The Quizbowl Resource Center

I edited the classical music for this set. I'd like to talk a little bit about my approach to writing this category, analyze some of the recently posted advanced stats , and invite you all to share your thoughts--I've heard from some of you in the discussion Discord, but like Aum I would like to ...

Opus 9 is now live on the QBReader website! We've made a small change to the distribution where 1 "ce/geo/oac" question has been replaced with pop culture, and the announcement post has been edited to reflect this.

Opus 8 of Geoword is now live on the QBReader website!

It looks like nobody else is going to shill my beloved former teammates at Columbia, so I'll do it myself: Cooper Roh should absolutely be in the top 20 of your ballot (I'm voting him 16th) as the lead scorer on a Columbia team that finished in the top 5 at both nationals. He tied for the fourth ...

Richard mysteriously neglected to mention that he had by far the most t1/t3 music buzzes (6/8) at ACF Nationals. I could likewise understand any permutation of him, Karan, and Chris as the top 3, but I'm putting Richard first because of his unparalleled depth and unquantifiable dawg factor. I'll ...

Is there anyone I can PM about a protest? (don't want to say what the protest is here because I don't know if the set content is cleared or not.) Hi Will, sorry for taking a while to respond as we were quite busy this weekend. We have to review and accept/reject all protests manually, so if we're ...

I am excited to announce Geoword: the Second Folio , a new series of biweekly Geoword games available to play on the QBReader website. The writing team consists of myself, Andrew Zeng, Jason Hong, Mitch McCullar, Owen Mimno, and Rosa Xia. The per-packet distribution, the same as from the First Folio ...

One of my playoff games at last year's ACF Nationals featured a "should have been prompted" protest that ended up mattering. I will detail what happened in order to show why I don't think "should have been prompted" protests should be entirely removed. 14. Description acceptable. This process ends ...

I've been thinking about making a post on the 90/50/10 bonus difficulty structure for a while, and recent discussion in the Discord has inspired me to collect some thoughts. To me, the first and most obvious fact about bonus difficulty is that quizbowl does not generally meet the 90/50/10 standard ...

The phrase "red apple" immediately causes something like 2 to pop into my head, but I can visualize 1 with a small amount of effort, so that's what I voted for. I do have a good memory for clues, but I don't think this is related. I'm basically never visualizing anything when playing quizbowl and ...

As someone who doesn't speak any tonal language, I don't find that moderators giving words the appropriate tones impedes my comprehension. In my experience, I'm basically just "tone-deaf" and don't process the tones as meaningful. However, as Tejas brings up, there are sounds in many languages that ...

For example, if I understand the distribution correctly, ARGOS had Earth Science in 100% of packets whereas ACF Regionals 2025 had Earth Science in 31.25% of packets. In ARGOS, the 0.5/0.5 was allotted to the entirety of earth science, astronomy, and engineering; they did not receive 0.5/0.5 each ...

Most culturally relevant art doesn't fall within the confines of "western classical music, European and American painters/sculptors/architects, and jazz records and movies that are at least 40 years old," but that's the vast majority of the quizbowl art canon. What are some examples of "culturally ...

To add my voice to the choir as someone who started playing in 2022, I also prefer to play as many games as possible. Even in the northeast where travel is easy and fast, tournaments are typically all-day events so I don't see a benefit to shaving off an hour or two.

Most people on this forum already know that the best way to speed up a game is to cut out the chit-chat. However, I'd like to emphasize that clarity should still be prioritized over speed: players need to be able to hear the questions and it's especially important to cater to the needs of people ...

Are there plans for an online mirror of this set? I greatly enjoyed playing one last year.

Sorry for the delay in announcing this, but we will be running a mirror of Untitled Film Set in the evening after the main event. A signup sheet can be found here.

I’d like to echo all the thanks to the wonderful staffers, writers, and editors who made this tournament possible. Playing my first CO was a humbling, thrilling, and uniquely fulfilling experience and I’m thankful to have been exposed to so many interesting new ideas. This tournament used some non ...

I am pleased to announce that Columbia Quiz Bowl will be hosting a mirror of 2024 NASAT on August 3rd, 2024. The tournament will be held at Columbia University in Pupin Hall and directed by myself, Forrest Weintraub. Rules: This tournament will be using ACF’s gameplay rules, and the set is not p ...

Richard Niu has rightfully gotten a lot of attention in this thread, but not enough of it has been given to the fact that he scored 50 ppg in the prelims of ACF Nationals while being teammates with Raymond, Nathan, and Jacky. Rank him first in music, second in science, top 5 in literature, and top ...

Thanks to everyone involved with the production of ACF Nationals this year! I had a great time playing the set and especially appreciated the music and philosophy questions. I have some general comments with regards to difficulty and vibes: --Seconding Matt Jackson's impression that this nationals ...

It has been an incredible privilege to be able to play for Columbia alongside my teammates. Geoffrey , Cooper , and Moses are all unbelievably good at quizbowl but are also incredibly wholesome presences and wonderful friends both inside and outside of the game. I'm thankful for Moses' calming ...

The deadline to sign up for this tournament is the end of the day tomorrow. If at all possible, we would appreciate 1 to 3 more signups before then. Interested teams can use this form to sign up.

Thanks to everyone who worked on ARCADIA for making this set a very enjoyable experience! In general, I thought this set a good job of covering canonical topics in fresh ways while still keeping them accessible. I'll list my general impressions of the set here--I have basically zero specific ...

Sorry for the last-minute change, but due to some scheduling issues I will now be reading this at 6 PM Eastern.

I have just finished writing one packet of 20 open-level tossups on early music, very roughly defined as music from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and early Baroque period. The tossups are powermarked with 20/10/0 scoring. I plan on reading this packet in the main quizbowl discord this Sunday (2/18 ...

The turbulence tossup was in astronomy and laminar in physics — agreed it’s not ideal answerline-wise, but I think they explored different enough topics that it hopefully wasn’t too jarring. Reading back, I think the wording of the adaptive optics clue isn’t clear enough to rule out “refraction,” so ...

I am pleased to announce that Columbia Quiz Bowl will be hosting a mirror of Booster Shot on February 24, 2024 . The tournament will be held at Columbia University in Hamilton Hall and directed by myself, Forrest Weintraub. Gameplay will begin at 9:00 am following an opening meeting at 8:45 am ...

Thanks to everyone who helped make ACF Winter an absolute blast to play. I really appreciated this set's willingness to stick to well-known clues about easily convertible answerlines--it seems to have made the tournament experience not as punishing as normal for new teams while still providing fresh ...

The Geoword jazz special is now available to play! Tossups are 6-7 lines in length and are of similar difficulty to JORDU.

Based on the results of the poll, I'll be holding this on Monday, August 14 at 10 pm Eastern. If not everyone is able to make it, I am open to reading it again on Thursday, since it has the second most votes.

I've written 20 superpowermarked tossups on Ravel to create the Musical Assemblage Utilizing Ravel's Illuminating Compositions Exclusively. There will be difficulty, and tossups will average around 8 lines in length. I plan on reading this packet on the Discord sometime next week and have attached a ...

The first thing I want to do is apologize for quoting Janice Raymond directly–you are correct that there is absolutely no reason to include that in a tossup and the same information could have been conveyed without doing so (as the CMST tossup essentially did). It was careless of me not to think a ...