The Quizbowl Resource Center

It's been posted!

It's being used at Oxford for an event today, but I'll upload it tomorrow!

A bunch of people on the Harvard team are around this summer, so we'll definitely be running open practices. Will post with an update once we get a regular room.

I do write history in a very traditional quizbowl way, a throwback style that is very anti-Marshall Steinbaum (i.e. it rejects a social science-derived approach to history, in favor of focusing on the hard facts of increasingly deep names and events and people). Leaving the question of this style's...

3) When you leave a tournament, you automatically forfeit all future games you might play during the day. For example, Harvard left the Northeast site of George Oppen with one playoff game to go and one loss. What should have/what "actually" happened at that event is they forfeited their ...

I'm playing this with Jacob Reed.

I really liked the Warren Zevon bonus. Could you post the Searchers tossup? I watched it a couple months ago but wasn't able to buzz on any of the early clues—they didn't feel super-evocative.

hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:Sriram and I are looking for teammates.

Jacob Reed has joined this team.

My issue with that question, however, is that this is a question ostensibly written for the regular-to-regular-plus high school level, and the depth ("specificity") of the cluing made it inappropriate in terms of difficulty. That issue is magnified when the work being asked about is The R...

A better example of the lit being several shades harder due to overly-specific cluing in general would be something like the Recognition of Shakuntala bonus, which was... something else. I think it went Shakuntala/Sanskirt/seven, with the third part saying something like "the Shakuntala has th...

1. The first is that if a critical mass of people have booked flights and non refundable hotel rooms to play the set on Sunday, then I think they, at a minimum, should have a say in this. Not sure what a critical mass is, but say maybe at least 3-4 teams or so. On the other hand, Weiner was handlin...

I am loath to suggest anything that would distract collegiate teams from completing and submitting their ACF Nationals packets (HINT HINT) but perhaps some sort of guerrilla tournament could be run after ICT? I'd be pretty satisfied even just having the day to hang out in Atlanta, but if people wan...

Harvard can play the final Saturday afternoon, but not in the morning. Would that work?

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:I think that our team and Harvard's both ended up X-2, but one of Harvard's losses was a forfeit. Perhaps we can organize a final by Skype sometime if we want to really settle this.

We're in—this weekend sometime?

ReverseTranscriptase wrote:I'm also looking for a team.

Sriram and I are looking for teammates.

EDIT: Someone who knows history would be cool.

Thanks to Columbia/staffers for running a great tournament! Sorry we had to head out a bit early.

Our train leaves at 7pm, so if the tournament runs late, running Eyes after wouldn't be great. Any chance we could run at least part of it during lunch and order pizza or something?

Kouign Amann wrote:What is the interest level in playing Eyes at this site?

I'd play!

Mewto55555 wrote:If I'm at CO I'm in.

Same here.

[On the other hand, there was yet another question on the show Hannibal, after one at ACF Regionals. I don't know anyone who watches this show, and both times I heard the question, a team just guessed based on "cannibal". This show seems a bit overrepresented, IMO.] Hannibal is one of the...

Thanks, again, for providing extended feedback. I'll post the requested questions once I'm back at my computer (or maybe Raynor can). Corry, I actually disagree with you on several of your difficulty assessments, and while this is anecdotal, a lot of the specific difficult answerlines you provided w...

Hey guys, thanks for all of your feedback. I'll try to respond to most of it—let me know if there's anything I miss. I have to agree with some of the sentiments about the particularly hard third parts in bonuses, especially in the science. While some were reasonable progressions from one to another,...

And, of course, maybe mirror some question sets that aren't HFT, because HFT is a college-level question set ostensibly intended for high schools, which is inappropriate for newer teams and which goes to support a club that does Sweet Fanny Adams for the college circuit. You're entitled to your opi...

Hmmm, the question doesn't actually use the word "she." Must've just been the moderator slipping up--sorry about that.

Stats are up: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/2250/

As far as the continued absence of statistics goes, I see no defense. Why were scoresheets for the HFT taken to New York by a student at Columbia? That makes no sense, nor does not making sure that all scoresheets are brought together, to the same place, by the end of the tournament day. Ben (who g...

