The Quizbowl Resource Center

Yogesh Raut and I (Ray Luo) are writing a movies tourney for Chicago Open, to be run given enough interest, probly Sat during lunch or something like that. It'll be 4 rounds of 50 ques each, with people moving between rooms b/t rounds. Basically, if it's like 18 ppl, then probly 3 rooms of 6 each, after 1st round put top two of each room in "top" room, next 2 in "mid" room, etc; then after round 2, move two lowest finishers down, two highest finishers up, etc, with last round as "final." Distro will be roughly divided into various genres and time periods of film, similar to breakdowns from previous installments of the tourney in 2003, 2004, etc. If u'r interested in playing, post here or lemme kno. We promise it'll be full of interesting clues.

Sign me up for movies.

Matt Weiner wrote:Sign me up for movies.

This.

Matt Weiner wrote:Sign me up for movies.

I'm doing this, and I'm pretty sure another ND guy will do it as well.

Of course, you can count on me for my first movie-only tourney! In fact, I will compete in lieu of eating lunch. Shall a draft precede the first round?

Happy D-Day anniversary,
Rom Masrour
CPS/UIC

Tim Hartman also wants to compete in the movie-only rounds around Saturday lunchtime. Tim and I have finalized our collaboration for History Doubles and Literature Doubles Friday evening and Saturday evening, respectively, but we still need one or two teammates for the main Chicago Open itself, depending on Arsalan Khan's undetermined summer weekend work schedule.

Keep Hillary off Barack's ticket,
Rom Masrour
CPS/UIC
[email protected]

Movies!

can we split off the "Chicago Open all-movies Singles" thread? thx.

to make things run according to plan, we can order pizzas in lieu of lunch, and stay indoors to play say on Sat,
just be sure to register so we know how much food to get. i think i'll charge $5 per person for the tourney to
offset a proportion of my own tourney cost, and ask ppl to contribute for pizza depending on how many ppl
there'll be. i'll try to playtest to see how long the tourney'd take, but if we have a fairly long lunch break like
we have at prev COs, we might be able to get thru say the 1st 3 rounds, leaving only the final to do (with the
uppermost bracket the only crucial one) later on, quickly before dinner or something.

if u have ideas or suggestions, post here or email me. sry i don't have anything totally firm yet on the distro,
but expect to see "everything" represented. My ques in particular will be ACF-style, no powers yet, but if there's
demand, we can do it.

recfreq wrote:we can order pizzas in lieu of lunch

NO DON'T

You now have your own thread to lord over and exploit, Ray. Also, powers are cool.

I shall play this.

Fried chicken > Pizza

I'm in when I get my ticket.

Better be some Dziga Vertov up in this.

I might be interested in this, or I might just want to witness firsthand whatever hilarious pizza-related shenanigans happen this year.

sign me up

I (Jacob Durst) and my teammate Andy Sekerak would like to play this tournament. Thanks.

I'd be interested in playing this, but I'd defer to people actually involved in other Saturday events. If there's still room after them, pls. sign me up.

Of course I'll play.

MaS

Put me in the same boat as Greg Sorenson. Will play if there is room.

I'd be interested in using the skills that got me to second place on the Silver Screen Test with Brick Barientos to play in this tournament. If anyone wants a teammate, let me know.

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:I'd be interested in using the skills that got me to second place on the Silver Screen Test with Brick Barientos to play in this tournament. If anyone wants a teammate, let me know.

isn't this a singles tournament?

MLafer wrote:

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:I'd be interested in using the skills that got me to second place on the Silver Screen Test with Brick Barientos to play in this tournament. If anyone wants a teammate, let me know.

isn't this a singles tournament?

Hrmm, is it? I just saw a lot of people saying "I'll play this with my teammate X" so I assumed it was a doubles tournament.

If there's still room, I'd like to sign up.

Official Announcement for 2008 Movies Singles Tournament.

1. I'll refer to this tournament as "The Underrepresentation of Film in Everyday Life."

2. Every odd-numbered question will be by Yogesh Raut; every even-numbered question will be by Ray Luo. There will be 200 questions, tossups only, split into 4 rounds of 50 TUs each.

