The Quizbowl Resource Center

Stained Diviner

Out of curiosity, what is it about single-elim playoffs that makes them an example of "bad quizbowl?" I wasn't aware that the elimination structure of a tournament was part of the problem with an event/circuit, I just thought it was the questions being overly focused on trash or just plain ...

Stained Diviner

The original post also applies to high school and middle school questions. I think one issue that comes up with Bible questions is whether to classify them as religion or mythology. I think they are obviously religion when they include the scholar practitioner perspective, but I think it is less ...

Stained Diviner

Quizbowl is work-intensive. You need a moderator for every 8 or so participants. Can't people rotate the reader? It depends how it is set up. If you have a bunch of former quizbowlers getting together for an hour or two a week to play some questions like is happening at Epic, then yes. If you are ...

Stained Diviner

It's great that Epic already has this, and hopefully more places will, but what is being proposed here is going to be difficult to pull off for several reasons. * Quizbowl is work-intensive. You need a moderator for every 8 or so participants. You need questions. (The questions already exist and are ...

Stained Diviner

Your questions are pretty good, but I hope that AGQBA regionals are a lot easier than that.

Stained Diviner

Sarah makes some reasonable points, but I am going to push back against them. First of all, it is easy to get some familiarity with the show because it is shown online. Here is a match between three teams that also participate in good quizbowl. Keep in mind that the DC area has an established ...

Stained Diviner

We are now offering an mACF middle school set.

The Solo questions have been used in Iowa and are scheduled to be used in Virginia.

Stained Diviner

Thanks to Soren Gjesfjeld, Reinstein QuizBowl is putting together an mACF set for middle school teams. The questions are in standard mACF format with powers. Tossups are about 300 characters in length, and bonuses are three parts each. The questions are written by Soren, Mike Laudermith, and me. The ...

Stained Diviner

Yes. The difference between one pyramidal event and none is enormous in terms of progress.

Stained Diviner

The people who run Brain Bowl think that Brain Bowl is totally awesome and that changing it in any way or integrating with anything will be harmful. (They are wrong.) See if you can contact somebody affiliated with the quizbowl team at the University of Colorado about running tournaments in Colorado.

Stained Diviner

There are no rules about who can host a tournament. If you can get questions, a facility, teams, moderators, and buzzers, then you can host a tournament. That is often easier said than done. For it to be an automatic NAQT MSNCT qualifier, you need to use NAQT questions.

Stained Diviner

With the new Groger Rankings out we can answer this question more objectively. If you look at the top 300 teams, here are the states by how many teams and a point for each rank. (In the right column, being #1 is 300 points, #2 is 299 points, #3 is 298 points, etc.) IL 45 5851 CA 28 4800 TX 24 3783 ...

Stained Diviner

We filled 350 middle school orders last year. You got that beat too?

Stained Diviner

a Joe wrote: ↑Sun Dec 29, 2024 10:15 pmLIQBA is the second-largest question production company in Quizbowl today.

You might be right about that, but I'm curious.

Reinstein QuizBowl produces 2716 questions per year (1068 hs and 1648 ms). IQBT probably produces a similar number. What number are you at?

Stained Diviner

I just ran a double card tournament yesterday, and I have designed card systems before, so I'm going to stick my nose in here. In a lot of ways double cards is between single cards and pools, so when somebody says double cards is better at doing X, you need to specify better than what because what ...

Stained Diviner

A huge thanks to everybody who helped out yesterday. Special praise to Jeff Price for providing the facilities, serving lunch to over 400 people, and putting out fires all day. Special praise also goes to Jonah Greenthal for compiling Standard stats and Sinecio Morales for compiling Über-Competitive ...

Stained Diviner

The tournament is now full with one team on the waitlist. The tournament will hopefully run with 24 teams in Über-Competitive and 48 teams in Standard. A card system will be used in Über-Competitive. Rounds 2 and 3: Every team plays an opponent with a matching record. Round 4: Every team plays an o ...

Stained Diviner

There is now one open spot in each division.

Stained Diviner

The Uber-Competitive Division is now limited to 24 teams, so there are two spots available.

There are currently 30 staffers listed above. If that number hits 38, I will start expanding the Standard field.

Stained Diviner

It is now at 64. Anybody else who registers will be on the waitlist.

Stained Diviner

Due to limits on moderators and space, the total field size for both divisions is capped at 64. It is now at 61. We still need a lot of moderators.

Stained Diviner

We need a lot more moderators. Please let me know if you can help out.

Stained Diviner

Welcome to the forums! I am glad you are writing questions and seeking feedback. If you ever want anything from me, let me know Since you are a high school student posting in the high school forum, I am going to assume that you are aiming for the high school level. The first step is to pick an ...

Stained Diviner

Jonah's link is still good for stats. Congratulations to Spencer Manning of Stevenson for winning the tournament. A huge thanks to Jonah for helping me run the tournament. A huge thanks to Olivia Parker and Sandburg for hosting. A huge thanks to Ethan Ashbrook, Weston Brzykcy, Timothy Buckley, Colby ...

Stained Diviner

Keep doing that. You'll probably win.

