The Quizbowl Resource Center

Matt Weiner

Any system where TDs, ACF, or anyone else is tasked with passing judgment on whether the reasons that some individual person took off time from school or quizbowl are "worthy" or not is incredibly flawed and unworkable by any metric we are applying here, and should not be used. In the next...

Matt Weiner

The current rule contains what's basically an exception to the experience criterion, that lets you have four years from HS even if you played a bunch of ACF tournaments in high school. Obviously, anyone implementing this by interrogating specific people about their age is an idiot, and I would not a...

Matt Weiner

They have to learn faster, get better faster, or they are going to quickly see their ability to play tournaments close. Nobody who was previously eligible has been made ineligible to play ACF by this rule change. Furthermore, the only person posting in this thread about Undergraduate status would h...

Matt Weiner

As a current high school player, I have to say this is beyond disappointing. ACF Fall and especially ACF Regionals are two of our most anticipated tournaments of the year. We rely on ACF regionals as one of the best gauges to the question difficulty we’ll experience in June. It also provides some o...

Matt Weiner

I do not speak for ACF, but I can speak for my own opinions on why I voted for all these changes and proposed some of them. Cody is getting at a key issue, which is that any high school team that wishes to play ACF Fall against college teams is definitionally too good to be playing against the sort ...

Matt Weiner

With all due respect, I don't see the point of trying to prove the impossibility of attending a tournament that 17 states attended last year. We're in year six of NASAT now, and I've learned a few things: *It's definitely not necessary to get a team together to practice. I don't know of a single NAS...

Matt Weiner

Full information has been added to the original post in the thread.

Matt Weiner

I think all of these questions and, by extension (or perhaps by antiprompting on "ACF Regionals 2015") all questions that use "antiprompts" have a more elegant solution to alternate answers than the perilous "antiprompt": In the "transformation" bonus part, yo...

Matt Weiner

The tossup on "mixing" had an "antiprompt" instruction on the answer line that essentially boiled down to "if the person buzzes in with the correct answer in line 1, "antiprompt" them and hope they magically know what larger class of things the correct answer they ...

Matt Weiner

I owe Drew Scheeler $100 in mirror fees from last summer's DUST trash tournament, but I do not have his mailing address. Over the last several months, I have tried e-mailing both him directly and Ian Lenhoff, who set up the mirror at VCU on his behalf, and have gotten no response. If Drew or someone...

Matt Weiner

So, we have Ithaca HS and Niagara University working on getting confirmed for Regional sites. I got nothing from anyone I talked to in the NYC area. I recently contacted the NYU quizbowl team about helping out, but they don't know yet (which is understandable given how little time they've had to loo...

Matt Weiner

East regional will be Sunday 2/1 at MIT. Website update and full announcements which will be posted here by Max are in the pipeline.

Matt Weiner

Out of curiosity, how often will these polls be done? Will it be monthly? The poll will be conducted six times per year: *A "preseason" poll at the end of August *A "fall" poll after the first few large tournaments, conducted around the last week of October *A "winter"...

Matt Weiner

Anyone planning to play the NHBB C set at James River HS this Monday should register through the NHBB website. The tournament needs to have some formal registrations in hand to move forward. Thanks.

Matt Weiner

VCU will once again be mirroring the Ottawa Hybrid Tournament and the Ohio trash tournament. This year, the event will take place at our main campus in Richmond on Sunday, March 22, from 8:30 AM to about 6 PM. As with all trash tournaments, this is an open, so teams do not have to be composed of pla...

Matt Weiner

I don't have any privileged information about how or why the choice to issue invoices in the way that they are was made, but it seems to me that the issue of sending an invoice is not the same thing as the issue of when payment is required. There's little marginal cost to e-mailing an updated digita...

Matt Weiner

http://www.hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewto ... =4&t=16855

Matt Weiner

The results of the first new high school poll are out. The improved methodology of this poll involved assembling a panel of experts (high school coaches and non-coaches who direct high school tournaments) from across 12 regions of the United States as well as Canada and international quizbowl. Each ...

