The Quizbowl Resource Center

Howard

Thanks, Dwight. As Matt basically said upthread, this situation requires a resolution that the community stop pushing its luck. It does not require a scapegoat. Exactly. TJ made it very clear to us what they needed and when they needed it by, and the majority of the group did not take this seriousl...

Howard

I've found gmail is now sending your notices to spam. I indicated they weren't spam, so we'll see whether this keeps happening.

Howard

Just to make certain we're clear, you're mirroring the same set that Maggie Walker is mirroring on 10/10, which can be found here?

Howard

Yeah, I told you privately that you should not use single elimination because there are fairer ways of determining a champion, and no high quality tournaments in your area use that format, and I am very disappointed that you didn't listen to me. And now you've destroyed any benefit that was achieve...

Howard

In my experience, and this will vary regionally of course, SAT dates do indeed significantly affect tournament attendance. Rarely do I attend a tournament on such a date that doesn't have a poor turnout. I do agree, however, that there shouldn't be a need to post here about it. SAT dates, ACT dates,...

Howard

In the past, I've severely lambasted certain people and groups in quizbowl for their bad tournaments, been criticized for it, and defended it. I will still defend those approaches towards people who aren't participating in the rational discussion of how to improve, because I believe those are the a...

Howard

Indeed, this may already be happening with several of the DC area private schools hertofore have only done It's Academic, although we will have to see if St. Anslem's shift to circuit quizbowl is an anomaly or the start of a trend. If Matt and I have our way, you should see St. Anselm's at good tou...

Howard

We'd consider doing this, but would choose a significantly closer event if on the same day. Google maps puts the trip at about two hours. Not whining about the length of trip, of course. Certainly you guys have made this trip much more often than we have.

Howard

QUESTIONS GALORE WIKIPLAGIARISM 3T14: “This English author was gifted in mathematics, photography and making up fanciful stories.” Wikipedia (“Lewis Carroll”): “…was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. ” (Since nobody has mentioned it yet) this hardly seems...

Howard

You're right that there are teams that do better than other teams at It's Academic year after year, but the game is not all knowledge, either. While the speed isn't a randomizer, it's just how fast you can hit the buzzer. This year, my primary strategy was to hit the buzzer and then think about wha...

Howard

I also have to tell you that I have had my team invited to the NAC in years where we did not necessarily have a good team (and our team was not the only team to get "cold called" like this. I can confirm that this year my team was invited to the NAC based on an accomplishment we had not y...

Howard

Go ahead and make us a solid one team. Will bring buzzer.

Howard

If by "content" you mean "are there going to be word choices that might make some people blush," I guess that's possible, but I'm not going out of my way to include that stuff or anything like that. Sorry for the ambiguity. I meant word choices or perhaps question topics of a mo...

Howard

Will the content be what most people would consider as suitable for high school-aged people? I've received several statements of interest from students, but wish to make sure they're appropriately warned about content if necessary.

Howard

Dan makes excellent points. Additionally, I'll add that, unlike buzzer systems, laptops are prime targets of thieves due to their significant street value and are relatively easy to steal by simply picking up and carrying away. I'm not even sure I'm willing to allow someone else to guard my laptop e...

Howard

I'm just not a fan of this "age-balancing" talk. I can hardly be the only person who watches old TV reruns AND watches what's on now, or, say, has played Atari/NES games and some games for the PS3. As has already been addressed, I don't think Mike intends to leave out older things, just t...

Howard

Yeah, this tournament had an unacceptable amount of typos, and I usually don't even care about that kind of thing. It had even more than you thought, because I caught a great deal on the fly in every round I read. We'll definitely be devoting more time to fixing this next year. I thought this set d...

Howard

I have sent you an email detailing my concerns about that from fellow staffer perspective, and discussion of it does not belong on the board. As soon as the questions are posted, I hope you will make use of the discussion thread to point out the objects you had to the tournament material. It seems ...

Howard

I think there actually might need to be a discussion about the whole hybrid team when it's going to see putting some of the top players from two NSC-attending teams together for a regular high school invitational. That seems like a silly idea to me, and I don't think it has much precedent in high s...

Howard

OK, so at lunch I've had a bit more time to think about this. With 30 teams, do 5 pelim brackets of six, followed by 2 play-off brackets of six and cross bracket finals make sense? And then the remaining 18 teams could go into 3 brackets of 6 and get a total of 10 rounds that way. I would suggest b...

Howard

Sent entry for one team using link in original post.

Google maps says 144 miles. "Missed it by that much."

Howard

Bad Boy Bill wrote:Now, as long as we keep it at 33, 34, 35, or 36 teams....

Good luck on that. Of course, we won't know for sure until Saturday.

Howard

Hilarius Bookbinder wrote:I can also report several teams choosing computational math, and the same problems as Will noticed.

Ditto.

Howard

Bad Boy Bill wrote:34 is workable too, two groups will have a bye in the first set.

May I suggest interbracket play in this case, even if it doesn't count toward tournament results? I've always found it annoying when more than one team had a bye.

Howard

Unfortunately, we're not likely to be able to make this tournament. Hopefully, all goes smoothly.

Howard

Quite simply, if we wanted to go, we can't on the 19th, and probably can't on the 26th. So the last choice would be the best even though it's quite a bit later. Well, perhaps better for you. I think something we should keep in mind though is that if you're hosting a Sunday tournament you are automa...

