The Quizbowl Resource Center

The 2013 incarnation of VCU Open will be held on Saturday, August 3rd at VCU. It will begin at 10:00 AM because our summer room reservation policies are a little weird. The tournament will be held in the Harris building, which faces Main St, Harrison St, Floyd Ave, and the University Student Commons on its four sides.

Difficulty will be very similar to the 2011 incarnation of the tournament.

Cody Voight, Daniel Hothem, George Berry, Auroni Gupta, Sarah Angelo, and myself are writing the packets.

Register by contacting me at [email protected]. Due to recent confusion caused by spreadsheet-based registration, please note that ONLY REGISTRATIONS E-MAILED TO ME will be "counted," though you may use the spreadsheet to form and track your teams.

This is a simple open tournament; there will be one division, consisting of teams of up to four people which may include any type of person whatsoever including current high school students, just-graduated people who are entering college in the fall, current college students, college graduates, and people who fit into none of those categories.

The base cost for this tournament is $120 per team.
The buzzer discount is $10 per system with no per-team limits (fully functional systems only).
People who YOU ARE TRANSPORTING TO THE TOURNAMENT AT YOUR OWN COST, you being any portion of a team playing the tournament, and are judged to be competent staffers by me, will earn a $10 discount if used as scorekeepers and a $30 discount if used as readers. I have no interest in compromising the quality of my tournament by using anything but the best readers available, so I will not intentionally move someone to a different role to save money. By the same token, do NOT try to claim someone who was showing up on their own dime to help out as "your" staffer for a discount. This is a dishonest practice that needs to end.

If you wish to mirror this event elsewhere, get in touch with me at [email protected]. You may certainly mirror on 8/3 or later; if you want us to have the set done early, that is not guaranteed at this time and will need to be worked out with me on an individual basis.

Team formation spreadsheet (once your team is finalized you must e-mail me to be counted as registered!): here

Matt Weiner wrote: The base cost for this tournament is $160 per team.

Um, is there a reason for the 1/3 price increase?

Mainly, to encourage people to bring what we need to make the tournament happen: The buzzer and staff discounts are larger than the normal $5 and $10 ($10 and up to $50, respectively).

I should have also mentioned that this tournament will feature 21/21 packets. Arts and RMP will each be 3/3 in every round and there will also be a full 1/1 each of trash, social science, and a current events/geography category.

Can a staffer discount for College History Bowl be applied to this tournament, and vice versa, if one wishes to play one tournament but staff the other?

You mean a discount from your team's entry fee based on you staffing the other tournament?

Yeah, that's what I meant.

If I can get transportation I'd definitely come staff both. Currently I'll be in blacksburg.

Matt Weiner wrote: People who YOU ARE TRANSPORTING TO THE TOURNAMENT AT YOUR OWN COST, you being any portion of a team playing the tournament, and are judged to be competent staffers by me, will earn a $10 discount if used as scorekeepers and a $30 discount if used as readers.

Matt Weiner wrote:The buzzer and staff discounts are larger than the normal $5 and $10 ($10 and up to $50, respectively)..

I'm confused. Where is this "up to $50" coming from?

That should say 30, yeah.

I have updated the initial post to reflect the fact that College History Bowl was removed from this summer due to lack of interest. I have also returned the entry fee to a more standard $120 since some of the reasons for the higher fee no longer apply.

Some notes:

This tournament is currently being written, on pace to be finished on time, and being worked on by six people who can see everyone else's progress. In short, the tournament will definitely occur, so:
1) Register for the VCU site or express your interest!
2) Let me know if you want to mirror this in the Midwest or in California.
3) We now have rooms reserved on Sunday 8/4 from 12 to 8 PM and no tournament to put there, so if you have some exciting side event in mind, claim the spot. If not, I may organize something on a guerilla basis (academic, trash, weird experiment, or whatever).

If this isn't mirrored somewhere in he Midwest (hey UM!), then some contingent of OSU people are hoping to be able to come to Richmond to play, as long as the logistics can be worked out. If someone in the area would like to house 3-4 swell folks such as myself and Jasper Lee that weekend, please contact me, as that would be much appreciated.

We will be running the TAMIL visual movies event and a guerilla tournament on Sunday. This will both be fairly short, so there is room for one more small side event if anyone has one. Marshall has also noted that we can re-run Urgent Call for Unity if there are sufficient people here who did not play it in Chicago.

If there is desire, I will have a packet of somewhat-short Star Wars mashups done by then. The academic part will be mostly lit, but there will be a few from other categories.

Matt Weiner wrote:We will be running the TAMIL visual movies event and a guerilla tournament on Sunday. This will both be fairly short, so there is room for one more small side event if anyone has one. Marshall has also noted that we can re-run Urgent Call for Unity if there are sufficient people here who did not play it in Chicago.

