The Quizbowl Resource Center

Mike Bentley

I'm going to read my packet tonight at 8 PM EDT on the Discord. I'll post a link to a separate server to avoid spoilers on the main Discord for anyone who might still play a mirror of this tournament.

Mike Bentley

I'd like to propose two rule changes for this tournament: First, I'll be enforcing my interpretation of the "should have been prompted" replacement rule for this tournament: any such upheld protests will be played off as a replacement tossup open to both teams. Second, I'm going to go with...

Mike Bentley

Doesn't this list just confirm that a very small number of games are affected by bonuses? In some tournaments as few as 1 or 2 games in the top bracket? Yes this affected who won some national titles. But much, much more impactful was pretty much every team converting that 11th or 12th tossup agains...

Mike Bentley

I'm a little conflicted around whether reducing parity by adding bouncebacks that make it more likely for the better team to win is a good idea or not.

Mike Bentley

Ok this tournament will take place on Saturday, July 18th. More details are in the first post.

Mike Bentley

And to be clear, this will be a quads event (i.e. teams of up to 4 people).

Mike Bentley

Remember to vote in the date poll before Sunday.

Mike Bentley

I will be running a mirror of my latest technology tournament, The Myth of the Machine , this summer over Discord. The tournament will take place on Saturday, July 18th, 2020 starting at 12 PM EDT. We will be using Discord's video chat features for this tournament. A camera will be required. Registr...

Mike Bentley

Also, even within the 2015-2020 range, there's trash that appeals more to younger vs. older demographics and vice versa. I'm guessing that, all else being equal, a current undergraduate is more likely to have watched a Netflix drama like 13 Reason Why than someone my age (who might be more likely to...

Mike Bentley

What's the rationale behind no "extremely online" content? I personally don't like many of these questions but my sense is that this type of content is a very important part of the culture of the age group you're targeting. For instance, would questions on eSports fall into this ban? 2015 ...

Mike Bentley

I love trash quiz bowl probably as much as I love traditional quiz bowl, but honestly I wouldn't mind the category deletion from most tournaments if and only if categories are thereafter liberalized in their definitions. As has been alluded to several times already, Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and...

Mike Bentley

I endorse the two posts above entirely, and it's good that this something being talked about instead of people doing the big "oh well" shrug. I actually think ACF Regionals 2020 was a great example of diversifying and trying to include more stuff with the bonus on the WNBA because in gene...

Mike Bentley

For college tournaments, I would like to see "pop culture" as a category removed, but large swaths of what is currently relegated to trash being added to the fine arts canon. I think quizbowl is often too conservative about what kinds of films can tossed up, with college film studies clas...

Mike Bentley

I definitely agree that if you're going to include trash in an academic tournament, it really behooves you to pay as much attention to the sub-distribution as any other category. I've probably been harping on this for over 10 years now. Any category included in a distribution should be taken serious...

Mike Bentley

This has been okay. It's more enjoyable than other guerilla tournaments I've played in the past but I wouldn't want to oversell it. Probably in part because our team came in late, getting games scheduled has been something of a hassle. I also personally get worked up over quizbowl games (even for a...

Mike Bentley

For what it's worth we've run some online events in the past for the Pacific Northwest on a West Coast time schedule. But I stand by my assertion that late start times for national tournaments are bad. I'm not sure there's a single online tournament I've played where it's gotten past 8 PM Eastern ti...

Mike Bentley

You can pop out the Discord video window to see both that and the chat, although it's a bit hard to find.

Mike Bentley

Zoom's chat interface is not as good as Discord. The main disadvantage is the lack of sound notifications when someone types (or at least that's what was implied by moderators). This meant that moderators missed buzzes a lot more than in a Discord tournament (where this isn't perfect either) and te...

Mike Bentley

This has been okay. It's more enjoyable than other guerilla tournaments I've played in the past but I wouldn't want to oversell it. Probably in part because our team came in late, getting games scheduled has been something of a hassle. I also personally get worked up over quizbowl games (even for a ...

Mike Bentley

Some of my thoughts after playing Cambridge Open on Zoom. Things I liked better about Zoom tournaments than a standard Discord audio-only tournament: It's still a small sample size, but the audio for all our matches was pretty good. Usually in a Discord match you get at least one moderator who is cu...

Mike Bentley

The hotter take is that bonuses end up making a difference in a very small number of games. A large portion of a quizbowl match is devoted to them. As I've argued elsewhere, I'd love to see new approaches to bonuses that preserve the teamwork element but make them more engaging, especially for a tea...

Mike Bentley

I don't have very strong opinions about paired bonuses. I don't necessarily see how they would lead to moderators not making errors anymore unless you make them inline after the tossup. And even then you're still going to have some errors that show up because the moderator accidentally skipped a tos...

Mike Bentley

So is this going to happen?

Mike Bentley

John Lawrence's post reminded me that this terrible rule is still in place. Quizbowl must change this rule. I think the current policy is also too generous, but also the "drop to 50% chance of getting the question" policy is too penalizing. Without speculating as to the chance of "wh...

Mike Bentley

John Lawrence's post reminded me that this terrible rule is still in place. Quizbowl must change this rule.

Mike Bentley

[*] Please remember that a webcam is required to play this tournament. If you do not currently own a webcam, please work on getting one. [/list] I'm assuming that this is intended to prevent cheating, but how would it do that? If someone is googling, the webcam won't pick that up. The webcam will p...

