ANNOUNCEMENT: TIT XXIII at Maryland: 1/31/09
Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 7:59 pm
Terrapin Invitational Tournament XXIII - Strip Russian Roulette: The Naked or the Dead
Saturday, January 31, 2009
University of Maryland - College Park
ANNOUNCEMENT:
The Maryland Academic Quiz Team is pleased to announce the 23rd annual Terrapin Invitational Tournament for Saturday, January 31st, 2009 to be held at our College Park, MD campus. This event will be a packet submission tournament at the avowedly enigmatic "regular" difficulty, meaning somewhere around regionals level. No mirrors are set in stone yet, although we are 75% likely to confirm a mirror at Northwestern University. We would love to have this mirrored elsewhere (particularly the West Coast, South/Southeast, and maybe Northeast. Ooh, and Canada), so please email Chris Ray at [email protected] if you're interested.
The tournament will be head edited by Chris Ray, with Jeremy Eaton and possibly some other people also heavily working on the set. It's likely we will be seeking some cameo computer science appearances as well.
PRICING:
+$100 - Base Fee
-$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, December 12th.
-$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, December 26th.
+$0 - Packet submitted by Saturday, January 3rd.
+$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, January 10th.
+$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, January 17th.
+$100 - No packet submitted and Westbrookian hatred at your existence. Seriously, you forfeit your guaranteed right to play in this event without a packet (unless you're a new school)
-$5 - Buzzer discount
-$10 - Competent moderator discount
+$10 - Formatting penalty for formatting your questions incorrectly (see formatting section below).
-$20 - Prize for the best unedited packet received in general, and by the best Division II (first two years play quizbowl) only team.
Minimum Fee Per Team: $40.
Any "Division II" teams (no players beyond their second year in quizbowl AND no players who have attended ACF nationals) may play without a packet, although it would be more than appreciated if they submitted one anyway. Guidelines for these teams are below:
-$50 - January 3rd
-$25 - January 10th
PACKET GUIDELINES:
Distribution (24/24 - down with the tyranny of 26/26!):
5/5 History (1/1 US, 1/1 European, 1/1 Ancient, 1/1 World, 1/1 Your Choice [please do not write both of these on the same subject])
5/5 Literature (1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 1/1 World, and 1/1 Any of the above; try to include at least 1/1 drama, 1/1 novels, and 1/1 poetry)
5/5 Science (1/1 Physics, 1/1 Chemistry, 1/1 Biology, 1/1 Other Science like Computer Science, Non-Computational Math, Geology, Astronomy, Earth Science, Engineering, etc., 1/1 Your Choice)
3/3 RMP (2/2 Religion and Mythology, 1/1 Philosophy)
3/3 Fine Arts (1/1 Visual Fine Arts like Painting and Sculpture, 1/1 Classical Music, 1/1 Your Choice or other like Architecture, Artistic Film, Dance, Opera or more painting / music.)
2/2 Social Science (Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, Linguistics, etc.)
1/1 Pop culture, common link, general knowledge, current events, misc.
Please vary all your questions by time period, region of the world (when applicable) and genre. Also vary the type of question you ask. For example, do not write 5 literature tossups on 19th century British novelists. A better literature selection would include tossups on authors, works and characters, on American, British, and World literature, and on fiction, drama, and poetry.
Difficulty:
Please keep your tossups between ACF Fall and ACF Regionals level difficulty, inclusive (last year's TIT, for example, is a good barometer if you're unsure of what this means). When in question, err on the easier side. It is not a good idea to explore canon expansion (i.e. writing about things that have never come up at tournaments before) in your tossups.
Every bonus should have a clear easy, medium and hard part. Almost every team in the tournament should be converting the easy part of the bonus, while a little more than half of the teams should be converting the medium part. The hard part of a bonus should be able to be answered by those with in-depth knowledge in the field.
Question Length:
All of the following lengths apply to documents written in Word with 1 inch margins (change these from the default), and a 10 point Times New Roman font.
Final tossups will be between 6 and 8 lines long. However, we'd prefer that you submit tossups on the long side (or even over the 8 line limit), since it's always easier for us to get rid of clues that we don't like than to add additional clues by ourselves.
