The Quizbowl Resource Center

I posted this in the Collegiate Discussion section about how to stay focused during long tournaments like ACF Nats. There's really no secret shortcut to building stamina. It's more useful to just keep a healthier lifestyle, which would help with your schoolwork as well. My advice would be: 1. Get su...

This may have been posted before, but this thought kind of floated in my mind while playing Fall Open yesterday. How did/do you guys get through 18 rounds of 14+ rounds of ACF Nationals/ICT without becoming extremely exhausted and losing focus in important games? Even after playing ~8 or 9 rounds o...

I edited physics. Initial playtesting suggested the tossups were too easy, so for most of them, I removed a sentence of easy clues and put in a tough opening sentence. Hopefully, people found the first half of the tossups sufficiently challenging. There was indeed a lot of applied stuff- we had many...

Sure- feel free to repost. Or, once we figure out the differences, it should be easy enough to modify this post. Thanks for pointing out that in places with underdeveloped circuits, there might not be more than 2-3 tournaments. In that case, coaches should definitely make it to all of them. For stud...

I’ve taken a job that prevents me from coaching this year, but I thought this might be useful to new (and even some experienced) teams, especially ones with an inexperienced coach. I feel like this post is still a bit disorganized, but I just wanted to put it up before the HS season starts. My Backg...

I recently got permission from Matt Weiner to post the files to his excellent "Studying for Quizbowl" presentation. He intended it as a resource for new college teams and new coaches, and made it nearly plug-and-play by providing slides as well as a Word file to read from while showing the Powerpoin...

That's completely absurd. I think it's fair to say he's the best specialist in hsqb. Seriously. I think Geoffrey's complete absence from any of the teams was arguably the biggest mistake with the All-World selections this year. I'd put it slightly ahead of leaving Grant Li off any of the teams. I t...

Once Sam mentioned it, I do think that I should've included a prompt on "sphere-packing problem" even if I mention "this statement"- it just didn't occur to me that people would buzz with that. If I had to re-edit, I would've rephrased it to say Toth developed a method to try to prove this statement...

I edited the math submissions and wrote the following questions: TUs on the core, sigma algebra, and Grothendieck. I had one other tossup that I don’t think has been posted yet, but has possibly been spoiled for next year and might get posted. I’ll talk about that one if Andrew clears it, since I th...

I was looking at the state tournament schedule at http://www.ihsa.org/data/scores/scb28r16.htm and was wondering if anyone knew how IHSA splits teams into pools. Is it seeded, random draw, geographic, or what?

Assuming the Internet access in here holds up, it'll be here: http://hsquizbowl.org/blog/

Cheynem wrote:I'm super sick so my packet will be late or MIA.

Mike, we should just get our packets done in time for NSC. We can do this again and see how well the young'uns do on stuff that came out about the time they were born.

Does anybody have any idea what is going to happen with the blog or the link to it? Well, assuming that the Internet at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare isn't completely hosed, and that a couple things that seem to be wonky with Wordpress get fixed, I'll be putting live updates from ICT's afternoon top bra...

I'm in for 50 cents an hour, with a cap of $50. Fred, make sure to find me at one of the nationals this year.

What seems more fair would be to use advantaged-final-style playoffs for these cross-tier matches. Teams in the top tier should still be afforded some advantage by virtue of doing better in the preliminary rounds. I think that teams in the top tier were already afforded an advantage- they had the a...

Mods- I’m not sure whether this should be here or in Theory, but since there’s only one tournament affected, I put it here. Please move if necessary. A quick summary of the problem: We currently have a format in which there are 12 preliminary pools of 8 teams to start. These sort into four playoff t...

The version that was used at HSNCT is as follows: The saponification of animal fats to form soaps is an example of this class of reaction. For 10 points each-- A. In what class of reactions does water break apart a chemical bond? answer: hydrolysis or hydrolytic reaction (accept hydrolyzing or hydr...

Can you post the condensation reaction bonus from the final game? Thanks.

Well the last one was the least important, anyway. For the first two: I am nigh-literally floored that either of those things were floated as ideas, much less BOTH, much less either happened, much less BOTH happened. There is no universe in which either of those are good ideas. Most importantly (no...

TJ would like to claim Sunday, 12/13 as the date for a middle school tournament on NAQT MS-15.

TJ would like to claim 2/14 for hosting a mirror of HFT.

Madden's Clock Theory So, here's a controversial notion, but one that I think has some statistical validity to it. I posit that not only towards the end of the game, but at any point, where a team takes a lead, they should then kill the clock as much as possible on bonuses (and if possible, even by...

Hey, this is Dennis from the UVA team. I edited the "other science" and welcome feedback and suggestions about those questions. In general, my edits to math tossups were based on the following ideas: If the answer is a theorem, add early clues about methods of proving that theorem. If the answer is ...