Howard

pretzeldude92 wrote: I don't think we will be able to let Howard go. Nothing personal, but it might look a little sketchy.

No offense taken. Best of luck with the tournament and to the teams that attend.

Howard

In the case of the members of the board, I doubt few are anti-trash. However, we're entering dangerous territory when we encourage students or others to choose between trash and academic tournaments. There's little reason these two can't peaceably coexist and be run at times so as to not conflict w...

Howard

As someone whose team likes to attend and does, from time to time attend trash tournaments, perhaps there'll be some benefit to hearing my point of view (regardless of who wanted the date first). I would consider taking my team to a trash event in New Jersey for the following reasons: -- even though...

Howard

We haven't requested the power-marked version of the set; if a bunch of teams want it I suppose there's no reason not to, but no one seemed to mind the absence of power marks at the fall tournament. Perhaps this would be better addressed elsewhere, but here's my question: If the set has already bee...

Howard

I don't think this will be too much of a problem as that was only an 8-team tournament and at least three of those teams (Cosby included) have not traveled an hour for a tournament before, and would likely not attend otherwise. If you need it, that list is just: MW, Cosby, Freeman, New Kent x2, Tuck...

Howard

Howard High School has interest. Availability is likely to be questionable until near the tournament date.

Howard

I'll express interest as well. Delaware is a strong contender, too. So if you're indeed using the same set, we'll only be able to attend one of the two unless enough different students are available on each weekend to actually attend both.

Howard

Well, if that's the case... that's complete crap and pretty lame of NAQT to do that. There are more problems than i initially realized. I believe that is what happened with the Delaware Open- initially, an IS Set was booked but was reassigned to an A set. Unless there's been a change, that's not th...

Howard

The 2-3 times we tried to play in rooms without having them reserved worked fine. I've found that despite what scheduling says, there will be lots of rooms open during the weekend. Sunday, especially, will have open rooms so long as the building is open (which they should be since it's during the s...

Howard

That being said, I was kind of surprised that the Hammond people scheduled it for the same day - we have, after all, claimed this date for a while, in various other threads including Daichi's master calendar of sorts for the DC/MD/VA area. Hammond has chosen the first Saturday after returning from ...

Howard

Obviously "impossibility" is an overstatement; however, my point all along was that four line questions just don't cut it when you're trying to distinguish these teams. Sure, their would still be "buzzer races" with longer questions, but this would occur much less frequently. I'...

Howard

Obviously "impossibility" is an overstatement; however, my point all along was that four line questions just don't cut it when you're trying to distinguish these teams. Sure, their would still be "buzzer races" with longer questions, but this would occur much less frequently. I'...

Howard

Personally, I believe the card system works better with more rounds than five. It does not have the desired result until at least seven rounds are played. In my opinion, last year's format was better. The card system has issues once the number of rounds is greater than the log to the base two of th...

Howard

I was reading as fast as I could without being totally unintelligible, and was only getting 19 or 20 questions in. Same here. Most games were 18-20 questions. If my recollection is correct, even with two very good teams in the room, I would get through at least 50% of the question 50% of the time. ...

Howard

That still doesn't answer my question. Not speaking for TJ, but it's pretty simple, really. Until you pay, you cannot register for any more tournaments at the school in question. If they don't come back and don't pay, that's okay, too. Sorry about the e-mails, Harry. Found out I left a letter out o...

Howard

hwhite wrote:I don't think I got your e-mail (Greyson may have, I didn't), but we would love to have your help.

Great. I'll be there.

Howard

That is an interesting thought. We've never done that before...I may have to see what people think of that. I think a lot of teams would play more games with our current system, though, which is part of the argument for round-robin playoffs anyway. I hadn't realized you'd already announced your str...

Howard

We're one of the teams that dropped, but I'm willing to moderate/scorekeep if you'd like, especially if it'll help increase the field size. Since I see Harry has posted here but not answered my e-mail, I'll presume that he hasn't had a chance to check e-mail yet. I'll be somewhat out of town Thursda...

Howard

I'd like to agree with everything Matt posted in the initial post. The only point I have to add is that many high school teams still want to go home after they're out of contention. Of course, this lack of dedication is part of the reason they're not in contention to begin with, but one must always ...

Howard

Some tournaments have a system wherein the bonus is related to the tossup. In these instances (or in any other instance when the bonuses are somehow tied to the tossup), it's important to preserve that relationship by skipping the bonus when a tossup is missed. Otherwise, I'm in agreement with the i...

Howard

Diachi-I see your point. However, this tournament may not be the best yardstick of the disparity between the elite and the second-tier, since some teams who attend this tournament quite possibly focus on It's Academic(local game show) and It's academic-style tournaments to the exculsion of curcit q...

Howard

More details on an RM fall tournament: a very tentative date is Saturday, September 27th (the last weekend of September). I'd like to point out that there's already a tournament scheduled for this date in the same county at Blake High School. Edit: Perhaps if I improve my reading skills a little, I...

Howard

It's also annoying when a reader just breezes through the text with no regard to punctuation you'd think there isn't any and wonder when one sentence ends and the next begins. Or when one inserts pauses. In the middle of a sentence then they just charge right into the next one with no break between...

Howard

The correct speed to read a tournament is "fast". I'm going to say that I disagree with this, especially at the high school level. Ultimately, the reading should be tailored to meet the needs of the teams playing. My experience is that reading too fast, even if precise and clear, discoura...

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