Bonus parts should be kept within reason. Do not write extremely lengthy leadins or bonus parts (try to keep them under 2 lines, generally). Also do not write extremely short bonuses or list bonuses, as these are typically not very interesting. The vast majority of your bonuses should be 10-10-10. Please do not write any 30-20-10 bonuses, as these really throw off the balance of the bonuses in a round. 5-10-15 bonuses are similarly bad and should be shunned, since they arbitrarily weight the hard part when in theory the bonus should have the same relative difficulty to all the others. However, Chris has an unusual tolerance for 10-5 bonuses and a few other creative point structures, so including one or two of these isn't out of the question, but don't do it more than that.
Formatting:
Please format your questions in the following matter:
1/1 Unfunny Meta Example Questions (reused to honor our recent alum):
The person involved in this event is starting a rumor that it was actually a planned occurrence to get himself mentioned in a meta question in Matt Weiner's canceled Chicago Open trash tournament. Immediately after this event occurred, one person was unable to identify Okazaki Fragments. It was preceded by Jeremy Eaton answering a tossup on time dilation. The person responsible for this event blamed not getting enough sleep the night before and the two hour drive to Richmond, but most of all just plain not paying attention. Occurring in a game against South Carolina at the 2007 VCU Open, it is now immortalized in the YTMND page Nude Descending a Gas Chamber. FTP, identify this action wherein Mike Bentley erroneously answered "The Armory Show" for "Auschwitz".
ANSWER: Worst Buzz (also accept Nude Descending a Gas Chamber before mentioned, Mike Bentley's Embarrassing Neg with The Armory Show on the Auschwitz Question at the 2007 Illinois Novice Tournament, and clear knowledge equivalents; do not accept just "Armory Show" or "Auschwitz")
Answer the following about a certain comic strip, FTPE.
[10] Like Chris Ray, the title character of this Dik Browne comic strip has red hair and a big beard, and is also illiterate and bathes only once a year.
ANSWER: Hagar the Horrible
[10] Using Wikipedia might erroneously lead you to believe that Hagar the Horrible was based on this play by Henrik Ibsen in which Sigurd defeats Hjardis by killing her sentinel, a white bear.
ANSWER: The Vikings at Helgeland
[10] If Jonathan Magin had his way, Hagar the Horrible and all other comic strips would be inspired by this Robert Louis Stevenson novel about some Scottish dude and his buried treasure.
ANSWER: The Master of Ballantrae
DO NOT USE ANY AUTOMATIC WORD FORMATTING EXCEPT FOR SMART QUOTES. Specifically, do not use any indentation or automatic numbering in your packets. Submit all packets in .doc or .rtf format please.
If questions are not correctly formatted (at the discretion of the editors), your packet will be returned for you to reformat. If you submit your packet at the deadline and it is rejected for formatting issues, you will be charged a $10 formatting fee (and asked to reformat the packet), but you will not have to pay any additional fees for missing the deadline.
Misc.:
As with all packet submission tournaments, questions must be blind to all other teams attending the tournament. Specifically, if a school is sending more than one team to the tournament, members of different teams should not know of each others' questions.
Please do not plagiarize questions. Do not copy direct passages and phrases from the sources you use to write questions. Additionally, do not write questions directly out of Wikipedia. While Wikipedia can be a useful source in finding preliminary information on a question, we encourage you to use more in-depth, scholarly and peer reviewed sources when writing your questions. Please see various question writing guides such as Jerry's guide for more information on where to find good sources for writing questions.
REGISTERING:
To register, please contact tournament director Jeremy Eaton at [email protected]. Please indicate how many teams you're brining and what discounts you think you apply for (such as the number of moderators and buzzers you're bringing). For the most part, we'll accept high school, non-affiliated and hybrid teams in additional to traditional college teams, but please contact me first.
Details on where the tournament will be held and when specifically registration will be will be announced closer to the date of the tournament.
Sunday Trash Tournament
We are very interested in running a Sunday trash event along with TIT. If you are creating such an event and would be interested in having it run at TIT (and maybe at its mirrors), please contact Chris Ray at [email protected]. Options for this event include GARBAGE (assuming it isn't paired with an ACF event) or an ABD mirror, or something independently created like the MO trash event.
