The Quizbowl Resource Center

Mike Bentley

Perhaps some of this could be run while JORDU is going on? That tournament doesn't have too many people signed up right now. I'm guessing you'll get more interest in a few people playing some rounds on Sunday than coming back on Monday.

Mike Bentley

I urge opposition to the Scylla and Charybdis of modern quizbowl: (1) The deep dive into primary source material that seeks to reward "direct engagement" with a given text/source as opposed to secondary or tertiary knowledge of the timeline. (often these are "soft buzz" question...

Mike Bentley

I'm looking for a teammate who is looking to get last place in this tournament. Or, I guess, someone who wants to make this tournament more challenging for themselves by effectively playing solo. Which is to say I'm putting myself out there as a buzzer rock for this event.

Mike Bentley

Will there be a stream for the finals? If not, can someone official please give explicit permission for live bloggers to spoil question content? This makes for a much more engaging watching experience.

Mike Bentley

Hi everyone, this is an open call for editors and writers for the 2022 PACE National Scholastic Championship. To apply, please email me at mbentleypace@gmail.com. Applications should be sent by Saturday, August 21st. Applicants must have already graduated from high school and cannot be directly invo...

Mike Bentley

Packets have been uploaded to the question archive.

Mike Bentley

Are we going to have enough staff to run this tournament? I only see one person signed up right now. I'd be happy to pay an entry fee apart from the donations to help attract staffers.

Mike Bentley

Oh that was the other server. I'll be posting the packets publicly soon.

Mike Bentley

Jaimie Carlson's team has one open slot for anyone who wants to join.

Mike Bentley

Registration is now closed. I've assigned free agents to teams. Will send out a logistics mail soon.

We could use a few more staffers. Let me know if you're interested. Will pay $20.

Mike Bentley

I'm going to close sign-ups tonight. If we don't have anyone else sign up, I'm going to assign the free agents to the existing 4 teams (with some teams ending up with 5 people).

Mike Bentley

Looks like we now have enough people to guarantee the tournament will happen.

Mike Bentley

Writing a high quality national set is an enormous amount of work. The quizbowl community already produces at least 3 of these a year at the high school level. Mirroring a college set probably makes sense, although you do have the downsides of (a) making sure such a set with enough packets exists, (...

Mike Bentley

Hoping to get at least a few more people signed up for this by this weekend to ensure the event happens.

Mike Bentley

Hi, I'm going to attempt an abridged mirror of The World As It Is before I release the packets. The tournament will be on Friday 7/9/21 starting at 7:00 PM EDT. It will be tossup-only with teams of 4. Entry fee is $10 per person. Estimate is somewhere between 6 and 8 packets. If there's more interes...

Mike Bentley

I have assembled question-by-question conversion stats based on the scoresheets , which were shared in the Discord by Harry White, in case these are interesting to anyone. The stats include 20/10/dead numbers for tossups, 30/20/10/0 numbers for bonuses, and individual part conversion for bonuses. K...

Mike Bentley

A few things to discuss: How verbose should answer lines be and how much moderator discretion should one give? We generally tried to include as many answers as reasonable in the answer lines (although of course there were some oversights). There were some cases I heard about where answers like "...

Mike Bentley

Thanks for playing the 2021 NSC! Sorry for the delays on Saturday evening. Running a new tournament format at such a large tournament is always challenging. Thankfully, we had a backup packet that avoided any serious disruptions in the tournament (apart from people's time). I don't have much to say ...

Mike Bentley

I can't imagine the demand for this tournament as written is so high to basically take all of the Sunday slot. No, and I do not expect it to. I don't want to push aside or compete with other events, as the CO weekend has always been about playing as much quality quiz bowl as possible. As others hav...

Mike Bentley

I'm looking for teammates for this. Email me at [email protected].

Mike Bentley

Looking for a teammate for this.

Mike Bentley

Still could use a handful more playtesters for tonight at 9:45 edt and possibly tomorrow and Wednesday.

Mike Bentley

I don't think this tournament as planned is a good idea. I don't see any way that you're going to be able to fit 562 tossups into a CO side event slot. For comparison, Scattergories 3 was 240 questions. Looking at my recordings, each match of 24 questions was about 20 minutes. So figure closer to 25...

Mike Bentley

Hi, I'll be starting Wave 3 playtesting on packetized questions soon. Could use more playtesters for that. Please let me know if you're interested. Will be on weekdays around 8 PM EDT. Will also do some this weekend for anyone not staffing HSNCT.

Mike Bentley

Cool!

