The Quizbowl Resource Center

Date finalized! The tournament will be on March 29. Stay tuned for further announcements. The full discount schedule for packet submission is below.

Hey everyone. This is a preliminary announcement for the Minnesota Undergraduate Tournament. This thing is happening, and it will be packet sub. The distribution and target difficulty level are very similar to Illinois's Cvijanovich tournament.

Now for the nitty-gritty submission details. The head tournament editors will be me, Rob Carson, and Gautam Kandlikar. Several other members of the Minnesota club will also be editing parts of the set.

Distribution:
History 5/5 (must vary reasonably by place and time)
Science 5/5 (no science biography, please; 1/1 physics, chem, and bio is required)
Literature 5/5 (must vary reasonably by place and time)
Religion/Mythology/Philosophy 3/3 (1/1 of each; not all Western)
Fine Arts 3/3 (at least 1/1 painting and 1/1 music; the other 1/1 is your choice, but be creative)
Social Science 1/2 or 2/1 (no more than one question per discipline; disciplines include law, anthropology, sociology, psychology, paleontology, economics, game theory, etc)
Geography 0/1 or 1/0 (write a geography tossup or bonus, but not both)
Pop Culture/sports 1/1 (no more than 1 question on any category)

For you fans of mental math, that's 24/24. Rounds will be 20/20 with a 1-tossup tiebreaker.

Guidelines (somewhat copied from the Cvijanovich announcement):
- Absolutely no spelling, calculation, "FAQTP," or ordering/multiple choice questions.
- Though there is no ceiling on the number of questions about real people, please attempt to focus on creations and the like. When writing questions on real people, please focus on their academic contributions, rather than on biographical details.
- Please be diverse across sub-field, time period, geographical location, etc. within each distribution category.
- All tossups are worth 10 pts and should be no shorter than 5 lines, nor longer than 6 lines; all bonuses should be worth a total of 30 pts.
- No bonuses potentially requiring six prompts (e.g. "FFPE," 10-5,
15-10-5, 5-5-5-5-5-5, etc.) Bonuses potentially requiring five prompts must be used sparingly, if at all.
- Packets disregarding these guidelines may be returned as unacceptable.
- I must be able to open your packet with MSWord 2007 (.doc, .docx, .rtf)

Costs and discounts
Base cost: $85
Buzzer discount: $5 (max 2)
Moderator discount: $10
Travel discount: $5 per 100 miles on Google maps
Minimum cost: $30

Discount deadline schedule
Packet received before...
January 27: -$50
February 9: -$20
February 23: No penalty
March 1: +$20
March 20: +$50
Packet received between March 22 and March 28: +$100
No packet received (you can still play): +$200

Formatting:
This tournament will use typical ACF/mACF formatting. If you deviate from these guidelines significantly, we will charge you $10 more to play the tournament.

Format tossups like this:

This man's flowery prose earned him the extra credit that yielded a perfect score on a Norse mythology test despite the fact that he forgot to mention that Snorri Sturluson was a writer. His better-known works include one describing a man who became enthralled with a girl's "complete lack of tact and subtlety" and another who "hadn't even done doggy style until this summer." His best-known work described a man whose voyeurism ends when another man's voice shatters a pane of glass. FTP, name this author of the "post of year" Lady Windemere's Hug and its follow-up, Lady Chatterley's Buzzer.
ANSWER: Oscar "Girls Gone" Wilde

Format bonuses like this:

Name the following question-writers involved in trainwreck HSQB threads, FTPE:
[10] This prolific personality who claims to edit COTKU, and MoC Masters, among other tournaments, evoked 5-year-old Yahoo! board posts to defend Sword Bowl questions in 2007.
ANSWER: Charlie Steinhice
[10] This Missouri denizen apparently thinks that Shylock is the titular Merchant of Venice, and famously claimed that some high schooler quizbowlers couldn't find their asses with a map.
ANSWER: Bryce Avery
[10] The author of the epic thread "Introducing myself and my business," this other Missouri native asked "Do you know the author, Matt?" to Matt Weiner, in reference to a question on the author of the Rubiyyat.
ANSWER: Cheri Quillin [accept Quillin's Questions]

Mirrors
Tulsa, Valencia Community College, and VCU are currently mirroring MUT. Anyone who wants to host a mirror can do so for $30 per team. We're seeking mirror hosts in California and New England, though Brandeis may wind up hosting a mirror as well. Stay tuned.

Any of those four weekends would likely work for Drake. March 15 and March 22 are during our spring break, but we would most likely have a team regardless.

Is this tournament going to use any of the questons people wrote for the summer practices at your house? Looking at the announcement I am guessing not, but I want to be sure.

bjb87 wrote:Any of those four weekends would likely work for Drake. March 15 and March 22 are during our spring break, but we would most likely have a team regardless.

Is this tournament going to use any of the questons people wrote for the summer practices at your house? Looking at the announcement I am guessing not, but I want to be sure.

It will not. Those might just be released into the ether unless we figure out some other way to use them.

The date's been set. Get writing!

Also, Oklahoma will mirror this tournament. I'm still looking for anyone who wants to mirror in California, New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and/or the Southeast.

