The Quizbowl Resource Center

The Quizbowl Team at the University of Washington will be hosting a mirror of Penn-ance on Saturday, December 1st. This tournament will be open to all players.

Since this tournament is pretty late in the fall quarter, I'm also going to open up this tournament to any teams that want to play via Skype. I really encourage all people to attend an in-person mirror if possible, but if you can't attend an in-person mirror and still want to play at least some of this tournament online, feel free to sign up. We had a decent experience with the last Skype tournament we tried, but please be prepared to lose some buzzer races due to lag and to play less games than you usually would due to delays in getting matches set up. If you are interested in reading for this tournament remotely over Skype, we'd also appreciate any volunteer moderators.

The fee for the tournament will be $15 per person.

To register, contact me at [email protected].

The University of Kentucky would be interested in participating in the Skype tournament. We have not played the Penn-ance set, and I do not foresee us playing it in the next two months. Could you please elaborate as to how we would pay registration fees for such a tournament?

If you are interested in reading for this tournament remotely over Skype, we'd also appreciate any volunteer moderators.

I'm interested.

I'm interested.

Would the difficulty level be appropriate for a strong high school team (possibly TVMSC)? If so, we could try to set up a couple of laptops with Skype here and host both teams.

There is interest among Delaware players in participating online. We will let you know how many players we have closer to the event.

I'd be interested in playing via Skype. Is this an open type where I could be matched up with some teammates, or would I need other people from Duke to be teammates for it?

North Carolina is interested. If, say, we had two players who could only each play half the time, would we have to pay $30 for the two or would they be counted as one person in the fee?

The Predictable Consequences wrote:North Carolina is interested. If, say, we had two players who could only each play half the time, would we have to pay $30 for the two or would they be counted as one person in the fee?

Uh, if it's two people it would be $15 each, regardless of how long they play.

Also, I might need to set a field cap on this depending on the moderator situation. If you're interested in doing any sort of remote moderating, let me know.

Golran wrote:I'd be interested in playing via Skype. Is this an open type where I could be matched up with some teammates, or would I need other people from Duke to be teammates for it?

I think I'm going to require that teams be in the same physical location to play together. Otherwise I think it's going to get too hectic.

Edit: That said, it is an open tournament, so if you found other people in the same place not going to your school, they could play on your team.

I guess I should mention that UNC/Duke chimera teams have been organized in the past (most recently for a 2005 summer tournament, I think) without leading to the implosion of the universe.

Assuming youc an get a decent connection, I can moderate.

I'd be interested in playing this (in person) depending on the size of the in-person field.

cornfused wrote:I'd be interested in playing this (in person) depending on the size of the in-person field.

Like in Seattle?

Mike Bentley wrote:

cornfused wrote:I'd be interested in playing this (in person) depending on the size of the in-person field.

Like in Seattle?

Yeah - I'll be in Seattle one of the first two weekends in December (haven't decided yet) and would totally play this, but I'm a little wary of a tourney where all but, say, two teams are calling in by Skype.

cornfused wrote:

Mike Bentley wrote:

cornfused wrote:I'd be interested in playing this (in person) depending on the size of the in-person field.

Like in Seattle?

Yeah - I'll be in Seattle one of the first two weekends in December (haven't decided yet) and would totally play this, but I'm a little wary of a tourney where all but, say, two teams are calling in by Skype.

Hopefully we'll have something closer to 4 local teams, although I encourage you to attend anyway.

Mike Bentley wrote:

cornfused wrote:

Mike Bentley wrote:

cornfused wrote:I'd be interested in playing this (in person) depending on the size of the in-person field.

Like in Seattle?

Yeah - I'll be in Seattle one of the first two weekends in December (haven't decided yet) and would totally play this, but I'm a little wary of a tourney where all but, say, two teams are calling in by Skype.

Hopefully we'll have something closer to 4 local teams, although I encourage you to attend anyway.

Sweet. At the risk of breaking into the Greg Peterson cliche of registering and bailing, put me/Lawrence down for a team.

EDIT: Yep, I'm out - but you didn't have me on the list, so it's OK.

Where should we send our checks to? And to whom should they be addressed?

Field Update (as of 11/15/2012):

Random Seattle People (1-2)
Washington (1-2)
Rice (2)
DePauw (1)
Kentucky (1)
Boise (1)
Duke/UNC (1)
Delaware (1?)

