Regionals. 2019 EFT and 2020 ACF Winter are good difficulty targets. A majority of your tossup answers should conceivably be a tossup answer at ACF Fall.
- Questions should be written in 10-pt Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Although you may submit longer questions, tossups will be capped at seven lines for the tournament. Each bonus part should be a maximum of three lines in length, with the majority being one or two lines long.
- When writing bonuses, aim for the easy parts to be converted by around 90% of teams. The giveaways for tossups should also conceivably be answered by the majority of teams. Answers should generally emphasize playability over creativity; aim for creative and interesting clues with straightforward answerlines.
- Especially if you are submitting for one of the later deadlines, the frequency of topic clashes means that broad common-link questions are unlikely to be used.

More information can be found in ACF’s packet submission guidelines.

HOSTS:
The host sites will be updated below.

Northeast: Yale
Upstate NY: RIT
Upper Mid-Atlantic: Rutgers
Lower Mid-Atlantic: James Madison University
Southeast: Georgia Tech
Florida: University of Central Florida
Great Lakes: Ohio State
Midwest: UIUC at Chicago
North: Minnesota
South Central:
Southern California: USC
Northern California: UC Berkeley
Northwest: UBC
Eastern Canada: Toronto
UK: Oxford

PACKETS RECEIVED:

-$50 deadline:

Harvard A
CWRU A
MIT A
Claremont A
MIT B
UNC A
SIUE A
UIUC A
Cornell A

-$25 deadline:

CWRU B
Oxford B
Virginia A
MIT C
Nebraska A
Virginia B
Durham A
William and Mary A
Florida A
UIUC B
Oxford A

+$0 deadline:

Chicago C
Warwick B
Swarthmore A
Cambridge A
USC A
Haverford A
Purdue A
Purdue B
Purdue C
Warwick A
Sheffield A
Queen's A
McGill A
Georgia B
Bristol A
Caltech A
Florida B
VCU A
VCU B
Cornell B

+$25 deadline:

Berkeley B
Chicago A
CWRU C
Georgia Tech A
Georgia Tech B
Iowa A
Iowa State A
Manchester A
Miami Ohio A
Minnesota A
Minnesota B
Minnesota C
Northwestern A
Princeton A
Virginia Tech A
Waterloo A
Western A
WUSTL A

+$50 deadline:

Brandeis A
Edinburgh A
Liberty A
Georgia Tech D
Georgetown A
West Virginia A
Harvard B
Kenyon A
Berkeley A
Brown A
Gettysburg A
Georgia Tech C

Late packets:
Kentucky A (1 day)
Johns Hopkins A (4 days)
UNF A (5 days)
Chicago B (6 days)
McMaster A (7 days)
Carnegie Mellon A (7 days)
Carnegie Mellon B (7 days)

[krollo]

A reminder that the first packet submission deadline is tomorrow.

[krollo]

I've updated the lists of hosts in the first post - registration forms for those sites will be up in a week or so. We're still looking for hosts in the following regions:

Southeast
Midwest
South Central
California
Northwest
Eastern Canada
UK

If you're interested in hosting a site in any of those regions, please fill out the form linked in the first post. Feel free to contact ACF at the email address given there if you'd like to discuss anything about hosting.

[krollo]

A reminder that the second packet submission deadline is today.

[krollo]

I've added the team registration form and the staffer registration form, as well as a field list spreadsheet, to the main post.

I've also updated the list of hosts in the first post - registration forms for the new sites will be up in a week or so. We're still looking for hosts in the following regions:

Southeast
South Central
California
Northwest
UK

If you're interested in hosting a site in any of those regions, please fill out the form linked in the first post. Feel free to contact ACF at the email address given there if you'd like to discuss anything about hosting.

[Coach Jim]

Is there a contact person at James Madison University? I need to request a W9 for our registration check.

[witta99]

Is there a contact person at James Madison University? I need to request a W9 for our registration check.

Hi Jim, you can reach out to me at [email protected]. Thanks!

[warum]

Does having played in a high school-only mirror of a regular collegiate tournament count for having to submit a packet?