3. Although there are many questions on movies in the "popular culture" category, this tournament is just a bit more than 50% weighted to the academic fine arts category of films and filmmaking as expected from, say ACF and NAQT. The approximate weights for our distribution will be:

35% American film
20% foreign film (balanced across different nationalities but higher weight to Europe and Japan)
20% directors
15% performers
9.995% miscellaneous (such as common link and related subjects).
0.005% Kung Fu

However, for the best indication of what the actual distro will look like (tho not the actual questions), I refer you to previous installments of the tourney on the Stanford archive:

http://quizbowl.stanford.edu/archive/mo ... index.html
http://quizbowl.stanford.edu/archive/ba ... index.html

I will make an effort to make this tourney as acccessible (in terms of answer space) as possible for a subject tourney. BTW there'll be no repeat of info or clues, but just because say a name appears else where in the tourney in another question doesn't mean it can't appear as an answer choice later.

4. I plan to use the following system to simplify scoring. Powers are worth 2 pts, o/w a question is worth 1 pt. I don't generally like giving generous powers. You only get one buzz per question, and if you get it wrong, it's -1 pt. Within each round except for the final, a player is deemed to be "finished" or "cleared" if the difference b/t her score and the 2nd highest score ATM is equal to the number of remaining questions. This rule is abandoned for the last 5 TUs. Once a player has cleared, calculations continue with the highest scoring player currently active. Players are ranked after each round based on when she "cleared," or for those players who didn't reach cleareance, the final scores at the end of the round. This is done so that the moderators can keep score more easily at the same time while monitoring clearance. Clearance is justified for more accurately ranking players in the middle of the order after a round, because stronger players often "shadow" moderately good players in a room. Scores reset after each round.

5. Given the current interest, we will go with either 18 players (6 per room), or 27 players (9 per room), although this may change based on the actual turnout and number of moderators I can secure. The following description is based on 18. We begin with a random assign of players into rooms A, B, and C (6 each). After R1, we place the top two of each room into A, the next two into B, and the last two into C. After R2, we place the 2 highest scoring players from C into B, the 2 lowest scoring players from B into C, and similarly for the 2 highest in B and 2 lowest in A. After R3, we move the 1 highest from C, the 1 lowest from A, etc, in the same way into B. (If we get 27, then we swap 4 after R2 then 2 after R3.) R4 is the final, and only the result from A is counted. Finally, although we never clear the top scorer in the final, we may isolate the two highest scorers in A if the average of their scores cleared the field in R4. That is, we have a two-person final the rest of the way (cumulatively scored) if at any pt, the number of remaining questions is equal to the difference b/t the two-score avg and the next highest score. No proof is given, but I claim that it is asymptotically optimal to use this format to select the top 2 players given the current room and rule constraints if a priori we do not know the actual rank of players on this set of questions b/f the 4 rounds. I'll pretend not to know how good anyone is on movies and make a truly random assignment b/f the rounds begin.

6. The cost is $5 per person for hundreds of fabulous clues, less than the price for a gallon of gas. If you want to mirror this tournament else where, please email me at recfreq at yahoo dot com. Questions should also be sent to that address.

7. Current roster (hoping to get more so we can use the preferred 27 format):

Players:
Matt Weiner
Trevor Davis
Bryce Durgin
Rom Masrour
Tim Hartman
Chris Ray
Eric Kwartler
Dan Passner
Susan Ferrari
Matt Lafer
Greg Sorenson
Mike Sorice
Colby Burnett
Mike Bentley
Andrew Ullsperper
Charlie Dees
Jake Pardo
Ed Cohn
Jonathan Magin
Jeremy Eaton
Harry Shearing
Lorin Burte

I'd be more than happy to staff.

I guess I forgot to sign up for playing this, so sign me up please.

Add Jake Pardo (another ND guy) to the list.

Ed Cohn also wants to play.

Sure, I'll play.

I'll read or something; I suck at movies.

I don't know why I signed up for this, I don't really like/know movies. Take me off the list please.

Yea, I'll hit this.

Does this have a likely slotyet? I'll sign up Harry Shearing and Lorin Burte since they don't read the boards.

Also, is it free or is there an entry fee?

Huh, I see my name is on the list too. I don't want to play either...you know, since I really don't know anything about non-Sandra Bullock related movies.

Oh, and regarding the time slot for this event - has it been hashed out yet? Sorry, I haven't been quite following everything people have said in this vein. I'm fine with just running it whenever there is free time during lunches and breaks between events - but I'd imagine that's less convenient for people who aren't going to be around for every tourney (if there are a good number of those people). I figure there will surely be time on Sunday - at lunch for one, and then between trash and soc sci event, for another. Lunchtime on Saturday is probably out, now that it's been pared down to a half-hour affair. Outside of that, I'm open to whatever plan people want.

