The Quizbowl Resource Center

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Will there be Pop Culture questions at this tournament? And if so, who will be editing them (and/or the CE and geography)?

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I think this tournament did a great job of hitting a really reasonable difficulty for the regionals difficulty slot, and I hope future regs level tournaments trend towards this difficulty. There were a lot of fun ideas that you can't pull off at easier difficulties, while not being punishing at all ...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

My main concern with the set involved its answerlines, many of which were long and complex but did not address answers that a knowledgeable player might reasonably give. Often the answerline listed a lot of synonyms & related terms to the main answer, but didn't take the important step of consi...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Congratulations to UNC A, who took home both the overall title and the UG title at this tournament, as well as Virginia A, who won the DII title! The top individual scorers were: Ashish Subramanian (DII) - 67.14 Mark Bailey (DII) - 58.57 Nathan Nguyen (UG) - 52.86 Vincent Du (UG) - 50.00 Nitin Rao (...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

All teams should be receiving a logistics email shortly - if you don't have one, please contact me and let me know!

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Two questions: (1) who do we make our check out to? (2) what address do we use to mail the check? If you're planning on paying with check ahead of time, please send me an email; the checks will probably have to go to my personal address, which I don't want to give out publically on the forums. Othe...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I am pleased to announce that the Lower Midatlantic site of 2020 ACF Winter will be held at UMD on Saturday, November 7, 2020. The tournament will take place virtually on Discord. The opening meeting will begin at 9:30 and gameplay will begin at 10. I, Vishwa Shanmugam, will be the tournament direct...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

This tournament really drove home several problems with holding tournaments online. During the tournament, Chase Chiang of Princeton was caught cheating (I have no idea why the final stats don't contain some indication that this occurred). From what I've heard, addressing the cheating situation was...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

well here I thought the Battle City analogy went: Chicago A - Kaiba (obvious analogy: big, intimidating, rich, doesn't need a millennium item to win tournaments because who needs millennium items when you've been playing for a long time and have lots of money to throw at things) Illinois A - Yugi (...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

If we are to treat cheating at online tournaments as an existential threat to the quizbowl community, it's really not acceptable to refer to it by a cutesy euphemism. I think in this case "biking" is useful because it refers to a very specific form of cheating, and in this case one that i...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Regarding what Boyd and French are saying: As I mentioned on the Discord, three parties DM'd me after I made this post saying they found the parties in question suspicious. This, along with the other parties who talked to me, suggests A LOT of rumormongering, backchannel accusations, were already b...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

(to be clear, this is not posted on behalf of the TO editors or anything - these are just my views) One of the parties involved is suspected of having a long history of cheating on Internet packets, and it’s an “open secret” they’re a Googler for Internet packets. I'm very confused as to how this is...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Frankly I think you'd get very, very few sign ups for anything resembling this idea, including from my team. The whole point of nationals is to play against other people in real time. Your suggested format would allow for none of that. Also with regards to national organizations saving their sets f...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Let's not forget that high school nationals (PACE NSC and HSNCT) are able to distinguish between top teams while still allowing the best teams to regularly score above 20 ppb. It's ludicrous to suggest that college nationals cannot have a difficulty that allows for just as many top college teams to...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

We hope everyone enjoyed the set - thank you for attending! There's now a discussion group for the set - you can join by going to user control panel, then usergroups, and joining "2020 Terrapin Open Discussion."

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Thank you to everyone who came out and played this tournament! There's now a discussion group for the set - you can join by going to user control panel, then usergroups, and joining "2020 Terrapin Open Discussion."

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

A bit belated, but this tournament was excellently run and extremely fun to attend - thank you so much for hosting! The very smooth rounds + timing made this tournament much less exhausting than I'd have anticipated, especially for a longer than standard set.

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Could we have a field update please? (if teams have signed up already) ty!

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

The distribution of 2020 NASAT is below. Notable changes from previous years include the reduction of chemistry and math, and the notable increase in world literature (with a corresponding reduction in American and British literature) Literature: 4/4 1/1 American 1/1 British 1/1 Euro 1/1 World + Cla...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

(This is more of a concrete response than I wanted the tone of the original post to be, so I split this off here) I think one of the better answers to the question is that quizbowl sets should really encourage diverse writing casts, because that minimizes a lot of the above issues. Sets where entire...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I guess I want this to be a discussion post about the boundaries between facts/clues/jokes you tell your friends and clues you use in tournaments. I've been kinda struggling with this idea a lot, and its always struck me how little seems generally accepted. There are some very broad guidelines of co...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I'm decent at post-1900 lit/vfa, know a tiny of bit of those subjects from before then, and I "know" "science" (besides chem)

also I have gummy bears, and I say nice buzz and fist bump people, even if they were converting a neg at the giveaway

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Is there an update on when this set will be ready? I'd love to play it whenever it happens!

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Hey all, After talking to some people, I've decided to change the deadline for editor applications to one week from now, December 8th. Additionally, since a lot of people had problems offering sample questions due to this being a busy writing season, I'm going to make sample questions (for editor po...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Just a reminder - if you're interested in editing for this set please get an application in by the end of the day this Sunday, December 1st. If this date is problematic for you, please reach out and let me know when you can get something in by. If you're interested in applying to write, feel free to...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I'm cross posting this here, but if you're still interested in editing or writing please check out the call for writers here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23487

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Hello! Since I'll be head editing this year's NASAT, I wanted to put out a post for anyone interested in writing or editing for the 2020 IQBT NASAT set. Note that to be eligible to write, you must have graduated high school. If you are planning on coaching or organizing a main site NASAT team, you s...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I felt the ouroboros clue in the aromatic tossup could have done with a disclaimer that the answer was not "cyclic" - this was a neg in my room despite seeming like a pretty natural answer.

