The Quizbowl Resource Center

magin

I want to thank all the teams that showed up to this year's ACF Nationals. I saw a lot of excellent play from teams, and I hope to see you all at next year's Nationals. We did our best to take the feedback from last year's Nationals into account and make this year's tournament much more accessible. ...

magin

ACF Nationals is coming up soon, and we could use a few volunteers to help us proofread and randomize packets.

If you're interested (and not playing), please email me at [email protected].

magin

grapesmoker wrote:
Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:I don't think I'm spilling any ACF cabal secrets when I say that Nationals will be substantially more accessible this year. Some may be downright disturbed by how many of the answers they will have heard of.
As many as 25% of the questions, even.

Let's not get carried away, Jerry.

magin

My vote is for a weekend of literature side tournaments.

Also, I'd enjoy that classical music tournament, but I suspect the audience for it won't be all that large.

magin

I don't know if NAQT does this already, but for last year's ACF Nationals (and this year's), I've had a fair amount of success targeting people who like specific subjects and asking them to write those subjects. People are usually happy to write subcategories that they know well and enjoy, especiall...

magin

We've already spoken privately to the teams who still have to submit packets, but as a reminder: If your team is required to write a packet and does not submit one by April 7th, you will not play ACF Nationals. Let me be absolutely clear about that. I sincerely hope to see the remaining packets in m...

magin

Thanks to all the teams who submitted their packets by yesterday's deadline. As a reminder, after the $50 deadline, you owe us $10/day; if you cannot turn in a packet more than two weeks in advance of ACF Nationals, you will not be playing ACF Nationals. This is a hard and fast deadline and there wi...

magin

To the extent that open packet exchange is a mechanism to combat packet inequity, Chicago is definitely free riding on that collective solution. I suppose that what you mean is IF the tournament had not been proliferated, Chicago would have been "free-riding" on the fact that teams have o...

magin

(2) Use the New Writer Feedback Program. Great idea in theory. Hasn't worked for my hypothetical person in practice, I assume because the hypothetical person who was supposed to provide feedback is busy with hypothetical med school (which is understandable). Hey, if the person assigned to give you ...

magin

If you haven't yet registered for ACF Nationals and would like to, please register here: ACF Nationals 2012 Registration

magin

The 25 dollar packet discount deadline has now passed. As a reminder, the no penalty deadline to submit a packet to ACF Nationals is March 6.

magin

As a reminder, the twenty-five dollar discount deadline for submitting your team's packet is February 20th, and is rapidly approaching. I'd love to have a bunch of packets in my inbox, so I encourage you to finish your packet by then and to start writing it if you haven't done so yet.

magin

Der Rosenbergkavalier wrote:I can staff if you need me; let me know.

Likewise.

magin

Amusingly enough, Ryan Westbrook made some post back in '06 lamenting the great wasteland of dedicated up-and-coming quizbowlers (besides Will Turner and Dave Rappaport) that really pissed me off and helped motivate me to get better and show those terrible Midwest elitists.

magin

Here's a brief update:

The -50 dollar packet deadline has passed, with only one team submitting a packet. The next deadline is February 20th for the -25 dollar packet discount; I hope to see many more packets in my inbox by then.

magin

I probably could find less than desireable questions in a number of categories. If you found this question poor, give some feedback to the editors who were working on it I heartily endorse this advice. The most practical way I've seen to improve writing has been to clearly demonstrate why a clue ha...

magin

Hey, just a reminder: The packets we've received so far have contained some incredibly hard tossups. Some of them are so difficult that they are not usable. Sure, ACF Nationals is a hard tournament, but again, it's not supposed to be an impossible one. Please try to keep your fellow players in mind ...

magin

Magister Ludi wrote: 4- San Francisco (Jonathan & I)

'

Oh yeah, I missed this. I don't think this was a buzzer race at all, since Ted was buzzing on the first clue, while I was only starting to hear the second clue (which was the one I knew).

magin

Also, perhaps this buzzer-race discussion should be moved into a new thread instead of squatting in this one?

magin

The implication, though, isn't that buzzer races are irrelevant to the topic at hand. The ideal tossup is a step pyramid, and it's obvious that buzzer races decrease monotonically with the number of steps. A 100-step tossup of ideal construction would require two 99th percentile players to be in th...

magin

The following schools have submitted packets by the -100 dollar deadline: -100 deadline: Minnesota Carleton Yale A Yale B VCU UCSD -50 deadline: Northwestern -25 deadline: Dartmouth South Carolina No penalty deadline: Michigan A Alabama Penn +25 deadline: Illinois Rutgers Virginia A Harvard +50 dead...

magin

Jerry, I don't know much about Ancient Greece, but I buzzed in fairly confidently a bit before the end with trials. I think it was a pretty solid question.

magin

Buzzer races are definitely frustrating as a player, but I don't think Ted is correct when he argues that line length causes them. In my experience, early buzzer races are caused by an editor 1) misjudging the knowledge of the field, or 2) using a well-worn clue early in the tossup. The best editors...

magin

East Africa's Maasai people and North Africa's Tuaregs were, until recently, ethnic groups that were constantly on the move with no settled residences. For 10 points each-- A. Give the anthropological term for such peoples. answer: _nomad_s or _nomadic_ peoples or _nomadism_ B. Nomads are contraste...