Stained Diviner

I still need another moderator. Here is the current list:
Buckley
Burnett
Capistran
Cazares-Johnson
Cheun
Corbus
Danowski
Doak
Egan
Fischer
Grigg
Guo
Horwitz
Jordan
Keown
Knox
Kulesza
Lauber
Laudermith
Lorinskas
Mohan
Price
Quadri
Robertson
Ryan
Sacks
Strey
Sullivan
Taylor
Walsh
Welmers

Stained Diviner

Writing questions for your own learning and writing questions for competitions aren't the same thing, though writing for competitions can help your learning. You can write bad questions, and they can help you learn. Figure out which answerlines you want to know more about--things that you get beaten ...

Stained Diviner

In addition to what Robbie said, which is good, make it worth their time. Make sure people know when practice starts and when it ends. Between the starting time and ending time, there should be a plan. The plan can be extremely simple, but it should involve doing things that are productive from the ...

Stained Diviner

It is common for something to happen in Kentucky and/or Southwest Virginia, but I don't know if those will happen this year, and I don't know if those are south enough for you.

Stained Diviner

I could use some more moderators. Contact me if you are interested.

Stained Diviner

Here is a list of the first ten teams to sign up for the Über-Competitive Division: Adlai E. Stevenson Detroit Catholic Central HSMSE at CCNY Innovation Academy A Innovation Academy B Lambert Mexico Naperville North Rockford Auburn Utica Academy We had 24 teams last year in the Über-Competitive D ...

Stained Diviner

The tournament is currently full, but people signing up now will have a good chance of getting off the waitlist.

Stained Diviner

Staff: Jason Briski Colby Burnett Ulysses Capistran Andrew Cheun Peter Cipriano Ben Dillon Brad Fischer Ryan Fox Rohan Ganeshan Terry Gatchell Christopher Gismondi Kaushik Gollamudi Jonah Greenthal (stats) Shao Guo Noah Hartman Grant Koh Denise Kreb Joe Kulesza Mike Laudermith Alan McCloud Dylan ...

Stained Diviner

The amount of thought that schools use to decide whether or not to block a quizbowl site cannot be put into numbers unless the number is zero.

Ask somebody how to get it unblocked.

Stained Diviner

The 2024 Reinstein Varsity Tournament will take place on December 14 at Barrington High School in Chicagoland. We will have an Über-Competitive Division and a Standard Division. The PLAYTIME Set will be used in the Über-Competitive Division, and NAQT IS-234A will be used in the Standard Division. To ...

Stained Diviner

This is an invitation to participate in the Twenty-Fourth Annual Scobol Solo, to be held on Saturday, November 9. The tournament is at Sandburg High School in Orland Park, just southwest of Chicago. This is the main site of Scobol Solo. You can enter by using the form at https://www.scobolsolo.com ...

Stained Diviner · Re: 30-20-10 (3-2-1 but better) Blue...No Yellow.

Blue...No Yellow.

Stained Diviner

I'm OK with a question like that in literature. I would put it in literature because I expect that's how most students would get it. It might seem strange cluing Daniel Day-Lewis in a literature question, but I have written a Jackie Robinson/Branch Rickey/Althea Gibson history bonus and a Muhammad ...

Stained Diviner

Oddly enough, the Illinois Elementary School Association already classifies Drama as Fine Arts rather than Language Arts, so I am already doing this. The full-scale movement is kind of strange because a lot of writers wrote both novels and plays, so they are difficult to categorize. That doesn't ...

Stained Diviner

Are you sure you want the same set? Elite middle school teams can do OK on a regular high school difficulty set, but most middle school teams would get overwhelmed by it. You could have a lot of matches where a bunch of tossups get answered at the end or not at all, and a lot of bonuses get 0'd or ...

Stained Diviner

Start by going to https://quizbowlpackets.com/ and clicking on Novice Difficulty. If you get bored with those, try regular difficulty. SCOP Novice is good.

Stained Diviner

If you want to do something formal, keep it very simple. 1. Go to https://www.qbreader.org/frequency-list 2. Choose American Literature, British Literature, Visual Fine Arts, or Auditory Fine Arts 3. Choose Middle School difficulty level 4. Pick something from the top ten 5. Say the most important ...

Stained Diviner

Students need practice answering tossups. A significant amount of practice should be dedicated to tossups. If one or two students are dominant, there are ways to handle that--if they are good at reading, they can read, and if not there can be a rule that any student who gets a tossup sits out the ...

Stained Diviner

Between-match commentary and hype is so 2021.

Stained Diviner

I produce quizbowl questions that follow the IESA format and distribution. These are standard tossups and bonuses with the following differences: * The bonuses are four parts and are meant to be read all at once, with teams given time to confer on all parts before answering. * Each round has 24 ...

Stained Diviner

This announcement actually covers four or five sets. Also see our website . Scobol Solo is a tossup only set. It contains 14 regular rounds, one replacement round, and a 60 question championship round, with tiebreakers for all rounds. It is about 400 tossups total. The main site will be November 9 ...

Stained Diviner

I got asked about this in a Facebook group, but I decided to put my reply here because it's easier to write and more people will see it. In 1995, there was a big cheating scandal at the Illinois State Academic Decathlon Championship. I was there. Five years later, HBO made a movie about it starring ...

Stained Diviner

We got 1st, 3rd, and 4th last year, so we decided to try it again. That was the first time we had 3 teams.

Stained Diviner

Here are the states with the most playoff teams. Congrats to Georgia and California!

California 15
Georgia 15
Illinois 14
Virginia 11
Texas 8
Ohio 7
Maryland 6
New York 6

Stained Diviner

I was talking about the big list, not the $2500 list.

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