Fall Novice @ St. Anselm's Abbey School (10/22/11)

[Kouign Amann]

This is the official announcement for the DC Metro regional site of the Fall Novice Tournament, a high school academic quizbowl tournament to be hosted by the quizbowl team of St. Anselm’s Abbey School on Saturday, October 22, 2011. This tournament is open to any high school team that wishes to attend and meets the entrance restrictions.

This tournament will take place at St. Anselm’s Abbey School in northeast Washington, DC. The exact address is 4501 South Dakota Avenue NE, Washington, DC, 20017.

PARKING: Parking is available in either of the two lots on school grounds.

TIMES: Registration will run from 8:15 to 8:45. An opening meeting will then follow, with the goal of starting Round 1 as soon as possible after 8:45. Teams arriving after 8:45 run the risk of forfeiting their first game.

ENTRANCE RESTRICTIONS: In keeping with what seems to be the FNT trend in DC, eligibility will be restricted to players in their first or second year of competition in high school quizbowl. In addition, any players who have played in either of quizbowl’s two national championships, the NAQT HSNCT and the PACE NSC, will be excluded. Teams are welcome to contact the tournament director on a case-by-case basis if they have players whom they feel would benefit from this tournament but who would be disallowed under a strict administration of these rules. Conversely, if a team has an otherwise-eligible player whose attendance the tournament director feels would harm the overall tournament, he will inform them as such, and a solution will be worked out.

QUESTIONS: The questions will come from the Fall Novice Tournament set, a nationwide collaboration to create a set appropriate for new and developing quizbowl teams.

The questions will follow a modified ACF format; that is, games of 20 tossups with 30-point bonuses, untimed. The questions will be distributed for free in electronic format after all sites have been completed. Sample packets from previous incarnations of this set can be found at http://www.quizbowlpackets.com/archive/2010FNT/ and http://www.quizbowlpackets.com/archive/09fallnovice/.

FORMAT: The field is temporarily capped at 16 teams due to staffing limitations. For each competent outside moderator we are promised, we will expand that cap by two teams, up to a theoretical maximum of 32, the most we can support in usable classrooms.

A format will be devised when we have a clearer picture of how many staffers and teams will be in attendance. All teams will be offered a minimum of 9 games in any format, should they desire to play them. Trophies will be awarded to the top three teams, and book prizes will be awarded to the top eight individual scorers.

REGISTRATION AND FEES:
-The fee structure is as follows:
Base fee: $45 per team. Due to the small field size, we are temporarily limiting schools to two teams each for this event. If you are interested in bringing more than two teams, please indicate as such in your registration, and we will add them to a wait-list and allow them into the field later on if there is enough space.
Buzzer discount: $5 off school's total fee for each fully functional system (i.e., control box and eight activators all work). We encourage schools to bring as many sets as possible.
Staffer discount: $10 off school's total fee. This could be a coach or student who is not playing. Volunteer staffers must stay through all the games (except finals) in order to receive credit for their school.
Travel discount: For teams travelling to the tournament from out-of-town, we will be happy to work out travel discounts on a case-by-case basis.

-To register, e-mail Aidan Mehigan at [email protected] (preferably with something about “quizbowl” and/or “tournament” in the subject line) with the number of teams, buzzers, and staffers you want to bring, and an email address where you can be contacted with details. We also ask that all teams provide a cell phone number by which they can be contacted on the day of the tournament in the case of emergencies. You should receive prompt confirmation of your registration. Feel free to share this announcement with any schools you think would be interested in attending. There is no further registration form or other action needed on your part in order to be officially registered; you only need to e-mail Aidan at that address with the information requested.

METHOD OF PAYMENT: All teams must pay by the day of the tournament. We prefer to accept payment in person right before the tournament starts, but we will accept checks by mail ahead of time if your procedures require it. We can accept cash, personal checks, or checks from school, school district, or quizbowl club funds. We have no ability to process purchase orders, credit cards, Paypal, or any other forms of payment; please do not bring them to the tournament expecting them to be accepted.

Unless special arrangements are made with the tournament director beforehand, any team that has not paid by the day of the tournament will be charged a $25 late fee and will have two weeks to pay in full before we start mailing letters to their school administration about it.

Please make checks payable to “St. Anselm’s Abbey School,” with “Quizbowl” on the memo line. If you require a pre-tournament invoice in order to have a check cut, let us know as soon as possible so that we can send you the paperwork in time.

TEAM & ROSTER SIZE: There may be a maximum of six players on one team's roster, up to four of whom may play at one time. There will be no exceptions to this rule. If you bring more than six players, you must register a second team to have all of them play. There will be a halftime substitution opportunity in each game. Each player may appear on only one team's roster throughout the day - no switching from the B team to the A team, etc. Teams may also play shorthanded if necessary.