Matt Weiner

Will the list of those who make the poll be released before or after the poll? In the case of their names remaining undisclosed I understand the reasoning for this as well. The list of voters will be released but specific ballots will not. The poll is closing at 5 PM so I hope to have the results u...

Matt Weiner

Those tournaments are happening on the announced dates; I'm trying to lock down the last hosts.

Matt Weiner

The Quizbowl Resource Center has inaugurated a new poll which will be based on a "panel of experts" approach. 26 high school coaches & college directors of high school tournaments representing 14 regions of the United States, Canada, and quizbowl abroad have cast their initial nominati...

Matt Weiner

I just don't think the problem with Maryland quizbowl has its roots in Daniel Galitsky calling his tournament SWAGFEST. The problem is that (almost) no one tries to engage teams in the Baltimore area (let alone the Eastern Shore or the west), creating a circuit that is limited to the Beltway. The f...

Matt Weiner

I'll remind people that the success of the Missouri Quizbowl Alliance was based on its ruthless devotion to running efficient, fair, professional tournaments at multiple sites around the state, no matter what entrenched interests opposed doing so. The people who will push back against running tourna...

Matt Weiner

It occurs to me as I write this that there may be ways to parse this distribution such that it's possible to include older trash that might still be readily consumable today (via Netflix, oldies radio, etc) or had a lasting impact on the cultural consciousness. There could be rules in a distributio...

Matt Weiner

This tournament will be held on Sunday, March 29 (the day after ICT) at Georgia Tech. The set will be co-written by a team including myself and Mike Cheyne. Style, distribution, and difficulty will be quite similar to the widely lauded 2014 set . Standard ACF rules will apply, with the sole exceptio...

Matt Weiner

I didn't really want to get into this post because Kenneth seems insistent on living outside of reality, but for the benefit of anyone else out there trying to start a team, it's important to set the record straight. What I meant by that term was just all of the things involved in creating a team (r...

Matt Weiner

Ryan's talking about the collegiate quizbowl dystopia he wishes to create where open teams are encouraged to participate in in-season tournaments and "regionals-plus opens during the year" become the norm again. In the universe he is posting from, being desperate to find enough college tea...

Matt Weiner

I have never quite understood why tournament fees are charged on a per-team basis rather than on a per-player basis. Granted, there are some costs tied to the number of teams participating (e.g. rooms to be reserved, moderators to be located); to deal with this, one could have fees like "$20 p...

Matt Weiner

In general, I think that open teams and masters players are used too much as a boogeyman in modern quizbowl. If you opened more tournaments up to exhibition teams, I don't think the sky would fall down, as people like Matt Jackson are fond of predicting. But no doubt, the "open tournaments = b...

Matt Weiner

Whether the point of the world literature distribution is to include "literature from non-Western cultures" or "literature not originally written in a European language" or "literature composed by someone physically residing in a place other than North America or Europe"...

Matt Weiner

Please note the board rule which states that "No thread may contain more than one request for the posting of tournament statistics within the same week or from the same person." I'm sure the stats will be posted as soon as possible; posting after them does not serve any purpose.

Matt Weiner

HOT NEW INFO: Assuming the field remains at 6 (with Seth and Ashvin being 2 separate open teams), we will run a double round robin unless someone can enlighten me on how to guarantee more games with the number of packets we have (15 counting Chicago's and Michigan's, 13 if we burn them both). I wil...

Matt Weiner

So, here we are for the Nth straight year with this. Some points to consider: The reason tournaments should run on time is not because top teams care. Top teams have a dedication to playing hard questions against high-quality opponents and an expectation that their entire Saturdays will be blocked o...

Matt Weiner

A "black" type of this food is made in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, with black pepper. Another variation on this food is sometimes named after Steubenville or the Ohio Valley. The Quad Cities-style of this food includes malt mixed into its base. A common version of this food may have been inv...

Matt Weiner

The site frontpage will now be an updated version of the DB. The blog will remain as a subsidiary feature. In the long term, I want people to be able to quickly find tournaments in their area without having to search for threads on the forums. This is not to discourage anyone from using the forums, ...