Andrew

I am not sure if we will make this or not due to funding concerns. More than likely, people will be interested in going to either Minn. or Oklahoma... I think they are equally far from here (Minn. may be closer?) but I'll keep you updated on our situation. We need to rake in the money for Penn Bowl if we want to have any chance of coming to this.

Actually, the mirror will be at the University of Tulsa, not OU, so it is slightly closer to Truman State than Norman is.

But how much IS it?

Hmm, yeah, this does need a base fee I guess...I'll see about that.

Base fee set; potential mirror sites, please email me!

VCU is interested in mirroring this tournament.

Mirror sites for the Southwest (Tulsa) and Mid-Atlantic (VCU) have been set. We're still looking for mirror hosts in California, the southeast, and New England, so please email me at [email protected] if you're interested in hosting.

Also, please note that teams attending mirror sites will not be expected to write packets. However, they may do so for a discount (that will come out of the per-team mirror fee) based on the following schedule:

Packet by February 2: -$30
Packet by February 23: -$20
Packet by March 20: -$10

Thanks, and please contact me if you're interested in mirroring MUT.

Andrew

Just to get the ball rolling, Maryland will most likely be sending 2 teams to the VCU mirror.

theMoMA wrote:We're still looking for mirror hosts in ... the southeast

I believe UTC is hosting Moon Pie that day, but not sure if it's been announced.

So what's the target difficulty for this tournament? ACF Fall level, or should our packets be eaiser (or harder) than that?

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:So what's the target difficulty for this tournament? ACF Fall level, or should our packets be eaiser (or harder) than that?

Aim for Fall level. Err towards the easier side though.

Field update:
Drake
Illinois x2
Macalester
Minnesota
Carleton
Sam Peterson and his Merry Band of High Schoolers
More U of Minnesota teams?
More high school teams?


Still waiting to hear from a few teams. I'd imagine the final field will be somewhere between 6 and 9 teams. We plan to produce a packet for every team that attends, plus 5 or 6 more. Jeremy Hixson, Chicago, and Greg Peterson have all been kind enough to volunteer to freelance, and Rob, Gautam, and I will all contribute an editor's packet.

Maryland will be sending at least one packet by that last deadline. Perhaps more will be coming, perhaps earlier than that deadline.

Midwest teams,

The last two packet deadlines are fast approaching. Please contact me at [email protected] if you plan to write a packet and compete in this tournament at the Minnesota site. Also, since there is a mirror on the 22nd, I have moved the last submission date up two days to give us time to edit any straggling packets.

There is a new field update two posts up, as well.

Thanks,
Andrew

PS--Thanks again to Jeremy Hixson for writing another excellent freelance packet for this tournament. Also thanks to Chicago and possibly Greg Peterson for volunteering to write freelance packets...it is much appreciated!

Packet talk.

Here's the field I have confirmed, and the status of their packets.

Illinois A - done
Magin + Hart - done
Maryland C + Hart - done
Gautam - done
Peterson + Gehring - done
Jeremy Hixson - done
Drake - done
Chris Borglum - done
Illinois B - done
Chicago - done
Rob Carson - done
Quentin Roper - done
Minnesota - done

Teams at the tournament:
Minnesota
Illinois A
Illinois B
Drake
High schoolers

Since we have 13 packets and just five teams, we can take extra teams into the field without packet submission.

Slightly reneging on the +$200 penalty from before, you can play for $150 per team, or $100 per team if you're high schoolers.

And just a clarification point between some of the last few posts: the Peterson of Peterson + Gehring is, in fact, Sam Peterson of Chaska, and not myself. Which is probably pretty obvious. But considering that one post says I might freelance and the next says there's a Peterson packet... yeah, no one cares. That'll be all.

Thanks to the six teams who showed up and contributed to the packetset. In an intense showdown, Drake defeated Illinois A 430-60 on the finals packet. We were able to get in twelve rounds in the prelims (with teams playing in all games except the one in which their team wrote the packet), during which both Illinois A and Drake went 10-1 with very similar PPG and a 1-1 record against each other.

The Minnesota A and B teams from the prelims were collapsed into a unified Minnesota A after the prelims, in order to minimize bye rounds.

Book-winning individual scorers included:
1. Brendan Byrne, Drake, 114.2 PPG
2. Andrew Bockover, Minnesota A, 57.7 PPG
3. Sam Peterson, Armageddon HS team, 41.4 PPG
4. Trygve Meade, Illinois A, 38.8 PPG
5. Steven Canning, Illinois A, 34.6 PPG
6. Igor Luzhansky, Armageddon HS team, 29.6 PPG
7. Greg Baboukis, Illinois A, 29.9 PPG
8. Carsten Gehring, Armageddon HS team, 21.8 PPG

Full stats can be found here.

NOTE: There was a slight stat error that meant that Sam Peterson was actually the tournament's third overall scorer, because six tossups were accidentally given to Trygve in the second match against Drake. This means that Illinois A's bonus conversion was better, but Trygve's individual placing went down a slot.

Thanks to everyone for coming, and I hope that all enjoyed the tournament (and the mirrors at Tulsa, Valencia, Chattanooga, and VCU)!