This is a tournament that was edited for a long time by Andy "Insane Sense of Difficulty" Watkins. I don't really see how the fact that Andy Watkins once edited a few (much, much earlier) incarnations of HFT has any bearing on this discussion. It's not like I was going back and using 2009...

I do not think the Harvard team's oft-stated belief that accessible, properly run high school quizbowl is "illegitimate" and that teams outside of the 30 or so who have the interest and funding to travel to Harvard can go screw themselves is good for quizbowl as a whole... I think a lot o...

Ben took most, but not all, of the scoresheets from the matches that took place in the Yard with him back to Columbia when he had to leave before the tournament finished (I've got the rest of those). Raynor has the scoresheets from the SOCH because we couldn't use a runner from the SOCH to the Yard,...

We'll get stats up as soon as possible. It might take a couple days, though, because most of the scoresheets are with Ben in New York.

Could I see the TU on The Master and Margarita and the bonus that went Franklin/Speak, Memory/Dahl? I thought the set was decent for the most part but both of those questions were not very good ideas. The tossup was almost certainly too hard, even for this set (How many people actually know what ha...

The staffer in question wasn't running a room solo, and initially was only slated to keep score, but requested to read due to poor math skills. Due to a miscommunication, I thought this staffer was bringing a laptop. We had something like 10-12 staffers/volunteers combined either drop out in the few...

Only one reader used paper packets at the tournament. Anyway, clearly at least one reader (John) saw my email!

Laptop checkout is for three hours, and there's no library within a 15-minute walk of where Raynor was, so that wouldn't have really worked.

We provided parking information to teams this year. We did utilize round-by-round distribution at Penn Bowl, but I thought that our situation of having multiple locations at HFT would potentially lead to that system causing delays.

Discuss the set as a whole in this thread. For reference, the set was written and edited with the following breakdown: - I wrote all of the literature, fine arts, social science, philosophy, and miscellaneous questions, and edited everything except for science. - Raynor wrote the religion and myth, ...

If you remember any mistakes (factual or writing) from the set, post them here.

Use this thread to discuss specific questions.

The location situation was not ideal. I booked the entirety of the SOCH during the summer, only to have them email me a few weeks ago that they had screwed up and had to take away half of our rooms. By that point, there weren't enough rooms available to host the tournament across two buildings, let ...

State College A defeated Wilmington Charter A in a one-game final. Stats will be up once Ben Zhang, Raynor, and I are able to combine all of our scoresheets. Thanks to all the teams who came today, and especially to their volunteers! I'm sorry the tournament took longer than expected--we had several...

Once the tournament happens.

The above isn't to knock Stephen or to say that his complaints about the staffing at the tournament are unfounded, by the way--it's more just to explain why I didn't see the tournament as running especially slowly while it was going on.

"post-dinner" finish times are not the norm (as long as you aren't defining this too early); tournaments should be finishing around 5:00 PM +/- 30 minutes, absent finals, for a 10 to 11 round tournament. I agree that tournaments should end around this time--just making the point that of t...

Hey! I'll do my best to respond to some of your thoughts, Stephen. According to my text history, we finished round 12 at around 7:25 PM. Assuming a start time of around 9:30 and an hour for lunch, this works out to 45 minutes per round. This is far slower than ideal. 7:25 is later than ideal--MIT wa...

MIT A defeated Yale A in the first match of an advantaged final. Completed stats are up.

Prelim stats are up: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... s/prelims/

Stats through Round 10: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... standings/

We still have space for a few more teams in the field--shoot me an email if you'd like to register. I'll be sending more detailed information to registered teams this weekend.

The field has been expanded to 36 teams (field and wait list are up-to-date).

Current Field (Teams/Buzzers/Staffers):
Amherst (1/2/0)
Brown (1/0/0)
Ottawa (1/0/0)
Yale (2/2/0)
Cornell (2/0/1)
MIT (2/1/0)
Dartmouth (1/0/1)
Northeastern (2/1/3)

Harvard will be hosting a mirror of this year's Penn Bowl on October 18, 2014. The original tournament announcement is here: http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15851 Fee Structure: Base fee: $120 per team Working buzzer discount: $5 each Approved moderator discount: $10 each, and w...

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