I'm writing four packets of world history tossups that I hope to have done by then. I'd be willing to read them to anyone interested.

I would like to force someone in the Midwest to mirror this.

We're currently figuring out if Michigan can mirror this. (If anyone who would come to such a mirror could bring staff, please let me know.)

women, fire and dangerous things wrote:We're currently figuring out if Michigan can mirror this. (If anyone who would come to such a mirror could bring staff, please let me know.)

We're going to be mirroring this in Ottawa, most likely on August 17th, and y'all are more than welcome...

The distribution for this was changed a couple weeks ago. The top-level distribution currently looks like:

20/20 regulation
4/4 each from Literature, Science, History
3/3 Arts
3/3 split approximately evenly between R, M, P and SS
1/1 Trash
1/1 split approximately evenly between Geography and Current Events

1/1 extra
0.2/0.2 each from Literature, History, Science, Fine Arts
0.2/0.2 split between R, M, P, SS

Like VCUO 2011, Literature has more American and British at the expense of World; other than that, there are no significant deviations from your typical ACF subdistributions. There are no guarantees about the finality of this distribution.

The field for this could certainly be improved. Maybe a public accounting of how many questions have been written and how many remain would reassure potential players who are worried about the set not being written on time.

vcuEvan wrote:The field for this could certainly be improved. Maybe a public accounting of how many questions have been written and how many remain would reassure potential players who are worried about the set not being written on time.

The six-writer team is cruising in to completion over the remaining weeks:

Is there a list of officially registered teams?

Sam wrote:Is there a list of officially registered teams?

The following 10 teams have e-mailed me to register (person who e-mailed me listed first):

Eric Douglass/Bryn Reinecke/Kevin McCall
Marshall Steinbaum/John Lawrence/Max Schindler/Doug Graebner
Nick Jensen/Cameron Orth/Will Alston/Aaron Pellowski
Richard Yu/Ryan Rosenberg/David Xu/Aidan Mehigan
Isaac Hirsch/Mystery Friends
Vasa Clarke/Patrick Canteros/Connor Wood/Will Overman
Sam Bailey/Jimmy Ready/Michael Coates
Evan Adams/Matt Bollinger/Tommy Casalaspi/David Seal
Neil Gurram/David Liu/David Ke/Saajid Moyen
Chris Ray et al.

Please contact me if you wish to register from this point forward -- I'd like to try to combine or extend any further teams to keep the field at an even number and avoid byes.

I will be assigning names to all teams, so save your own creativity for future events.

Jonathan Xu had to back out, and our team will include Aidan Mehigan in his place.

The tournament is 8 questions away from completion:

We look forward to everyone enjoying this set full of classic VCU Open flavor on Saturday and later. I will set up a private discussion group so that the Ottawa mirror isn't spoiled.

Hey, anyone who is on the fence about playing this tournament-- play it with me. I am registered to play alone due to some unfortunate circumstances.

Updated stats will be here throughout the day;
Round 2 is missing a game that will be played at lunch

After the lunchtime game;

Fake Tupac Amaru (UVA): 6-0
A Pup Named Poodle Doo (UMD): 5-1 (Loss by forfeit)
I Hear That Gemeinschaft Is A Bad Mother--(Chicago A): 5-1 (Loss to UVA)
4 LocoFoco: 4-2

We have three rounds to go before rebracketing.

We have now rebracketed into a top bracket of 4, and a bottom bracket of 6. The top 4 will be playing a round robin.

Fake Tupac: 9-0, 423.3 PPG
Poodle Doo: 7-2, 288.1 PPG
Gemeinschaft: 7-2, 275.0 PPG
4 Locofoco: 6-3, 197.5 PPG
MSIRI: 5-4, 181.9 PPG
Harper Valley ETA: 4-5, 183.3 PPG
Sixteen & Pragnanz: 3-6, 172.5 PPG
Morning Yet on Kreayshawn Day: 2-7, 110.6 PPG
iCarlists: 1-8, 105.6 PPG
Kneel: 1-8, 58.1 PPG

Top Individuals

1. Matt Bollinger, Fake Tupac, 78.33, 74/7
2. Chris Ray, Poodle Doo, 58.12, 51/9 (in 8 games)
3. Neil Gurram, MSIRI, 46.11, 46/9
4. John Lawrence, Gemeinschaft, 38.89, 36/2
5. Tommy Casalaspi, Fake Tupac, 38.33, 36/3
6. Richard Yu, 4 Loco, 38.33, 36/3
7. Sam Bailey, Sixteen, 37.78, 36/4

"Fake Tupac Amaru" cleared the field. Congratulations to Matt Bollinger, Tommy Casalaspi, Evan Adams, and David Seal.

Oh, I just realized I forgot to link to the full stats.