The Quizbowl Resource Center

naan/steak-holding toll

100% agree with Emmett's position here. I get that online quizbowl is more tiring and less engaging than in-person quizbowl and that winning any sort of online tournament is just considered "not as good." I don't think this is a reason to cut corners on basics like providing a proper final...

naan/steak-holding toll

Ryan Humphrey has resigned from the editing team. We are looking to recruit a biology and chemistry editor and/or who can commit to writing a decent number of questions. Feel free to contact me via DM or email if you're interested!

EDIT: Eric Mukherjee has joined in his place.

naan/steak-holding toll

In pack B, I wasn't a huge fan of "this model" for the Phillips curve tossup - while Wikipedia does label it as a model, in my experience it's treated more as a prediction of a model than a model in itself. "This construct" or something similar might be better in my opinion. Agr...

naan/steak-holding toll

yes plz

naan/steak-holding toll

I think this set's quality was similar to last year's (solid, many very creative questions) but the feel was distinct. Tossups seemed about the same in difficulty with a bit less inter-category difficulty variance than last year. Bonuses, on the other hand, seemed quite different. The middle parts o...

naan/steak-holding toll

I also may have misheard the "Carthage" tossup but I heard the phrase "non-Athenian Sacred Band" which narrowed the answerspace down to Thebes, Carthage, or "maybe there's some other city with a Sacred Band" for me. I'm guessing this was either written as "non-The...

naan/steak-holding toll

The western movement of the Xiongnu confederacy pushed these people south, which in turn pushed the Sacae into the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. For 10 points each: [h] Name these Tocharian-speaking nomads who, along with the Wusun, were visited by the Han diplomat Zhang Qian, who reported on their one h...

naan/steak-holding toll

Will there be a second open mirror of IKEA and/or a closed mirror for teams who couldn't play at their regional site? I'd like there to be one - unfortunately my schedule is incredibly packed right now and I'm not sure I'll be able to organize such. If someone would like to serve as TC for such a s...

naan/steak-holding toll

In light of recent events, I will be serving as TD for this tournament tomorrow. Stefan will not be participating and Justin and Pratyush will work in the control room. All players and staff, in addition, will be expected to follow the code of conduct used for IKEA (with all instances of "IKEA&...

naan/steak-holding toll

Yeah, I'm not gonna lie that we went very hard on the "no find your ass easy parts" philosophy for this set. Billy was very much on board with this for the science - so it was definitely very possible to get a zero there. This was intentional - I hate pity 10s. This game is hard, so when y...

naan/steak-holding toll

I was inspired to write that Tintoretto tossup, and to clue that portrait, by the exact same exhibition - and had the same feeling as you did about it. It's wonderful to see that was appreciated! "Intermediate periods" was a very cool tossup, both in answerline and in cluing. I'm very glad...

naan/steak-holding toll

I thought this set was fun to play! Thank you to the writers and the editors for all their effort. One piece of feedback that I can remember right now: In our room, the other team negged the "surgeries" tossup with "dissections." Should that have been accepted? When we ruled on ...

naan/steak-holding toll

Here are my thoughts on the tossups for packets 1-5. I might do the same for packets 6-10 if I have time. Atlantic Ocean should specify that "South Atlantic" should be accepted I never realized that egg matzo didn't contain eggs! Cool clue Maya tossup: the "j" in "ajaw"...

naan/steak-holding toll

Yeah, I'll just say that to me the Borodin tossup only half feels like an opera question, given that a bunch of it clues from the Polovtsian dances (often performed as an orchestral excerpt) and In the Steppes of Central Asia . One of these could have gone in packet 11 or 12 - but since the number o...

naan/steak-holding toll

The comment about the lack of symphony content in tossups is well-taken. I generally classify music as "orchestral, chamber, solo piano, opera" etc. when distributing a tournament, but this approach led me to not clue enough from symphonies in this tournament. I think we could have used so...

naan/steak-holding toll

I wrote this question, and it didn't get much editing. I apologize for misleading you with the description of Cocijo. It might be good to either do as you suggest and describe Cocijo's role, or describe the glyph (which is something like stacks of maize and a waterfall?), or even invert the sentenc...