magin

I'm looking to team up with a couple of people who know 80s music, TV, video games/comics, and don't mind losing.

magin

Yeah, if you want more earth science, or Math, or whatever in quizbowl, the way to do that is to write good, accessible questions on those topics and submit them to tournaments (or offer to write them for tournaments). Editors will not turn down good questions, especially if they knock out a pesky s...

magin

It's also fairly convenient for teams flying in Friday night to land at National airport in DC and take the metro to College Park.

magin

I have no qualms with a cap for ACF Regionals; as for this tournament, I was very happy with most of the content in the questions, even if it made them longer, and I liked hearing the extra clues. For an open tournament being played by a host of good players, why not? I can think of a few reasons w...

magin

I disagree with Ted; I think 7-8 lines is fine for easy answer lines at hard tournaments as long as you choose appropriate answer lines and clues. To my mind, Ted's argument goes astray by assuming that knowledge is mostly linear: Person A has 5 units of knowledge about Garcia Marquez, and Person B ...

magin

2) Have one set of questions, but specifically have all the afternoon rounds in the upper bracket played on longer 7-8 line versions of those questions that better approximate PACE NSC length while keeping the lower brackets playing on normal 5 line questions. You already did this in 2008 and it wa...

magin

I wonder if this is because potential hosts are rebelling against the perceived inappropriate difficulty of the tournament... Dallas just posted stats for 15 of the 34 teams. 2 of those teams have a ppb better than 12. Last year, HFT had the 3rd worst average and 4th worst median ppb of all the set...

magin · Re: DATE CHANGE: BARGE at Maryland (1/14/12) I plan on playing.

I plan on playing.

magin

Also, ACF is very concerned about providing feedback to writers young and old. Jonathan Magin spearheaded the creation of our new writer feedback program to address this issue. Anyone who wants prompt and specific feedback on their questions (even questions that were already submitted to Fall) is w...

magin

I think it's a good thing to have teams get experience writing a full packet, especially when many tournaments these days are housewritten.

magin

I'm in the same boat as Bruce; if anyone can give me a ride, I will give them a book for free. An interesting book.

magin

Here’s the fee schedule and distribution for this year’s ACF Nationals. Guidelines for who is eligible to play ACF tournaments and packet submission can be found here: ACF Packet Submission Guidelines Fee schedule: Base fee: $220 -$100 discount: January 23 -$50 discount: February 6 -$25 discount: Fe...

magin

I think that a lot of this could be avoided by making sure to list alternate answers; if the clue refers to a scimitar and the answer is "sword," making sure to say "accept scimitar" on that clue is pretty important. I also agree with Chris that if a player gives an answer which ...

magin

I would enjoy playing this.

magin

Since I ended up being unable to make it to Minnesota, I'm throwing my hat in the ring for this tournament.

magin

Just a reminder: the questions you submit to this are fine to use at tournaments because we'll make sure that a person who isn't playing that event looks them over. We haven't had a ton of people submit questions, and we'd love to give more feedback/support to writers, so if you want to improve your...

magin

DumbJaques wrote:You didn't "be generous and prompt" me on Star Wars, mofo.

Ah, that's because I didn't have access to the answer lines, just the file names. I apologize.

magin

The old thread is locked, so moderators feel free to move this there.

People wanting to have answerlines for the Imaginary Landscape packets can go here: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B-vOb_ ... x&hl=en_US

magin

Crossposted from College Announcements: On behalf of ACF, I'm very pleased to announce our writer feedback program, which is designed to help quizbowlers of every level improve their writing. How it works: send up to 5 questions to feedback.acf@gmail.com, along with what level the questions are for ...

magin

On behalf of ACF, I'm very pleased to announce our writer feedback program, which is designed to help quizbowlers of every level improve their writing. How it works: send up to 5 questions to feedback.acf@gmail.com, along with what level the questions are for and what you'd most like help with. We'l...

magin

If ticket prices aren't too crazy, I'm pretty interested in flying out and playing.

magin

Quizbowl doesn't seem to be missing any major writers; however, I think that question writers could do a better job of asking about a range of not-major-but-still-reasonably-known authors. For some reason, people will find some previously neglected but prominent author, such as, say, Jose Donoso, an...

magin

I think Ted and Matt W. are both going a bit too far in their positions here. I think that Ted is discounting the responsibility of players to actually play tossups; sometimes, you forget part of something you've read, or it just doesn't register for you. That sucks when it happens, but it's part of...

magin

I don't buy what Cameron says at all - with science and music, we've really gotten to a point where you can't "coach up" writers other than the handful of two or three expert writers. The only people who are going to meet the standard proposed are the people who are both (1) a very good q...

magin

Since Jerry's flight lands at 6:35 tomorrow, could we read our packet first to make it more likely he doesn't miss any rounds?

magin

I've been looking through this lately, and I really like this set. Well done. The only complaint I have so far is small. In the Faure tossup, the Pavane, Op. 50 showed up much earlier than I expected for it to, since it's a standard piece in the orchestra repertoire. Although, maybe I'm just biased...

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