Moderators:
Auroni
Eric
Brittany
Probably some UW people (although if anyone else wants to remote moderate, we'd also appreciate that)


Also remember that you're probably going to get less rounds in this tournament than a real quizbowl tournament because there's more overhead in these online matches. I'll come up with a schedule once we get closer to the date of the tournament.

I don't think a UNC team is going to come together for this, unfortunately.

I sent an e-mail update to all of the participants, let me know if you didn't get it.

I didn't get anything.

Since as "hosts" of this tournament we're not really providing much service besides organizing the event, we'll distribute 50% of the profits from this tournament to anyone who wants to volunteer moderating. This probably won't be more than like $20-$30, but if you're not otherwise doing anything on Saturday and want to read quizbowl questions for a nominal bounty, let me know.

I can read provided my new microphone comes in the mail by Saturday and it actually works.

Thanks to the teams that played the tournament today. Things went reasonably well for an online tournament. Rice A cleared the field in the prelims. We organized a sort of ad-hoc single elimination tournament for the top four teams, but Rice had to leave before playing UW C in the final. We may try to organize some final some other time.

Prelim Stats: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... s/prelims/
Prelim + first found of single elim stats: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... standings/

Thanks to Mike Bentley and others for organizing the tournament. Sorry for having to duck out all of a sudden after playing Delaware, but we'd be game for continuing sometime.

We'd also love to play more online tournaments in the future, if the opportunity does come up again. We had a few technical glitches here and there, but overall, it ran quite smoothly. We hardly ever get out of Texas, and we're always excited to do so.

I'd also like to thank Mike and Washington for organizing this. Except for a small number of times where a transmission would get mangled, this really worked out well. And I think that 8 teams is exactly the number to have.

Here are a couple of comments about online tournaments in general:

Unlike our last attempt at this, we made sure that all matches except those when two teams in the same physical location were playing each other were conducted by a remote reader. This avoided some of the unfairness between having one team being read to by a local moderator while the other team was getting to read over Skype with a couple second delay.

Moderators should always type "TU #X" before each question so there isn't any confusion over whether a buzz was for a previous question or for the current question.

Always have backup PCs when playing an online tournament. Several teams had to change laptops over the course of the day.

I'd advise moderators to slow down a little bit from in-person speed and go for extra clarity. By not being able to see the moderator as they read the question, you lose some non-verbal context clues. Furthermore, even good connections can occasionally glitch, and you'll lose less information if the moderator is being deliberate than if

With some more practice I think rounds could go a little bit faster, but they're still significantly slower than a real match. I think 7-9 rounds is probably the limit for such a tournament, especially if you have teams playing across different time zones.

Overall, I'd say online tournaments give you probably 75% of the quizbowl experience, and with a few modifications can probably be closer to 80-85%. I would still advise you to attend a local tournament when possible, but I think they're a pretty good resource for regions like the Pacific Northwest or Texas where there's a limited number of teams separated by long distances. They allow you to play teams you normally wouldn't get a chance to play except for maybe at ICT or ACF Nationals, and help break the routine of playing 4 team triple round robin tournaments over and over again. I wouldn't ever suggest running a national tournament online (not the least of which because of the possibilities of cheating scandals), but I think they're useful tools to supplement the quizbowl experience.

One thing that I started doing was reading the tossups out loud but copying and pasting the bonus parts. It's harder sometimes on bonus parts if you miss a pronoun (especially on particularly wordy parts) to understand what is being asked for and assuming people can read the text on the computer (which all the teams I read to appeared to), it also seemed to save time.

Cheynem wrote:One thing that I started doing was reading the tossups out loud but copying and pasting the bonus parts. It's harder sometimes on bonus parts if you miss a pronoun (especially on particularly wordy parts) to understand what is being asked for and assuming people can read the text on the computer (which all the teams I read to appeared to), it also seemed to save time.

We were playing in a meeting room on campus, so after you started doing that, we hooked my laptop up to the video display so that we could read that. It would have been awkward to try to do that over my laptop. If this is an option for teams (some sort of LCD or video display), it might help.

There were a couple of issues with feedback or echoing. I'm not sure whose computers were doing that. I don't know if the moderators had a headset, but if not, that would probably be recommended to help cut down on the echoing. I brought external speakers and an external mic to try to help cut out feedback and make the sound quality clearer. I don't know if it helped or not.