naan/steak-holding toll

I'd be interested in seeing the tossup on the Oaxaca Valley. I recall buzzing on the clue about "Glyph C" with "Yucatan" since there's an identically-named glyph that identifies a bunch of gods in Maya tradition. I think the clue specified something about Glyph C being on a headd...

naan/steak-holding toll

After private discussions with representatives of the Iowa and Michigan teams, the editors of IKEA have decided to ban Tuhin Chakraborty from participating in all IKEA mirrors at the request of the latter. Given Tuhin's actions, both at tournaments and in other quizbowl contexts, as well as the circ...

naan/steak-holding toll

This tournament was pretty good and I'm happy the Florida team got a chance to try their hand at a hard set, since they definitely produced what I thought was a pretty distinct experience. I take it this is something of a swan song from their older players - it's definitely a good note to "go o...

naan/steak-holding toll

Finally, I get to rate various stuff from my fraternity's old 80s parties. Voting purely based on how much I like the songs, no other criteria. 1 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, "The Message" vs. 16 INXS, "Need You Tonight" 8 Rick Springfield, "Jessie's Girl" vs...

naan/steak-holding toll

I was uncomfortable reading the film bonus that included answer lines on Paris Is Burning and Brokeback Mountain because I do not think it is okay for a cishet person to use the term that was the first answer line. I know this is not a concrete thing (just look at the different answers given in thi...

naan/steak-holding toll

I still find Discord much more centralized, more engaging, and better optimized for any sort of game experience when you're doing more than just talking and listening to other people - which you are in a quizbowl tournament. Discord is also, frankly, much more fun - and this can't be underestimated ...

naan/steak-holding toll

Yeah, I completely agree with John Marvin here. The author is from Bosnia and I'm pretty sure that's significant from a "lit perspective" - even though, frankly, this is a geography tossup and I don't think we need to care about the "lit perspective" that much as it's basically a...

naan/steak-holding toll

I'd like to see the tossup on "Twins" in literature as well as the bonus that talked about Serge Gainsbourg (not sure which packet this was in). Both felt like very interesting topics and I was pretty happy to hear them in the set. I also felt like the enclosure tossup was pretty hard for...

naan/steak-holding toll

I thought this set was great top to bottom, but one erratum from the bonus part on just-noticeable difference resurfaced in my mind just now: [10] Psychophysics often searches for this threshold, defined as the level of stimulus which a subject detects 50 percent of the time. Weber's law suggests i...

naan/steak-holding toll

I thought almost all the history in this tournament was excellent, with some interesting lead ins and well organised clue orders - I will be pointing new writers towards some questions as 'how to do it' in the future. Only big erratum I spotted was this question: 18. Members of this body were requi...

naan/steak-holding toll

(e.g. Ashalaho and Ashshipíte seemed similar enough to Ashkúale for a moderator to recognize a knowledgeable player's answer). This is illuminating and, I think, a very unusual philosophy of answerline acceptability. In general we give points for saying what's in the answerline, not for sounding kn...

naan/steak-holding toll

To avoid belaboring the "space" tossup elsewhere: For the "space" tossup, I probably should have figured out that because the question was in the philosophy distribution - answers like "reference frame" wouldn't really make sense and "relative position / location&q...

naan/steak-holding toll

I should compliment Chris by saying the "score clues" were excellent at this tournament - several different players on our team were able recognized clues from very famous pieces such as Bach sonatinas, the Concierto de Aranjuez, the 1812 overture, and Mozart's piano sonatas and successful...

naan/steak-holding toll

This tournament was very good and probably even slightly undershot expected difficulty, at least in the bonuses - the tossups seemed generally on point overall. In particular questions did a good job giving lots of useful contextual information to make buzzes, so it was pretty rare you'd be confused...

naan/steak-holding toll

Why is the tossup on Aristotle's Poetics categorized as literature and not philosophy? I'm admittedly not very good at philosophy, but it just reads like a philosophy tossup to me. Poetics is a pioneering work of literary criticism - I don't see what's wrong with putting it in the literature distri...

naan/steak-holding toll

It did - Nick Jensen got first, I got second (I think) and I think Kenji, Conor, or Eric C. got third. A good time was had.

