The Quizbowl Resource Center

In keeping with the goal that no tournaments go un-mirrored in Canada, Waterloo will be hosting an OPEN mirror of the Maryland-Yale regular difficulty tournament MYSTERIUM. The tournament will consist of 14 powermarked packets and additional info on the set/distribution can be found here

Everyone come celebrate the end of (Canadian) exams with some great quizbowl!

Location and Time:
As usual, the tournament will take place on the fourth floor of Waterloo's wonderful beacon of brutalist architecture, MC. Timing will be announced closer to the start of the tournament once we have a better idea of the field.

Fees and Payment: American teams may be interested to note that these fees are in CAD.
$120 base fee
$10 discount for each capable moderator with working laptop
$10 buzzer discount (maximum 3)
$10 travel discount for every 321.87 KM between your school and the University of Waterloo
$20 shorthanded discount per missing player

Minimum Fee: $40

Registration:
To register please send me a message in some form, my email is [email protected]

Field (teams/buzzers/staffers):
Waterloo (1/0/Some)
Aayush/Patrick/Rein/Faith (1/0/0)
Jay/Jess/MHY/ADR (1/1/0)
Michigan State (1/1/0)
Dennis/Dillon (1/1/0)
Adam/Luka/Shuying(1/0/0)


Side Events
See Poll

I'm looking for teammates, with a preference for people I haven't played with (at least not recently). I know computer science and classical music, and also other science things.

Sigurd wrote: American teams may be interested to note that these fees are in CAD.

This is the real reason I keep coming to Canada.

I'll be playing this, of course.

Imma come to this, anyone wanna play with me? I'll try to coax the Mac people, but *nasally-voiced* "it's right in the middle of exams..."

Senator_Jay wrote:anyone wanna play with me?

We at Michigan State are interested in playing this. We only have three people, so if anybody wants to join our team, please let me know.

EDIT: Also, we can bring a buzzer set.

My team will have at least one, at most two buzzer sets. Maybe a staffer, but not really sure yet.

Arch Stanton wrote:We at Michigan State are interested in playing this. We only have three people, so if anybody wants to join our team, please let me know.

EDIT: Also, we can bring a buzzer set.

Excellent, glad to have you Michigan State! In the event you don't find your own free agent, there are usually a few that show up to each tournament so one of them can probably join you.

Would there be interest in doing any side events? Imaginary Landscapes 3 (Auditory Music event, viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18117) or any of the CLEAR packets from Rutgers (Academic Subject Specific, viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18202) would be available for use.
I've added a poll for side events in the OP.

EDIT: Added AVODAGRO'S NUMBER and Eyes that do not see after request from Aayush

Signing up as a free agent, given the paucity of interest from my current and future universities. I also will bring a buzzer set.

EDIT: I have become "American" and joined Michigan State.

Harris Bunker from MSU has offered a set of five trash packets as a side event which has been put in the updated poll, unfortunately when I remade the poll it cleared the previous one. -________-

Anyhow, to help mitigate this issue here are the results as they stood before I edited the poll. Please refrain from voting again if you have already voted. My apologies for the inconvenience.

I'm not going to this after all. Headed to DC for NHBB nats.

If you were wondering what FTP is, it is a trash tournament that I and Trent Koch of MSU wrote. FTP stands for Fuck This Packet. It's a standard college trash packet that was inspired by Never Say Never from several years ago. This means that the answerlines were written to make players laugh or feel embarrassed as they buzz in.

The distro is as follows:
4/4 Music (about 1/1 classic rock 1/1 pop/rap 2/2 rock from 1970-)
4/4 Sports (about 1/1 NFL 1/1 NBA 1/1 MLB 1/1 other with like 3 or 4 NHL questions)
3/3 Movies (a lot of comedies. Don't expect a lot of good films to come up honestly. No Art house here.)
3/3 TV
3/3 Video Games (about 1/1 "classic" video games (pre 2000) 2/2 modern video games)
.5/.5 Internet Culture (AKA memes)
.5/.5 Pop Culture
2/2 Misc

This set of 5 packets if supposed to be fun to play but reward deep knowledge with challenging powers and lead-ins. The answerlines were picked such that there shouldn't be more than a few dead tossups per round, and when we playtested, there weren't many that went dead. Bonuses are similar. It's difficult to 30 a bonus, but it is really easy to 10. That said, I find trash bonuses difficult to write in the sense that it's really easy to 30 or 0 a bonus depending on your background knowledge. It's almost binary. If you listen to Slayer, I guarantee that you will earn at least 20 on a Slayer bonus, but if you have never listened to them, a bagel may be likely. I tried to make the hard parts on bonuses harder and easy parts easier, but some bonuses are pretty easy to 30 while there are a couple that are almost impossible to 30. I think this is just a part of trash bonuses and is a part of why this packet set is called Fuck This Packet.

PM or email me if you have any questions.

EDIT: Please do not take this set to seriously. There are a lot of bad/overly sarcastic jokes and there are some questions that are a little too out there for a normal trash packet. Once again, this set is supposed to be fun and humorous, while still having good clues. All the tossups are over 100 words and the longest is around 180 words I think. In short, please do not come after me after negging a tossup because there is at least a few tossups that are meant to be really goofy. There is some knowledge required there, but I can imagine a lot of players yelling "what does he want?". I hope people have fun and accumulate some trashy knowledge here.

Hello Everyone! Looking forward to see you all this weekend.

The Schedule for the Weekend will be as follows:
Meet in MC4040 at 8:30 AM Saturday for a 9AM start of MYSTERIUM.
At lunch we will be playing Imaginary Landscapes 3, and to keep things running smoothly there will be a group pizza order which will likely cost $5 per person. The tournament itself will likely be a one room shootout unless ALOT of people want to play.
In the afternoon we will play the remainder of MYSTERIUM (including finals if necessary) which will be followed the Michigan State's Trash side event FTP. Harris has recommended teams of two as a format for this event.
Ideally, the day would wrap up between 8:30 and 9 that evening.

For Sunday, Meet in the same place at the same time EDIT:Meet at 8:45AM for a 9:15AM start in the morning to begin ACRONYM.
Sunday Lunch will be EYES and we can have a pizza order again (same cost) if people are interested. The Sunday evening side event will hopefully be AVOGADROS NUMBER, for which the format is again teams of two though that can be changed if people wish it to be, assuming I can get in touch with Brian McPeak which I have been unable to do so far. If we do not get AVOGADROS NUMBER, we can move Eyes to here and then have a more relaxed lunch.

In order to know who wants to do what, I have made a spreadsheet where people can sign up for what they want. Please mark your pizza preference with a M (meat) or V (Veggie).

Here is the link to the spreadsheet: https://goo.gl/WGx6jf
Again, I look forward to seeing you all this weekend.


Further Edit:
A shorthanded discount of -$20 Per missing player has been added.

Six Teams Registered for this tournament, and live stats will be posted throughout the day here http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... ive_stats/

I've set up a private discussion forum to discuss the Imaginary Landscape No. 3 set. You can join it under User Control Panel > Usergroups > 2016 Imaginary Landscape No. 3 discussion.

I think I can speak for the entire MSU team and say that I thoroughly enjoyed this tournament. The question set was good and the tournament was run super well. All the players I met while I was in Canada were gracious and helpful. None of us had cell service in Canada, so we are grateful that Waterloo students helped us get back to the highway.

I am glad that people seemed to have enjoyed FTP but I can't promise there will be an FTP 2. All in all, I hope we can go to more Canadian events in the future.