The Quizbowl Resource Center

John Ketzkorn

Hey everyone, We will be holding the event in room 146 of the Armory. We recommend people park at the main library. We will be aiming to start at 8:45 on both days so try to arrive at 8:15-8:30. Additionally, anyone who staffs, and brings a laptop, will be given a free entry to a side event for eac...

John Ketzkorn

This "debate" seems to more boil down to "how much should the giveaway of tossups give away" than "Should we accept the city name for sports teams?" I think it's fair to expect people don't have any knowledge on the subject if they've let the tossup go to the end. As a ...

John Ketzkorn

Lastly, I would suggest notetaking AND flashcarding. It might be cumbersome to read books/Wikipedia/packets, take notes, and then make flashcards from your notes, but I find that multistep process to be helpful in digesting and learning all that information (some people can just read stuff and reca...

John Ketzkorn

I'll at the very least contribute 1 packet to this (distribution likely to only be vaguely followed)

John Ketzkorn

Imaginary Landscape for those interested on Saturday either concurrently or following FILM as probably a 1 room shootout. Definitely not concurrently! (As if I would miss a film tournament...) We can see how people react, but I think Shoneys will go pretty fast as a shootout, has gotten good review...

John Ketzkorn

Per Raynor's advice, I've now made FILM doubles so feel free to start taking partners. All changes have been updated on the spreadsheet . The current plan is as follows: FTP3 on Friday (I presume Harris would prefer teams, so I've added to the spreadsheet as such). FILM as doubles following Words an...

John Ketzkorn

I think the Tienanmen Square tossup is probably a good example of a tossup that, in many rooms, played as six or seven lines of an art tossup that no one got, followed by a very short history tossup on Tienanmen Square (at the mention of the Goddess of Democracy statue). I don't doubt that there ar...

John Ketzkorn

Erik has unfortunately decided to pull the Illinois mirror of SNICK, and I'm sorry to all those who were looking forward to playing it at the Illinois site. This should at the very least mean we have plenty of time to get through both FILM and Chomping Down at Shoney's. If people (myself included) a...

John Ketzkorn

I enjoyed this set as a whole. My one feedback for literature would be an attempt to confine 'canon-busting" tossups to 1/1. I'm suspicious that the number was higher than that this year, but I could just not know things. I won't strictly define "canon-busting" but something along the...

John Ketzkorn

Cambridge open will be $25/player ($100 for a 4 person team).

For side events:

Worldstar, Words and Objects

$12/person

RAPTURE, FILM:

$10/person

Chomping Down at Shoney's:

$5/person

Human Use of Human Beings:

$2/person

John Ketzkorn

Is there a chance of any Friday events (perhaps some of the informal ones)? If there's enough interest, there's a very good chance we can run events Friday -- either at someone from the Illinois club's apartment or in a classroom on campus. I'm gonna hold off on doing a survey at the moment, but pe...

John Ketzkorn

Here's our schedule as of today (June 12th). If you'd like to discuss possible reordering / evens I missed that you feel I should try, feel free to post here or email me. Informal: FTP 3 - Harris Bunker will presumably be organizing the logistics of this Saturday: Cambridge Open (no forum post, but ...

John Ketzkorn

Cheynem wrote:When do you think you'll have a schedule of events finalized?

We should have a schedule of events out sometime within the next two weeks. Not necessarily "finalized" since I'd like to give people another week or two to make suggestions before cementing our plan for the weekend.

John Ketzkorn

Looking at form responses, we've ultimately settled on keeping the dates as is.

John Ketzkorn · Re: Illinois Side Event Open - 8/11/18 I've created a form here

I've created a form here

John Ketzkorn

Would anyone be opposed to this event being pushed back to August 18th? Seems that may accommodate some people busy the weekend of the 11th, but if this adversely affects more people, I'd be against doing so.

John Ketzkorn

Illinois event officially announced

John Ketzkorn

With dates finalized and rooms reserved, I'm happy to announce that Illinois will be hosting a summer open on August 11th and August 12th. Ideally, I'd like to run one "main event" on Saturday, but that's pending a possible Cambridge Open / Oxford Open mirror since many Illinois players wi...

John Ketzkorn

I'd be interested in like a mirror at Michigan State of Canada Hybrid/Oxford Open whatever and maybe the Florida trash tournament on Sunday. This sounds ideal to me but it's hard to plan this when I don't know when the Illinois event is. Given that we can't really host while I'm in New York, it is ...

John Ketzkorn

Illinois plans on hosting a side event weekend in August with details regarding that coming out hopefully soon.

John Ketzkorn

Bernard Bumpus is the UMBC of names

John Ketzkorn

A few requests to start: 1. Can I see the Ethan Frome tossup? While I didn't play it, I heard a major stock clue (pickle dish being broken) was dropped in the first line. The title character of this novel looks through a window of a church to see a dancing girl in a red scarf who is later dismissed...

John Ketzkorn

gyre and gimble wrote:This really has nothing to do with me, but if I may add my two cents: This isn't really a side event, since you're only providing 20 questions. I wouldn't worry too much about crowning a winner.

As a non-myth player, I still feel this to be the most important hat-wearing side event of the year.

John Ketzkorn

so in fact it's playing an extra game (maybe good) on a high-quality packet (good) Since when has playing an extra game of quizbowl been downgraded to "maybe good"? This varies person to person, but everyone has a limit for how much quiz bowl they're willing to play over the span of 1-2 d...