Considering how we may not have a time slot at CO, I'd prefer to move this tournament to a future date so I can work on my questions some more, and perhaps provide more for the final. I'd also prefer to have a real tourney instead of have a round here and a round there, because I want to allow ppl to digest our ques. There's a glut of really really really good tournies already, and I don't want to step on any toes, so I think it'll be in everyone's best interest if we held it at one of the coming tournies, perhaps WIT, Card Classic, Illinois Open, VCU Open, whatever. If you have a preference for which one, pls let us kno. I'm very sorry if this has altered anyone's traveling plans, but presumably yall came for CO and not just to play a single movies tourney. I advise everyone to delay their gratification. (Pls let ppl kno who don't read this board.)

So what works for ppl? Can uall make VCU Open? Is this possible Matt? Can IO accomodate any more side tournies? What's our best bet here?

I don't know if I'm going to any of those tournaments, and I know a few other people who want to play who definitely will not be attending them. Is there really no way to make this work on Sunday?

Susan

ETA: Peter Onyisi may be interested in playing if the tournament is held this weekend (but not if it's held later unless you want to mirror it at CERN).

recfreq wrote:DATE TO BE MOVED...
VCU Open

Yes, please!

Sorry, we only have the rooms until 7:30 PM on both days, so there's not much room for side events or an extended lunch at VCU. I really don't think there will be much of an issue with reading 200 tossups during lunch on Sunday; that's less than 2 regular rounds. Obviously, if the tournament isn't quite ready or the people running trash don't approve, you'll have to explore other options, but if possible CO weekend seems like the best time to do this.

Come on, we can play it this weekend people!

As the Gaddis after HSNCT taught us, 200 tossups can take a surprisingly long time to read. I have already told people who aren't planning to stay for the SS/phil that I would try to have the trash tournament end at a reasonable hour, so I'm going to have to insist on keeping the lunch break on Sunday short.

Andrew

recfreq wrote:if we held it at one of the coming tournies ... Card Classic

This is a very appealing idea, as we're contemplating having a side tournament or two at next year's Cardinal Classic.

Actually the TUs'll probly take a while to read, b/c at least on my part, I have a fairly large amt of gettable stuff but with some really obscure clues to begin; and for Yogesh's part, some of the stuff is probly gettable only at the end. Instead of trying to piece together a tourney, it'd probly be better to save it like Arnav suggested for Card Classic (and whatever east coast mirror that could host it). And finally, I'm still 30 TUs short (Yogesh is done), and while I shud be able to finish on time, the ques'd be better if I spent more time on it.

Yes, this has been quite a tease, but we certainly won't let it go past Card Classic (if not earlier).

If this film scrimmage were delayed, I could definitely spend a night with friends in Urbana if it were rescheduled for the Illinois Open, but I understand that Charlie Dees is working on a fine arts tourney for that weekend, too. I could not make it to VCU anyway even if rooms remained open. As for WIT & Card Classic, I have no idea where they are.

Sing La Marseillaise like in CASABLANCA,
Rom Masrour
CPS/UIC

OK, here's the soln I came up with: we're gonna do rounds of 40 TUs instead; this will make things go faster. We're gonna just use whatever time is available, hopefully on Sunday, as long as there's enough interest (o/w I save the ques). I'm gonna save some of my ques for the TTGT11 film packet.

So conclusion: I'm still gonna try to make this tourney work, and if you show up to CO, there's a good chance it'll happen, it may be slightly shorter tho. When it'll happen? I dunno, but most likely Sunday after trash depending on demand/availability. Pls let ppl who signed up know!

Just to clarify, it's going to be 40 TUs per rd, still 4 rds. Anticipate about 1 3/4 hrs, hopefully 1.5, and certainly no more than 2 hrs.

Ryan also suggested friday after the hist tourney to get started. Will everyone who wants to play be there then? If there're less than 18 ppl, I don't think I'll run the tourney. If there're 21 or 24, we can do 7/8 per room, respectively (I have a way of moving b/t rooms in mind alrdy in those cases). So this is gonna be totally guerilla style...

Ed and I won't be there on Friday.

yall'll be there on sunday after trash tho?

btw i've also been shortening a few ques slightly, so hopefully that'll help keep the time down.

I also won't be there Friday. I would imagine Colby is doubtful as well.