Looking forward to seeing you there,
Jeremy Eaton and Chris Ray
EDIT: Added promised subtitle
Saturday, January 31, 2009
University of Maryland - College Park
ANNOUNCEMENT:
The Maryland Academic Quiz Team is pleased to announce the 23rd annual Terrapin Invitational Tournament for Saturday, January 31st, 2009 to be held at our College Park, MD campus. This event will be a packet submission tournament at the avowedly enigmatic "regular" difficulty, meaning somewhere around regionals level. No mirrors are set in stone yet, although we are 75% likely to confirm a mirror at Northwestern University. We would love to have this mirrored elsewhere (particularly the West Coast, South/Southeast, and maybe Northeast. Ooh, and Canada), so please email Chris Ray at [email protected] if you're interested.
The tournament will be head edited by Chris Ray, with Jeremy Eaton and possibly some other people also heavily working on the set. It's likely we will be seeking some cameo computer science appearances as well.
PRICING:
+$100 - Base Fee
-$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, December 12th.
-$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, December 26th.
+$0 - Packet submitted by Saturday, January 3rd.
+$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, January 10th.
+$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, January 17th.
+$100 - No packet submitted and Westbrookian hatred at your existence. Seriously, you forfeit your guaranteed right to play in this event without a packet (unless you're a new school)
-$5 - Buzzer discount
-$10 - Competent moderator discount
+$10 - Formatting penalty for formatting your questions incorrectly (see formatting section below).
-$20 - Prize for the best unedited packet received in general, and by the best Division II (first two years play quizbowl) only team.
Minimum Fee Per Team: $40.
Any "Division II" teams (no players beyond their second year in quizbowl AND no players who have attended ACF nationals) may play without a packet, although it would be more than appreciated if they submitted one anyway. Guidelines for these teams are below:
-$50 - January 3rd
-$25 - January 10th
PACKET GUIDELINES:
Distribution (24/24 - down with the tyranny of 26/26!):
5/5 History (1/1 US, 1/1 European, 1/1 Ancient, 1/1 World, 1/1 Your Choice [please do not write both of these on the same subject])
5/5 Literature (1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 1/1 World, and 1/1 Any of the above; try to include at least 1/1 drama, 1/1 novels, and 1/1 poetry)
5/5 Science (1/1 Physics, 1/1 Chemistry, 1/1 Biology, 1/1 Other Science like Computer Science, Non-Computational Math, Geology, Astronomy, Earth Science, Engineering, etc., 1/1 Your Choice)
3/3 RMP (2/2 Religion and Mythology, 1/1 Philosophy)
3/3 Fine Arts (1/1 Visual Fine Arts like Painting and Sculpture, 1/1 Classical Music, 1/1 Your Choice or other like Architecture, Artistic Film, Dance, Opera or more painting / music.)
2/2 Social Science (Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, Linguistics, etc.)
1/1 Pop culture, common link, general knowledge, current events, misc.
Please vary all your questions by time period, region of the world (when applicable) and genre. Also vary the type of question you ask. For example, do not write 5 literature tossups on 19th century British novelists. A better literature selection would include tossups on authors, works and characters, on American, British, and World literature, and on fiction, drama, and poetry.
Difficulty:
Please keep your tossups between ACF Fall and ACF Regionals level difficulty, inclusive (last year's TIT, for example, is a good barometer if you're unsure of what this means). When in question, err on the easier side. It is not a good idea to explore canon expansion (i.e. writing about things that have never come up at tournaments before) in your tossups.
Every bonus should have a clear easy, medium and hard part. Almost every team in the tournament should be converting the easy part of the bonus, while a little more than half of the teams should be converting the medium part. The hard part of a bonus should be able to be answered by those with in-depth knowledge in the field.
Question Length:
All of the following lengths apply to documents written in Word with 1 inch margins (change these from the default), and a 10 point Times New Roman font.
Final tossups will be between 6 and 8 lines long. However, we'd prefer that you submit tossups on the long side (or even over the 8 line limit), since it's always easier for us to get rid of clues that we don't like than to add additional clues by ourselves.