Mike Bentley

Friendly reminder to everyone that this tournament is on a Sunday. That caused some problems for the last online tournament on a Sunday.

Mike Bentley

With CO cancelled this year, it's looking pretty likely there won't be any in-person summer events. That's a long time without quizbowl. Most online open tournaments since the lockdown have largely been late mirrors of tournaments that already happened to some capacity in person. Unless I'm missing ...

Mike Bentley

This packet's now up on the archive: https://hsquizbowl.org/db/questionsets/2258/

Mike Bentley

Apart from potential buginess with Discord video, is there any other benefit to Zoom over Discord? Reading sections in this document about having to go back to the lobby to talk to the TD about technical issues, using another platform for communicating about packets, push to talk not working that we...

Mike Bentley

Jokes aside, I'd be happy to contribute a couple of questions to this.

Mike Bentley

By the way, there was a 2019 iteration of this tournament, right? Is there a reason the questions haven't been posted to the archive?

Mike Bentley

I wonder if there's an option for a shorter, 2020-eligible tournament tacked on to the 2021 event. An event before and/or after the main event open only to teams based on 2020 eligibility. Since this is likely to be niche in the teams it attracts, perhaps ACF can make this event invite-only so that ...

Mike Bentley

naan/steak-holding toll wrote: ↑Thu May 07, 2020 12:50 am
LeoLaw wrote: ↑Wed May 06, 2020 11:27 pm I've never played a Zoom tournament before, is a webcam required?
Video will be mandatory for all participants.

I'd suggest emphasizing this about 100 times given how good quizbowl players are at paying attention to requirements.

Mike Bentley

I personally find the caret to be the best option when conferring via text. It saves you from having to type the answer again and avoids accidental giving of an answer for something that is naturally capitalized (like when someone types "PA" to mean "Pennsylvania"). With vocal co...

Mike Bentley

With CO postponed, any plans to reschedule Age of Empires or that social science tournament?

Mike Bentley

Ok looks like I'm leading a replacement packet team. Email me if you want to join, especially if you want to write science.

Mike Bentley

One of the teams (beepbeep, i'm a sheep) has contacted me about dropping out because they haven't been able to finish their packet; I have proposed that instead they absorb some of the unteamed free agents into a large team to finish the packet (and not require a new team to write from scratch). Yo...

Mike Bentley

I got around to listening to about a dozen of these episodes over the weekend. A few observations: As you'd expect, the distribution and sub-distributions are very different than today. For one, there's almost no science. Instead, there's a lot more poetry (in particular, completing lines of poetry ...

Mike Bentley

7:00 am pacific is very early. Assuming that most people wake up between 8 and 10 am, you're asking west coast people to wake up over an hour before their usual wakeup time. On the other hand, if the tournament starts at 8 am pacific, then even if it lasts 10 hours it will still end at 9 pm eastern...

Mike Bentley

As an antidote to this popular new game nonsense, I may convert my traditional yearly packet on old, obscure videogames into a slightly more formal ~4 round tournament. Depends how fast I finish other stuff. Stay tuned. (Just to be clear, am excited to play any videogame tournament, unless it's an R...

Mike Bentley

I'd strongly prefer a one day event. WORKSHOP pretty efficiently ran 11 packets with bonuses in one day. I don't see why this tournament couldn't do that.

Mike Bentley

A few thoughts on some questions mentioned in this thread: Contrary to an opinion stated above, I, and everyone else playing the question, hated the use of the pronoun "this resource" for randomness. I'm not sure that anyone would ever use that pronoun in normal speech and seemed a clear i...

Mike Bentley

I'm sure there's much more to dig up than what's publicly available on Google. On that note, I would encourage people who are interested in this topic to look and see whether there are any relevant materials in their university's archives/special collections department. I was able to find a few thi...

Mike Bentley

Excited to hear reports on how quizbowl over Zoom compares to Discord. We did some test games last week, and the consensus was that it worked well. We'll still be using the chat feature to buzz, but the rest plays out more or less the same way in-person events do (with the added bonus that unlike i...

Mike Bentley

Excited to hear reports on how quizbowl over Zoom compares to Discord.

Mike Bentley

As far as I can tell, the first use of a buzzer in a quiz contest was on the radio show Information Please in 1943, when guests Boris Karloff and Jan Struther were across the country and thus unable to raise their hands to answer. You can hear them fumble their way to this solution here: https://op...

Mike Bentley

In this age of Discord tournaments, I had no idea that the radio form of College Bowl was conducted with two teams playing remotely in radio studios. Mike Cheyne pointed me to some recordings from the 1950s that I hadn't heard before. They're fascinating. Well worth a listen: https://otrrlibrary.org...

Mike Bentley

Quick PSA for anyone like me who didn't pay close attention to the tournament's date: The tournament is on Sunday, not tomorrow. I also made this mistake and am now scrambling to change my weekend plans. So I was apparently not the only person on my team to make this mistake. We have another openin...

Mike Bentley

Quick PSA for anyone like me who didn't pay close attention to the tournament's date: The tournament is on Sunday, not tomorrow. I also made this mistake and am now scrambling to change my weekend plans. So I was apparently not the only person on my team to make this mistake. We have another openin...

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