FOOD: Neither breakfast nor lunch will be provided at this tournament. Directions to local eateries will be supplied. Due to a dearth of walking-distance food options, we will also be offering teams the opportunity to order pizza for lunch.

Please e-mail me if you have any further questions. We’re looking forward to seeing a wide variety of teams from DC and surrounding states on October 22.

[Kouign Amann]

SCHOOL - TEAMS - BUZZERS - MODERATORS

St. Anselm's (MS) - 2 - 1 - some
Wakefield - 2 - 2 - 1
Maret - 1 - 0 - 0
Centennial - 4 - 2 - 1
Wilson - 1 - 1 - 1
Marshall - 1 - 1 - 1
Longfellow - 3 - 1- 0
Seton - 2 - 1 - 0
Caesar Rodney - 1 - 1 - 1
New Kent - 1 - 2 - 0
Gonzaga - 1 - 0 - 1
GDS - 1 - 3 - 1
Howard - 1 - 2 - 1
TJ - 4 - 1 - 5
Collegiate - 1 - 1 - 0
RM - 2 - 1 - 1

TOTALS: 28 - 20 - 14

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

We'd love to come to this. I'll figure out who i can bring and send a registration e-mail soon. It'll just be one team, but you know i'd love to help moderate to maybe help expand the field by a couple teams.

[Kouign Amann]

This tournament is now less than three weeks away! We'd really love some more teams and some more staffers, so get registered.

[Kouign Amann]

A couple of drops have put us at 28 teams for Saturday. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to schedule 28 teams on 13 packets, assuming we need to save 2 for a final and 1 for tiebreaking?

[biggiebird89]

4 divisions of 7 for prelims (7 rounds, 6 games per team) - rebracketed into 7 divisions of 4 (3 matches per team) gives you 10 rounds, 9 matches, with plenty of breathing room.

[mithokie]

Regarding the 4 pools of 7 giving teams 6 games in 7 rounds, you could play cross-bracket games that don't count in the standings during the AM rounds, just so teams don't have byes. Additionally, be wary of your bracketing in this setup, as a team will have to win its prelim pool to be eligible for the championship. I would probably consider the following.

Let prelim groups be named A,B,C, and D, and A1 represents the team that finished 1st in prelim group 1.Use tiebreakers to determine placement into groups if necessary; where the difference between A2 and A1 is irrelevant, but the difference between A2 and A3 matters very much, as does the difference between 4th and 5th place, and 6th and 7th.

Afternoon groups
E: A1, B1, C2, D2
F: A2, B2, C1, D1
G: A3, B3, C4, D4
H: A4, B4, D3, D3
I: A5, B5, C6, D6
J: A6,B6,C5,D5
K: A7,B7,D7,E7

Each afternoon group plays a 3-round round robin on 3 packets. Play tiebreaks, if necessary, for placement in groups E and F, let other groups placement be decided statistically, and then play cross bracket games for final placement.

E1 vs. F1 for 1st place,
E2 vs. F2 for 3rd place, etc...

Note that K1, K2, K3, and K4 are done after the group K round robin.

By my calculations, that would be 7 rounds for prelims, 1 round for prelim TB (cut into half-packets allowing for the possibility of 3 way ties), 3 rounds for playoffs, 1 round for afternoon tie-breaks (also cut into half packets for possible 3 way ties), leaving a single packet to determine your overall champion.

7+1+3+1+1 = 13

Teams ranked 25-28 play 10 games, and everyone else plays 11 games (assuming you play a crossover game in the AM).

Advantage: A single loss in prelims will not completely eliminate a team from contention.
Disadvantage: You lose the ability to play an advantaged final.

I will be interested to hear what you end up doing, and to know how it works out.

[biggiebird89]

True - but that may (in a very nit-picky sense) give some teams an unfair advantage of already seeing how a team they could play in playoffs perform. This could result in changes of strategies for that team, etc. Mind you, it's very minuscule if that, but someone might say something about it.

[Kouign Amann]

That was my first thought. It just seems suboptimal to have only four teams in the top bracket, so I was wondering if anyone had any better ideas. If we had more packets, we could have playoff tiers consisting of two brackets of four and then do some crossing over, but we don't. Any creative solutions out there?

[Kouign Amann]

True - but that may (in a very nit-picky sense) give some teams an unfair advantage of already seeing how a team they could play in playoffs perform. This could result in changes of strategies for that team, etc. Mind you, it's very minuscule if that, but someone might say something about it.

I don't think this is particularly consequential.

[biggiebird89]

Hence why I said it was just nit-picky in saying so. I think 4 brackets of 7 into 7 of 4 works the best.

