The Quizbowl Resource Center

Northwestern will mirror Penn Bowl Trash IV on Sunday February 12. Northwestern will also be mirroring Penn Bowl on Saturday the 11th. More info here. I will be the Tournament Director.

To register a team, fill out this form. Teams are $100, buzzer systems are a $5 discount, and staffers are a $10 discount. Free agents can email me ([email protected]), and we'll work out a fee privately. I can also offer good discounts to people or schools who provide people who staff Penn Bowl and/or our middle school tournament Jr. Wildcat.

Please park in the free Lakeside Parking Structure, which is located at 1 Arts Circle Drive. Check-in will occur from 8:00 to 8:30 am in Kresge Hall Room 4-425, which is located at 1880 Campus Drive. Gameplay will begin at 9:00 am in Kresge. An interactive campus map can be found here.

Current field (FULL)
Chicago x2
DePauw
House/free agents team
Lawrence (w/ Greg Peterson) x2
Michigan State
Minnesota (possibly with free agents)
UIC (possibly with free agents)
Wisconsin (possibly with free agents)

Wait list
Case Western

Free agents
Delano Barnes

I've tentatively registered a team from Minnesota. We may or may not be seeking free agents and we may or may not be providing a staffer.

I've registered a team from "UIC" but that may only consist of me and one other teammate, therefore we will be taking any free agents interested in joining.

A trash tourney ten miles from my house the day after I take the LSAT, you say?

I'm in as a free agent but may join with Lawrence's team(s) if they play this.

Chicago will have 1-3 teams for this.

Lawrence will send two teams. We'll add greg to one.

Just 4 spots left. (Or possibly just 1 spot if Chicago registers 3 teams.) Register soon.

Just 3 spots left. If you want to play this, you should fill out the registration form ASAP. And, as always, if you're playing this you should consider staffing Jr. Wildcat on March 3 in exchange for a discounted registration.

I registered my school for one team; if space remains we may add a second one later or have some free agents the day of.

Michigan State has signed up, so the field is now closed. I may expand it to 12, so if you want to get on the wait list, let me know.

Please place one Case team on the waitlist.

I know i've asked this before in another thread but if someone knows Delano Barnes' email address and if they could email or PM it to me that would be great.

Edward Elric wrote:I know i've asked this before in another thread but if someone knows Delano Barnes' email address and if they could email or PM it to me that would be great.

Sent you an email.

So it sounded like the main site running of this was a disaster. I can take bad questions, I suppose, but I'm far less inclined to stick around for 7 packets of bad questions. Please tell me more packets will be written and a modicum of editing applied to this set before this event. If not, that's cool, but I think those wanting to play this should get some warning of what the deal is.

Yeah, as someone giving up a not-insubstantial amount of time to come play this, I'd also be interested in some sort of assurance that it'll be better than what I've heard of it so far.

Yeah i'll echo the others comments about improvements on the set. We at UIC are planning to play with Delano but I want to make sure that there are more than 7 packets and they aren't as craptacular as the main site seems to indicate they are.

I've contacted Joe Nguyen. Hopefully he'll post here or give me a message that I can relay.

Thanks. I normally am not the type of person who bails out on tournaments, but I can definitely say that there will have to be major edits and promises of completed packets to convince us to play this now.

As you may have heard, our version of Penn Bowl Trash went poorly today. The quality of our work was not up to our standards of our previous tournaments. I would understand if you would be deterred from showing up at a mirror of our tournament, but we will make the best efforts to improve this year's tournament to the quality we have produced in past years. However, we must know if teams would be willing to play in order to make our revisions worthwhile. I am sorry and downright embarrassed that I have to ask to get the go-ahead to write a full tournament that is enjoyable for all players, but that is what I am doing now. If you do not want to play, I completely understand, but if you do, please be assured that we will put the care for detail and quality that you all deserve.

I will play if you can promise at least 10 packets of reasonably edited material and that some outside source (like Dan-Don) can verify it by the day before the tournament.

Cheynem wrote:I will play if you can promise at least 10 packets of reasonably edited material and that some outside source (like Dan-Don) can verify it by the day before the tournament.

Yeah, this.

Joe Nguyen offered me 8 packets of unedited Penn Bowl Trash. I'm going to go ahead and assume that no one will want to play this on Sunday, but Andrew Hart suggested to me that people would perhaps want to play just the tossups on Saturday night. Thoughts?

Dan-Don wrote:Joe Nguyen offered me 8 packets of unedited Penn Bowl Trash. I'm going to go ahead and assume that no one will want to play this on Sunday, but Andrew Hart suggested to me that people would perhaps want to play just the tossups on Saturday night. Thoughts?

/phone rings

"Hi, Dan-Don, it's me, Joe. Yeah, I'm good, thanks for asking. Look, I know you asked for a trash tournament for 2/12, but - and this is just an offer - would you like a steaming pile of shit instead? Yes, I'll hold."

I'll play the tossups Saturday night in the spirit of TERP, which will hopefully involve Dan-Don locking himself out of a building and stern lectures about laptop security. I assume this will be a free event.