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Meet up in 2325 asap - ideally we'll start soonish

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Given 8 signups, half of which are tentative, I'll place this as a shootout around half an hour after Scattergories wraps up - there are only 6 packets so I'm not anticipating this ending ridiculously late.

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Hey all, This post is an announcement for a CO mirror of CANONEXPANSION , a fairly difficult science side event that I'll be running (you can find a better description of the set's difficulty in the announcement. ) The set is free to play. Depending on people's availability, I think this would be be...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Some preliminary notes on logistics, due to the unusual time slot we’re occupying- We’re planning on meeting Sunday night at either 9 pm or a few minutes after finals ends, whichever is later. We’ll quickly go over the schedule and the rooms, make sure everyone is present, and get to starting asap -...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

If you like to play quizbowl or move the scientific needle, please sign up for the QANTA League 1 event next month. You can register by logging into your Qblitz account. Will this event also use questions used at the in-person QANTA League mirror, or will these questions be fresh for participants o...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Many players would agree that pure mathematical rankings can’t tell the full story about any given team's strengths and weaknesses. Each team has a unique story and personal character which cannot be gleaned off of a mere look at a stats page. This is why we believe player-submitted polls are crucia...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Thank you all for your patience! Without further ado the results of the poll: 1. Uni Lab A - 153 High: 1 Low: 4 (11 first votes) 2. Auburn - 137 High: 1 Low: 4 (2 first place votes) 3. Stevenson A - 136 High: 1 Low: 4 (3 first place votes) 4. IMSA - 117 High: 2 Low: 5 5. OPRF - 82 High: 5 Low: 8 6. ...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Just 5 days left to submit a ballot--make sure to get them in! Voter turnout is looking solid right now but could always be better.

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

On behalf of the Illinois Quizbowl discord, I, Vishwa Shanmugam, am pleased to announce the 2018-19 ILQB midseason poll. While anyone can submit a ballot, we will ask that you demonstrate your knowledge of the circuit by justifying your ranking. In your ballot, we will ask you to rank any ten teams ...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Some random stuff that I remember: -I think the Bocaccio bonus part in Editors (6?) claimed that the Decameron was about 5 men and 5 women, escaping a flood -I've heard multiple people negged Yugoslavia with Croatia on the clue about the ustase since those were specific to Croatia -I think labors of...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Overall, I thought this set was fun - there was a good mix of fun qs on core content and some interesting out there ideas. I generally appreciated the answerline selection and thought there were a lot of well executed ideas. One of my biggest problems with the set was the subdistributing. In the 13 ...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

What criteria was used here? I see that Arjun Nageswaran has put up scores of 42.50, 4.38, 29.17, 19.51, 6.00, 66.67, and 18.42 PPG at tournaments this season. His two best performances were when he was playing on teams where he was essentially playing by himself. While the 66.67 at PACE NSC is (no...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I hope people don't forget Geoffrey Chen in this poll, because "best player" really shouldn't just mean "flashy 100 point generalist" but should also encompass extremely deadly specialists like Geoffrey. Geoff was: -Probably one of the highest power% players on regular season que...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Could I see the tossup on "Special Relativity" from round 27? Also, if/when conversion stats go up would I be able to see conversion stats on the wave theory tossup (round 10) and Portugal (lit tossup from Round 26?) Also also, am I allowed to ask what the distribution ended up being in ro...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

The initial allegations and the subsequent blog posts in this thread were perhaps the only things I have ever read that have made me feel physically sick. I can't imagine anyone wanting to associate themselves with someone who says those sorts of awful things publicly, and as everyone else has said,...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I'm heading to the University of Maryland, almost certainly playing as well!

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I don't think I see prison bowl main site on here (http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/4901/)

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I really really enjoyed this set, and I thought there were a lot of cool tossup ideas and clues (I really really enjoyed the races in myth tu and the electron transfer tus, along with numerous others) I had a couple comments on some stuff: -The pronoun in the above superfluids tossup being singular ...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Just noting, I think Alex Schmidt (LVA) is a really really big miss after being a first team member last year and staying roughly on par this year. I'm not sure how the teams weight generalists vs. specialists, but I also think Geoffrey Chen (Wayzata) is worth looking at, because he has had really g...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

Any predictions before nationals? (Honestly, this is more me trying to get to know the landscape of the region this year after having been absent for so long) Hunter is probably a clear favorite in the area, and I don't forsee that changing too much. After that, I think that Lehigh, High Tech, and ...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

I'm a big fan of powers per game as a base statistic. Agreed; I find power percentage when used in context is also helpful to distinguish how good specialists are (A player with something like 50/10 probably has really really deep lockdown knowledge in one field, which you can't necessarily say for...

John Quincy Adams's Alligator

As a science (mostly physics and math) player, Numberphile, Computerphile, SixtySymbols, and PBS Space Time are some of my personal favorites. I've also heard good things about PBS Eons and PBS Infinite Series, though I haven't watched them myself. Seconding PBS Infinite Series, it's really fun and...

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