[dtaylor4]

Hence why I said it was just nit-picky in saying so. I think 4 brackets of 7 into 7 of 4 works the best.

This also creates the sub-optimal situation where one loss means a team may be ineligible to win the tournament. I think Beeken's idea is good, as long as you carry over the games involving teams in parallel brackets (i.e. A1 v A2).

[biggiebird89]

I agree. I should admit I did not see that long entry when I submitted my "nit-picky" comment, so I apologize if that offended anyone. I like the idea of balanced playoff pools better, and disqualifying one team for losing one game really doesn't boost their morale when playing either.

[Howard]

If this were a normal tournament where we could better predict the teams' abilities, I might go with 7 brackets of four.

Then take the top team in each bracket and one wild card based on the tiebreaking statistic of your choice into two brackets of four for a round-robin. Then take the top two from each of these brackets for a round robin.

Take the remaining teams and order them according to your statistics, and have them play double round-robins.

If you feel you can rank the teams accurately, I'd suggest doing this for the simple reason that it provides more games between teams with similar abilities. On the downside, this only provides nine games whereas you'd initially indicated you'd have ten. This isn't a big difference to me, but I don't know how the other teams feel.

[wilsonmathteacher]

If this were a normal tournament where we could better predict the teams' abilities, I might go with 7 brackets of four.

Then take the top team in each bracket and one wild card based on the tiebreaking statistic of your choice into two brackets of four for a round-robin. Then take the top two from each of these brackets for a round robin.

Take the remaining teams and order them according to your statistics, and have them play double round-robins.

If you feel you can rank the teams accurately, I'd suggest doing this for the simple reason that it provides more games between teams with similar abilities. On the downside, this only provides nine games whereas you'd initially indicated you'd have ten. This isn't a big difference to me, but I don't know how the other teams feel.

Unfortunately, I don't think that it is likely to be possible to rank teams that accurately given that this is a novice tournament and there is a lot more uncertainty about the composition of the teams involved. I know from past tournaments that missing out on being in the top tier because of one loss to a team that was surprisingly good could be frustrating (I know the top teams find this to be so when we do X groups of 4), and having statistical tiebreakers picking only one team is also not ideal.

Ideally we would have 5 prelim games then lunch, which could be done with 3 groups of 6 and 2 groups of 5 with crossover, but I couldn't think of any good way to split the teams into playoff groups after that (worst two second place, all third place and best 4th place? yuck!)

I think the larger original groups (of 7) are almost necessary for this to work well, even if it is suboptimal from a getting more competitive games standpoint and from a scheduling standpoint since there is a break for lunch after round 4ish and another after round 6, or a lot of hungry kids.

It could be worse, you could have 27 teams

[Kouign Amann]

This is probably a little late to be useful, but if anyone is taking the Metro in the morning, please know that Brookland will be closed, and, inevitably, that will cause issues getting to Ft. Totten. Please adjust accordingly.

[Kouign Amann]

Congrats to TJ A for defeating Longfellow A in the champinoship game of the 2011 Fall Novice Tournament. Stats are here.

Thanks to everyone who came out for this tournament, especially the many staffers without whom today would not have been possible. We hope y'all had a good time. Also, thanks are due to Mr. Beeken, whose schedule worked very well for us.

The stats report makes order of finish sort of unclear, so here it is:

1. TJ A
2. Longfellow A
3. RM A
4. Centennial A
5. TJ B
6. Gonzaga
7. New Kent
8. Centennial B

[wilsonmathteacher]

Congrats should go out to St. Anselm's, who ran a really tight tournament (except maybe for packet 11 ). I don't think there were any significant delays or issues, and my kids had a really good time.

I think there were some issues with the questions, but obviously that needs to wait for them to be cleared.

[Kouign Amann]

I think there were some issues with the questions, but obviously that needs to wait for them to be cleared.

Please direct any feedback about the questions to me by email, and I'll make sure it gets to the right people.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

I thought this set was great, and other than sort-of-repeats (which are bound to happen in novice sets of like 12 rounds), there really isn't much i would change. I especially loved the bonuses and thought they were incredibly accessible without being insultingly easy.

I had fun reading, so thanks for the opportunity. My kids probably enjoyed themselves as well, but it's hard to tell with such a poor record. I guess it was a humbling experience.

Also, i know this is a novice tournament, but is anybody aware of any middle school ever making the finals of a high school quizbowl tournament? Longfellow is ridiculous. TJ is going to have incredible players for many years to come... if only we had middle schools who cared about quizbowl here.

EDIT: Oh, it's "Julia Chavarry" and "Zach Howell," for correct statistics, by the way.