John Ketzkorn

While I think there's something here about quizbowl being weirdly obsessed with Canadian national parks, I really don't think this case has much merit. Geography players are not magical fruit that fall from the sky - geography, like any other quizbowl subject, can be learned. In fact, I personally ...

John Ketzkorn

Can I see the Cummings toss-up in like round 15? It felt like it cliffed pretty hard from my end.

Also, the Hell in No Exit toss-up seemed extremely neg-baity. "Place" and "Play" sound very similar, and I negged thinking I heard the latter.

John Ketzkorn

Anyone else find it odd that only one team in both Division I and II converted over 20 PPB for ICT, and neither of those teams had over 21 PPB? I don't know if anyone from NAQT reads this part of the forum, but if they do: does NAQT have any intention of adjusting its bonus difficulty, or is ~20 PP...

John Ketzkorn

We have a DII team going to this and I plan on staffing. Illinois seems like the DII favorite right? Ohio State also has a really strong DII team. I'd just like to learn more about this DII event because we know who are the favorites in DI are. While the D-value isn't perfect, I think it gives a de...

John Ketzkorn

Granny Soberer wrote:
AKKOLADE wrote:cracker barrel is ok
lies

It's been all down hill since they fired Brad's wife.

I'd give my thoughts about DII, but

Tornrak wrote: no one cares about DII.

John Ketzkorn

I knew wearing beanies would eventually pay for itself.

I'll definitely play

John Ketzkorn

edit: teams that fall outside the top 42 by A-value have been italicized; these teams may be bumped if the field fills out with the top 42. edit 2: as of March 31, the field is full. Louisiana Tech has withdrawn and we currently have 43 teams registered, so without significant pressure to expand th...

John Ketzkorn

It'd be cool to have something like last year where we played a bunch of side events in early August. I'd also very much be interested in playing some sort of packet-submission "main event" of sorts. Maybe we could do something similar to TTIAC where it was side events Saturday evening and...

John Ketzkorn

Any update on the logistics of when/where/how this event will be ran?

John Ketzkorn

Extremely interested! I've been dabbling in the VA studies, so my plan is to (super)power things I know and to sit there on everything else!

If that sounds good to you, hit me up.

John Ketzkorn

So I meant to post much earlier, but I haven't had a lot of free time. ANYWAY, if you need someone who is mildly good at literature and can sometimes make buzzes in other categories, I'm your guy (also I'm pretty good about getting my stuff written in a timely manner).

John Ketzkorn

For future, I hope it is possible to one day run an open tournament at which the location of every buzz was recorded (preferably by Ophir!), and we had all kinds of data as to who correctly answers what percentage of questions in which subjects at which points in the question. This idea is actually...

John Ketzkorn

For all of these questions, I tried to make sure power was ended before the 5th line of a tossup was ended, so that I left behind a significant amount of lower middle clues. This in turn made my questions harder to power since you had much less wiggle room to sit on a tossup--and I strongly suspect...

John Ketzkorn

A lot of the math questions seemed to be written by someone who doesn't really like math. This wouldn't be an issue if IHSA accepted the fact 4/4 math is excessive. How much would you consider not excessive? I'm not an expert on the IHSA distribution (nor am I a fan of the 24 question format), so I...

John Ketzkorn

Hyrdofluoric_Acid wrote:A lot of the math questions seemed to be written by someone who doesn't really like math.

This wouldn't be an issue if IHSA accepted the fact 4/4 math is excessive.

John Ketzkorn

A bookstore might have 1 Shakespeare shelf and 2 other drama shelves, next to 20 or more shelves devoted to capital-L-Literature. That's roughly the ratio that I've always seen. While you may be right about that ratio (although I imagine the ratio is smaller than that, but I'm no expert), you can c...

John Ketzkorn

So I've seen in other threads the claim that D2 SCT was tougher this year than in years past. While obvious player quality is something we can't account for, does anyone have data on average ppbs and power numbers for this year as compared to the past? Here's what we found: 2016: 25.9% power rate, ...

John Ketzkorn

The discussion in the wake of SCT was almost nonexistent. While I can't speak for the D1 set, a lot of D2 players have expressed discontent with how much more difficult this year's D2 SCT was when compared to last year. However, none of them are really that active on the forums. The fact that a fai...

John Ketzkorn

I think for the most part the literature in the DII set was well put together, and I want to thank the writers/editors for their time and energy they poured into the set. There were, however, a sizable handful of questions that seemed too difficult for DII SCT and wouldn't really be out of place in ...

John Ketzkorn

Very interested. Skype or at a HS national works for me. 1v1 or 2v2 seems good to me.

John Ketzkorn

theMoMA wrote:
theMoMA wrote:It would be nice to see stats for this event.
Kurtis, will you ever post stats for this event?

I believe 1/3 or so of the stat sheets from this event are missing, so if he does put out stats, they won't be complete.

John Ketzkorn

Will the neg5 link to stats be posted? I didn't get a chance to write it down.

John Ketzkorn

The philosophy on difficulty for literature bonuses seemed inconsistent. I think "Africa" is barely an easy part because it's meant to be a "figure it out" easy part. Ngugi could (and probably should) be a hard part in this set. 16. The Caine Prize is a yearly accolade awarded to...

John Ketzkorn

I get that a lot of cool people came out of France, but should we really be tossing it up (at least) three times?

I'll probably have more to say once the set is posted.

John Ketzkorn

Maybe don't have an archetype bonus part after asking for a specific archetype in an earlier round?

John Ketzkorn

Lovely tournament. Our site had a ton of fun playing this, and everyone had some impressive buzzes. The questions were pretty well constructed for an audio tournament and some fantastic clues were picked.

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