naan/steak-holding toll

I wasn't a huge fan of the question on Mozart, as it seemed like it tested somewhat arbitrary Murakami knowledge, especially considering how much other composers come up in Murakami works (the Wind-Up Bird clues especially felt like neg bait for Rossini). The inclusion of Amadeus near the end also ...

naan/steak-holding toll

Jack Mehr has joined this tournament's writing staff to contribute questions. We're very glad to have his help! The set has continued to progress and is more than 1/4 complete. We may reconsider our policy on submissions at a later date, but as for now we're continuing to plan on a housewritten CO t...

naan/steak-holding toll

. -On the Colson Whitehead bonus, I'm not sure that Pulitzer Prize works as a easy/medium part, especially since The Underground Railroad also won the National Book Award (which is what we said). I didn't particularly think this was an issue, especially since the question said they're awarded by Co...

naan/steak-holding toll

whatamidoinghere wrote: ↑Fri Oct 30, 2020 3:45 pm I was just curious why there was a prompt on Nagel for Thomas Nagel. I'd always figured that any reference to "Nagel" was to Thomas.

Ernest Nagel is a philosopher of science who is completely askable as a bonus part at this level, albeit as a hard part.

naan/steak-holding toll

Yeah, Trowulan was me reasoning from "Palembang was a hard part before, so we can probably do Trowulan." But nobody converted it in the first few mirrors, so I changed to Singhasari for later mirrors. I'll happily point to Hari's great bonus part on deep battle and my bonus part on interio...

naan/steak-holding toll

Please find here. Don't distribute these, obviously.

naan/steak-holding toll

I liked the bonus on medieval bestiaries. That was in the "Texts, Scriptures, and Stories" distribution which your team seemed to not like :razz: I shouldn't take the credit for all the other academic, as most of that content came from a bunch of other writers. I did take my usual hard li...

naan/steak-holding toll

-The literature bonuses felt variable in the difficulty of hard/medium parts, more so than other categories. Some felt like they were along the lines of ACF Regionals bonuses, while other wouldn't be out of place at EFT. I liked a lot of the contemporary lit bonuses quite a bit, but some felt like ...

naan/steak-holding toll

Prompting on British India seems reasonable enough to do before "ruler of" - since at that point, the question I think has clearly ruled out the notion that we're talking about all of India. The Byzantine empire question was originally far harder; I made it a good bit easier and it seems t...

naan/steak-holding toll

I would agree with Mike. Especially during corona times, I suspect attendance at this event is going to be very high. Having 100 people buzzing on a single packet just isn't very fun, leads to a zillion buzzer races and people giving tons of random guesses, and in general makes stuff take forever.

naan/steak-holding toll

As a note, there is a discussion forum for the set! We'd love to get some feedback on what we did and didn't do well.

naan/steak-holding toll

Thanks very much to ACF for making this training publicly available - it's immensely helpful.

naan/steak-holding toll

Stats are posted. I want to sincerely apologize for screwing up the schedule of the bottom bracket - I hope everyone enjoyed the rounds they got to play regardless.

naan/steak-holding toll

Minor issue, but the answerline for the tossup on "LSD" should have some instructions on what to do if a player gives the answer "acid." "Acid" is a common street name for LSD. However, there seem to be no instructions in the packets (at least from the packets from 9/2...

naan/steak-holding toll

I may be somewhat biased from answering this question incorrectly when I played it, but the second clue of Pack F's Tossup 7 has some issues. Civil servant or bureaucrat is arguably a more reasonable answer to the clue "That man who worked in this profession feuded frequently with Wang Anshi&q...

naan/steak-holding toll

I'm closing the field at 14 teams. We are going to run a "paired round robin" where there will be two brackets of 7 teams each. The way this will work is that each team in Bracket 1 will play each of the 7 teams in Bracket 2 once each - this way, we can avoid byes. Teams will then be sorte...

naan/steak-holding toll

I made a quick video showing the writing of a basic tossup which hopefully provides a quick and useful overview of the criteria which make a tossup good, the mechanics of finding good sources and thinking about themes, etc. No promises that the tossup is good, but I think it's the sort of thing whic...

naan/steak-holding toll

We're up to 12 teams. This is a good number, so I'll only allow further registration in pairs of two teams.

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