What a terrible offer, by the way.

Yeah, I should address the issue of cost.

If people want to do this as a free event, I won't be sticking around (no matter how badly you want to see my Marles Chartin impression, Mike Cheyne), and I don't know how successful I'd be in encouraging the other Northwestern staffers to stick around and moderate. All that being said, I'd have no problem distributing the packets to people and letting everyone stay in the rooms.

If people could maybe give $10 to play this, I would stick around and actually make schedules and scoresheets and stuff. And I could try to make a few Northwestern staffers stay and moderate.

I won't pay $10 for this; if push comes to shove, we'll just take the packets and play them at our hotel or something.

$10 per team might be fair; per person it seems steep. I'd probably pay $5 max for a tossup-only event.

Bone seeker wrote:

Dan-Don wrote:Joe Nguyen offered me 8 packets of unedited Penn Bowl Trash. I'm going to go ahead and assume that no one will want to play this on Sunday, but Andrew Hart suggested to me that people would perhaps want to play just the tossups on Saturday night. Thoughts?

/phone rings

"Hi, Dan-Don, it's me, Joe. Yeah, I'm good, thanks for asking. Look, I know you asked for a trash tournament for 2/12, but - and this is just an offer - would you like a steaming pile of shit instead? Yes, I'll hold."

I was going to use the words "magnanimous fucking offer" to describe Dan-Don's post, but then I'd have spent more effort looking up the word "magnanimous" then was put into designing these alleged questions.

Yeah, sorry $10 per team is fine, $10 per person is too steep. For 8 packets of unedited apparent crap, I'm not inclined to pay a whole lot, although I understand Northwestern people's reluctance to staff it.

So I think we're probably just going to keep the rooms open and let teams play the packets however they want, for free.

But, I was just emailing with Delano Barnes, who said that if we wanted to have a Sunday trash tournament, the Bayou-a-Drank/Trashmasters set is still available and likely wouldn't have been heard by any potential attendees. I don't know enough about trash to know if this is still the case, or if this set is of quality. Is this something that might interest people?

Dan-Don wrote:So I think we're probably just going to keep the rooms open and let teams play the packets however they want, for free.

But, I was just emailing with Delano Barnes, who said that if we wanted to have a Sunday trash tournament, the Bayou-a-Drank/Trashmasters set is still available and likely wouldn't have been heard by any potential attendees. I don't know enough about trash to know if this is still the case, or if this set is of quality. Is this something that might interest people?

I sent Minnesota Bayou-a-Drank a few months ago so they might have already heard it, but you're welcome to use it.

We've heard it, but that's okay. We'd still play what's available on Saturday night.

Cheynem wrote:We've heard it, but that's okay. We'd still play what's available on Saturday night.

Yeah, this is fine with me.

So I sent an email to this effect, but I'll post here too: this has been canceled. I'll make sure we can have a few rooms if people want to play the packets informally after the conclusion of Penn Bowl proper.

Are there any other trash sets available?

Just so people know, this tournament wasn't really at "steaming pile of shit" levels or anything. It wasn't like, good or anything, but as far as trash tournaments go I'd assuredly rather play these questions than TRASH Regionals or something. Of course, that doesn't address the packet count or anything, but if your site gets eight packets of this year's Penn Trash without the tournament being periodically stopped to write more questions, you'll probably get (eight rounds of) a more or less standard trash experience. Which is to say, less than good, more than a steaming pile of shit.

Yeah, if that's the case, I'd love to play this. Not at full price, and I certainly wouldn't drive from out of state to play it, but, like - who's up for a trash minitournament?

I think I'd still prefer to just do the tossup only event Saturday night, but I'll probably play if there's a mini-event on Sunday.

DumbJaques wrote:I'd assuredly rather play these questions than TRASH Regionals or something.

I don't know, maybe I'm particularly susceptible to the halo effect of the awful logistics, but I'm not sure I agree with this. The questions were really bad: often anti-pyramidal, the bonuses were frequently either gimmes or impossible, and our site was decided based on a repeat.

So if you're interested in playing this, maybe I'll try and get a list going of who wants to play and who can staff right away, so that we can figure out format and logistics. Obviously, if very few people want to play we can do like a shootout or wacky rotating teams or something so we can hear bonuses, but if there's enough interest we can do like doubles/triples. Laptop security is of course essential.

Edit: Feel free to post here, but I'll also try to set up a list the morning of the tournament. I should add that I am assuming we are playing on Saturday night.

I'll play this. Don't really care if it's a shootout or teams. If teams, i'm a free agent.

I'd like to play, but I can only do so on Saturday night.

Some Michigan guys might be able to stick around on Saturday

Chicago definitely has some people interested in sticking around for this.

I got the packets from Joe yesterday, and I'll distribute then via flash drive to whoever wants to stick around for this.

These packets were awful! But it was free.

Stats for the slapdash event are here:

http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/90 ... all_games/

There is no accuracy as to any of these stats being true--I kept track of my own stats, so I can verify those are correct.