Bonus parts should be kept within reason. Do not write extremely lengthy leadins or bonus parts (try to keep them under 2 lines, generally). Also do not write extremely short bonuses or list bonuses, as these are typically not very interesting. The vast majority of your bonuses should be 10-10-10. Please do not write any 30-20-10 bonuses, as these really throw off the balance of the bonuses in a round. 5-10-15 bonuses are similarly bad and should be shunned, since they arbitrarily weight the hard part when in theory the bonus should have the same relative difficulty to all the others. However, Chris has an unusual tolerance for 10-5 bonuses and a few other creative point structures, so including one or two of these isn't out of the question, but don't do it more than that.
Formatting:
Please format your questions in the following matter:
1/1 Unfunny Meta Example Questions (reused to honor our recent alum):
The person involved in this event is starting a rumor that it was actually a planned occurrence to get himself mentioned in a meta question in Matt Weiner's canceled Chicago Open trash tournament. Immediately after this event occurred, one person was unable to identify Okazaki Fragments. It was preceded by Jeremy Eaton answering a tossup on time dilation. The person responsible for this event blamed not getting enough sleep the night before and the two hour drive to Richmond, but most of all just plain not paying attention. Occurring in a game against South Carolina at the 2007 VCU Open, it is now immortalized in the YTMND page Nude Descending a Gas Chamber. FTP, identify this action wherein Mike Bentley erroneously answered "The Armory Show" for "Auschwitz".
ANSWER: Worst Buzz (also accept Nude Descending a Gas Chamber before mentioned, Mike Bentley's Embarrassing Neg with The Armory Show on the Auschwitz Question at the 2007 Illinois Novice Tournament, and clear knowledge equivalents; do not accept just "Armory Show" or "Auschwitz")
Answer the following about a certain comic strip, FTPE.
[10] Like Chris Ray, the title character of this Dik Browne comic strip has red hair and a big beard, and is also illiterate and bathes only once a year.
ANSWER: Hagar the Horrible
[10] Using Wikipedia might erroneously lead you to believe that Hagar the Horrible was based on this play by Henrik Ibsen in which Sigurd defeats Hjardis by killing her sentinel, a white bear.
ANSWER: The Vikings at Helgeland
[10] If Jonathan Magin had his way, Hagar the Horrible and all other comic strips would be inspired by this Robert Louis Stevenson novel about some Scottish dude and his buried treasure.
ANSWER: The Master of Ballantrae
DO NOT USE ANY AUTOMATIC WORD FORMATTING EXCEPT FOR SMART QUOTES. Specifically, do not use any indentation or automatic numbering in your packets. Submit all packets in .doc or .rtf format please.
If questions are not correctly formatted (at the discretion of the editors), your packet will be returned for you to reformat. If you submit your packet at the deadline and it is rejected for formatting issues, you will be charged a $10 formatting fee (and asked to reformat the packet), but you will not have to pay any additional fees for missing the deadline.
Misc.:
As with all packet submission tournaments, questions must be blind to all other teams attending the tournament. Specifically, if a school is sending more than one team to the tournament, members of different teams should not know of each others' questions.
Please do not plagiarize questions. Do not copy direct passages and phrases from the sources you use to write questions. Additionally, do not write questions directly out of Wikipedia. While Wikipedia can be a useful source in finding preliminary information on a question, we encourage you to use more in-depth, scholarly and peer reviewed sources when writing your questions. Please see various question writing guides such as Jerry's guide for more information on where to find good sources for writing questions.
REGISTERING:
To register, please contact tournament director Jeremy Eaton at [email protected]. Please indicate how many teams you're brining and what discounts you think you apply for (such as the number of moderators and buzzers you're bringing). For the most part, we'll accept high school, non-affiliated and hybrid teams in additional to traditional college teams, but please contact me first.
Details on where the tournament will be held and when specifically registration will be will be announced closer to the date of the tournament.
Sunday Trash Tournament
We are very interested in running a Sunday trash event along with TIT. If you are creating such an event and would be interested in having it run at TIT (and maybe at its mirrors), please contact Chris Ray at [email protected]. Options for this event include GARBAGE (assuming it isn't paired with an ACF event) or an ABD mirror, or something independently created like the MO trash event.
Looking forward to seeing you there,
Jeremy Eaton and Chris Ray
EDIT: Added promised subtitle