Matt Weiner

There are at least two people playing ACF Fall this year for colleges they "plan to apply to" in the spring, just that I already know of (and I'm not an ACF Fall editor, these are just the cases that made it back to me). The fact that the current rules seem to allow this was the impetus fo...

Matt Weiner

I initially didn't agree with the support that people such as Jay and Ben gave to Reach, however, if they can turn Reach into something like the Minnesota format that R runs that is a bridge between real quizbowl and knowledge bowl, that can be a good comprimise. My understanding is that the only u...

Matt Weiner

Let me take a crack at this. I will say that while I have been involved in many sorts of outreach projects, my home base in Virginia had multiple good high school events from before the time I started TDing, and our challenge has mostly been taking teams who already play one good event a year (VHSL ...

Matt Weiner

It's pretty clear that the only trash tossup in a tournament, inserted as tossup 1 of packet 1, is there to make a point and/or be funny, in a way that the exact same question buried among 15/15 trash in a tournament with a dedicated 1/1 trash per packet distro would not necessarily be.

Matt Weiner

Also: I'm curious as to why a tossup on a central concept from a very-well known cartoon is to be labeled a "less" legitimate form of trash simply because people who are half your age can enjoy it as well. We feel that “traditional” quizbowl trash puts an inordinate amount of emphasis on s...

Matt Weiner

I think this is a good teaching moment about why these cartoon questions are so polarizing and perhaps unwise to include in academic quizbowl most of the time. As we have discussed in the past regarding anime, it's an "all-in" phenomenon -- either you have little to no idea what it is, or ...

Matt Weiner

Why was the tossup on the Airbending thing not a "tossup 0" instead of a real tossup? If my team had lost a game based on that funn tossup I would have been very upset. Yeah, it was never claimed that this tournament would not have trash. Having trash in only one round in service of the d...

Matt Weiner

I'd say yes. In the latter case, I'd say that their team forfeits their wins. I get that it's not a huge penalty to have to forfeit your record at ACF Fall, but then again, that's mostly because ACF Fall wins aren't that precious in the first place. If someone does this in total bad faith, they wil...

Matt Weiner

Right, but the clue was: Until 2009, politicians in this country could use “floor crossing” to switch parties, a practice used by a mayor who blew the whistle on the Strategic Defense Acquisition here. The quotes make it clear that we're supposed to get something out of this term itself, which is im...

Matt Weiner

Could I see the rest of your South Africa question, Will? I liked the lead-in a lot, as I've never heard floor-crossing mentioned in a tossup before, even though it was a relatively big deal in South African politics. This was actually a really bad clue that didn't understand that "crossing th...

Matt Weiner

Having two mirrors of an open tournament in the same state makes no sense; that said, I obviously prefer a Norcal site to a UCSD one. Auroni, if you have any interest in approving something in the Bay Area (Stanford A would travel down to San Diego to play, by the way, though we are considering the...

Matt Weiner

There has been some recent discussion of the underutilization of the IRC quizbowl channels as a tool for outreach and other quizbowl improvement. The outcome of that discussion is as follows: Big changes: Quizbowl IRC is now a "sponsored project" of hsquizbowl.org. Hsquizbowl.org has appoi...

Matt Weiner

William & Mary would like to announce Oxford Open for February 28th. Are there any objections to this? The announcement for STIMPY only stated that they were looking to run the set during the first two weeks of March. This is the date of VHSL Scholastic Bowl states being held at your very schoo...

Matt Weiner

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do NOT break up a word with a hyphen to put part of it on one line of text and the rest on the next line! It makes for awkward reading and it's absolutely unnecessary unless you've typed up the q on a manual typewriter. Thank you. I don't know if this is a condemnation of LaTeX...

Matt Weiner

compare to this very inappropriate but fucking awesome (rejected) question for Nationals 2011"] It should be noted that (according to the editors) the only reason this question was rejected was because they did include another animal question submitted in the same packet, namely the bonus on t...

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