Mike Bentley

Nothing offensive about the term "TRASH", at least as it's used in the QB community. I've seen/read it somewhere that it's actually an acronym for Testing Recall About Strange Happenings. Pop culture stuff gets thrown in with "trash" because the two have become kind of like a ca...

Mike Bentley

I think someone else may have already had this idea, but one option is to use "pop" for "trash". "Pop tournament" is about as easy to say as "trash tournament" and conveys about as much information to an outsider but doesn't have negative connotations.

Mike Bentley

Is that open mirror still happening on 5/1?

Mike Bentley

Oh also I should mention that a few questions from this set were playtested last year. I'm guessing most people have forgotten them but pay attention if you participated in that.

Mike Bentley

I'm going to be holding NSC playtesting between now and when the set's finished. There will be at least 2 waves. Wave 1 will definitely happen. At least one of Wave 2 or 3 will happen. Wave 1 - April weekends and the occasional weeknight starting this week: -Randomized (not packetized) tossups and b...

Mike Bentley

Given how hard most of those sample questions are and the sheer quantity of questions here, any consideration of making a version of this set just with the easier answers? I suspect that would get a much bigger interest. I'm personally uninterested in playing 600 tossups if 450 of them are going to ...

Mike Bentley

I'm looking for a few teammates. Happy to have anyone who fits the category of "I like playing quizbowl, but not hard tournaments, and I'm no longer eligible to play college tournaments."

Mike Bentley

Yes, I do have that kind of data but I won’t reveal specific numbers due to certain constraints (at this time, I don’t believe the data will be made available to non-editors/writers). Literature was on average powered more than other categories (tied for the highest power percentage out of all cate...

Mike Bentley

Would it be possible to post a couple of sample questions?

Mike Bentley

Not sure how long these tossups are, but 600 tossups is 30 packets. Even at a tossup-only event you're probably looking at something longer than a typical tossup/bonus event. And if you're pushing for an in-person event I'm guessing in practice almost every mirror is only going to use a fraction of ...

Mike Bentley

Thanks for hosting this! I thought this was a great set with many interesting clues and answer lines. I encourage everyone to play it.

Mike Bentley

By the way, for anyone not checking the server, the packets are now posted there in the #announcements channel. Curious to hear people's thoughts about literature. We deliberately included a big non-fiction and other distribution. The other ended up having some "literary culture" type ques...

Mike Bentley

I'll be reading the remaining two packets to the top two teams at 8 PM EST tomorrow. Nick will be reading those packets to everyone else in a separate channel at the same time.

Mike Bentley

Thanks everyone for playing the set! I'm glad to finally be finished this set, as it was probably the longest-gestating set I've written. I first had the idea for this set around 2017 and some of the initial ideas took form then. Work on it began in earnest in late 2018. It was effectively delayed f...

Mike Bentley

There's now a private discussion forum.

Mike Bentley

Would love to see a North American mirror of this. Since it would presumably be a large staff commitment, I'm personally willing to pay a higher than usual entry fee to attract more freelance staff.

Mike Bentley

Congrats to Bloc Jébécois for clearing the field and winning the tournament. Thanks to everyone who helped make the tournament happen. Stats are here: https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/6815/ I mentioned in the other thread I was going to release the set soon, but I guess I'll wait a few more day...

Mike Bentley

Team contacts should have received a logistics mail earlier this week, including a link to the Discord server. Let me know if you need me to forward it to you. If you haven't already joined the server, please do so today so that I can get roles assigned prior to tomorrow morning.

Mike Bentley

Looks like not enough interest. I'll release the set following the mirror on Sunday.

Mike Bentley

Free agents have been assigned to teams. As of today, there's still one open spot for any late joiners.

Mike Bentley

I'm gauging interest in a second mirror of The World as It Is. Please vote in this date poll by Thursday. If there's not sufficient interest, I will release the set following the main mirror on Sunday.

Mike Bentley

Change of heart, I'm instead setting a field cap of 22 teams. There will be a prelim of 7 games, with some teams having one of those games be a cross-bracket game that mostly won't count. Top 2 teams from each bracket will advance to top bracket. They'll play 4 cross-bracket games for a total of 11 ...

Mike Bentley

With about 1.5 weeks until the tournament, there's still some open spots for teams. I'll start assigning free agents on to teams by next Wednesday, so form now. I'm also imposing the following restriction on any teams forming: If you're forming from people currently signed up on the free agent list ...

Mike Bentley

Did the email invite go out already? If so, I didn't receive it.

Mike Bentley

Quick update: We got a new influx of staffers so I'm officially expanding to 24 teams. I don't expect to move beyond this limit unless there's a huge demand to go to 27 or 28.

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