Matt Cvijanovich Memorial Novice Tournament (3/14/09)

millionwaves · Post by **millionwaves** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 10:08 pm

This is an announcement for the Matt Cvijanovich Memorial Novice Tournament, which will be held at UIUC on March 14, 2009. Matt Weiner will be in charge of editing the tournament this year, so all packets should be sent to him.

Eligibility

You are eligible to play this tournament if you meet the ACF DII Guidelines. Specifically:

"Division II" player is a player who did not receive a BA or equivalent or higher degree prior to the academic year in which the tournament is taking place, has never played at ACF Nationals, and meets either or both of the following conditions:
1 The player graduated from high school in an academic year year two or fewer years prior to the year in which the tournament is taking place
2 The player did not participate in any collegiate or open academic quizbowl tournaments before the fall semester of the academic year one year prior to the year in which the tournament is taking place.

OR

NATIONALS CRITERION: If you have ever played at ACF Nationals, you are no longer Division II-eligible. Yes, this includes people who played ACF Nationals in high school.

DEGREE CRITERION: If you graduate (receive a BA or BS degree or equivalent) during the 2008-2009 academic year, or have not graduated by the time of the tournament, then you meet the degree criterion. If you received a BA or BS or equivalent in summer semester 2008 or earlier, you are not Division II-eligible. In other words: Division II eligibility is a subset of Undergraduate eligibility; you must be Undergraduate-eligible in order to be Division II-eligible.

TIME CRITERION: If you graduated from high school in 2007 or later, you meet the time criterion. If you didn't play any regular collegiate or open academic tournaments before fall 2007, then you meet the time criterion. You only have to meet one of those tests, not both--if you graduated from high school in 2003 but didn't start playing quizbowl until 2008, you are fine. Conversely, if you've been playing collegiate tournaments since you were 12 but you didn't actually graduate from high school until 2007, you're also fine.

Packet Submission
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Every team attending the Illinois site of MCMNT is required to submit a packet to this tournament, regardless of team composition. Please follow all of the official ACF guidelines, which can be found here, if you disregard the information that pertains only to official ACF tournaments.

Please model your difficulty on last year's set, which may be found here.

Please submit your packets to Matt Weiner at [email protected].

Schedule of Packet Discounts

January 31 -$30
February 14 +0
February 21 +$30
February 28 +$60
No packet submitted by February 28: You may not play this tournament, unless you receive a specific dispensation from Matt Weiner.

Mirroring this Tournament

We're interested in mirrors from every region except the Midwest, of course. Please e-mail me if you're interested in hosting a mirror as soon as possible. I'll list the confirmed mirrors right here:

Weekend of Quizbowl

This tournament will almost certainly be held in Gregory Hall. I'll periodically update this post with more information. Please e-mail the Tournament Director, me, at [email protected], if you have any questions or would like to register.

We're looking forward to seeing many of you in March!

Frater Taciturnus · Post by **Frater Taciturnus** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 10:51 pm

If this is obvious just point it out to me but do teams playing mirrors need to write packets?

millionwaves · Post by **millionwaves** » Sat Jan 10, 2009 3:28 pm

The only teams that are exempted from writing at this event are teams entirely composed of freshmen who are playing mirrors. If you're playing at Illinois, or you've got at least one sophomore, we'll need a packet from you.

alkrav112 · Post by **alkrav112** » Wed Feb 11, 2009 8:08 pm

Fee structure?

powerplant · Post by **powerplant** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 7:48 pm

Any word on mirrors?

Mechanical Beasts · Post by **Mechanical Beasts** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 7:59 pm

Last year when Harvard mirrored, we had a good time running a separate singles or doubles division. I assume when you put constraints on who can play, you refer to how you're going to run things at your own site alone?

Sima Guang Hater · Post by **Sima Guang Hater** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 8:56 pm

everyday847 wrote:Last year when Harvard mirrored, we had a good time running a separate singles or doubles division. I assume when you put constraints on who can play, you refer to how you're going to run things at your own site alone?

Yeah can we do this again.

Mechanical Beasts · Post by **Mechanical Beasts** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 9:28 pm

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:
everyday847 wrote:Last year when Harvard mirrored, we had a good time running a separate singles or doubles division. I assume when you put constraints on who can play, you refer to how you're going to run things at your own site alone?
Yeah can we do this again.

I can't commit Harvard to hosting (though what the hell, what else do I want to do with a weekend) and if so, we'd probably require some help staffing (either by having staffing on byes, or not everyone plays the singles/doubles, or something) but in any event, yeah, I support this recurring.

Post by **theMoMA** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 9:51 pm

I don't want to relay false information, so please inform me if I'm wrong, but Matt Weiner told me that this tournament is postponed until the Fall due to lack of packet submission.

Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) · Tue Feb 17, 2009 10:47 pm

If the separate Illinois Novice set isn't going to be used, could this maybe turn into a mirror of MUT with the same eligibility rules? Right now we're having problems getting to any MUT mirror and this would be so much more convenient, especially since we have a lot of new players.

Jeremy Gibbs Lemma · Post by **Jeremy Gibbs Lemma** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 11:08 pm

I like this idea a lot... would save us 2-3 hours travel time.

millionwaves · Post by **millionwaves** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 11:45 pm

Hey,

On Illinois' end of this, I'll confirm that we're postponing this tournament (probably until the fall, we'll need to work further details) and we're currently not sure if we're going to ask to run a mirror of MUT or run nothing that weekend at all. We'll have a decision made about that shortly, and I'll post here.

It would help to know how much interest there is in an MUT mirror, since I received minimal interest in MCMNT. Please post here or e-mail me if your team is interested in an Illinois MUT mirror.

Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) · Tue Feb 17, 2009 11:55 pm

Interested.

Jeremy Gibbs Lemma · Post by **Jeremy Gibbs Lemma** » Wed Feb 18, 2009 3:00 am

Interested.

powerplant · Post by **powerplant** » Wed Feb 18, 2009 5:39 pm

Interested.

Post by **theMoMA** » Wed Feb 18, 2009 5:42 pm

millionwaves wrote:Hey,

On Illinois' end of this, I'll confirm that we're postponing this tournament (probably until the fall, we'll need to work further details) and we're currently not sure if we're going to ask to run a mirror of MUT or run nothing that weekend at all. We'll have a decision made about that shortly, and I'll post here.

It would help to know how much interest there is in an MUT mirror, since I received minimal interest in MCMNT. Please post here or e-mail me if your team is interested in an Illinois MUT mirror.

Just posting to confirm that mirroring MUT at Illinois, either on 3/7 or 3/14, is a possibility. We understand that teams from the lower Midwest are unlikely to be able to come to Minnesota for the main site of this tournament, and we appreciated Illinois mirroring its novice tournament at St. Olaf last year so that we could have the opportunity to play. If there is sufficient interest in a MUT mirror at Illinois, we will gladly allow the set to be mirrored there.

evilmonkey · Post by **evilmonkey** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 1:22 am

Interested. I wanted to play this, but Indiana NAQT States is on the 7th, so I couldn't. So a mirror on the 14th would be great.

Jeremy Gibbs Lemma · Post by **Jeremy Gibbs Lemma** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 2:21 pm

err... I just caught that Charlie mentioned having the same eligibility rules... I guess I wouldn't be in favor of this in that case.... but 3/7 is the start of our spring break, so I could easily just drive to MN to spend the first couple days of break.... so I guess I'm only interested if I would be eligible to play at this site.

millionwaves · Post by **millionwaves** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 2:31 pm

If we run this, it'll be with the same eligibility rules that the Minnesota site uses. Decision soon.

Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) · Tue Feb 24, 2009 1:47 pm

So, is this on? I know I would love to come if it is, and it sounds like there are other interested people.

powerplant · Post by **powerplant** » Tue Feb 24, 2009 2:21 pm

Centre actually is no longer interested, unfortunately.

swwFCqb · Post by **swwFCqb** » Tue Feb 24, 2009 2:23 pm

powerplant wrote:Centre actually is no longer interested, unfortunately.

Did your team bail on you again??

sds · Post by **sds** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 8:18 pm

Seconding Charlie's question - any decision on whether an MUT mirror is happening?
Michigan will send 1-2 teams if yes. However, we need to know by this Friday morning (3/6) in order to make sure we have university car reservations sorted out. Thanks!

Post by **Auks Ran Ova** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 8:29 pm

Word has it a MUT mirror will indeed be run at Illinois, though obviously since I don't go there I can't speak with perfect authority.

Captain Sinico · Post by **Captain Sinico** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 11:27 pm

Ukonvasara wrote:Word has it a MUT mirror will indeed be run at Illinois, though obviously since I don't go there I can't speak with perfect authority.

This is indeed happening and will be announced shortly (when we find out for sure that we have rooms; sorry, it's taking longer this semester than usual for reasons unknown.)

MaS

Jeremy Gibbs-Marangoni Effect · Tue Mar 03, 2009 12:08 pm

Missouri State will bring one team.

marnold · Post by **marnold** » Tue Mar 03, 2009 1:13 pm

I believe that means that Chicago will have a team or two.

Captain Sinico · Post by **Captain Sinico** » Wed Mar 04, 2009 4:09 pm

The University of Illinois Academic Buzzer Team is pleased to announce the 2009 Matt Cvijanovich Memorial Novice Tournament, to be held March 14, 2009 at Gregory Hall on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. This tournament is held to honor the memory of Matthew Cvijanovich, a great player and teammate whose death on January 2, 2005 forever impoverished our team and game. We miss you, man.

This event is open to players in their first and second years of collegiate competition. Each team must consist of such players who all attend the same school. These are the only restrictions; in particular, there are no restrictions on the basis of year in school, age, presumed skill level, etc.

This event will be a mirror of the Minnesota Undergraduate Tournament, edited by a crew led by Andrew Hart. Questions have been predicted to be “…well-written and controlled-difficulty… for undergrads only” by no less a critic than Matt Weiner.

By the generosity of the Minnesota team, no packet submission is required, though I do encourage everyone to write for tournaments whenever possible. The tournament will cost a flat fee of $20 per player up to four on your team (so, for example, if you field a team of four or more, your base fee is $80, while if you must play solo, you pay only $20.) There is a $5 discount for working buzzer systems that I approve in advance, a $10 discount for competent staffers likewise approved in advance, and a $10 discount if your origin is over 200 miles distant one-way according to Google Maps, floored by a minimum fee of $10 per player up to four. We won’t turn anyone away due to money so, if paying these fees is going to be an issue for you, please let me know and we can work something out.

Each match will consist of 20 tossups with accompanying bonuses, divided into two un-timed halves. Ties will be broken by sudden-death overtime tossups. The tournament will consist of some form of round robin (which form exactly as dictated by the field size) followed by a playoff to decide the tournament champion. Once the field is finalized, a format will be announced and, if possible, schedules sent out in advance.

Getting to the tournament is extremely easy. Plentiful free parking is available at Lot E3, which is immediately southwest of Gregory Hall; all metered spots in Lot E3 are free on weekends. Google Maps directions to the entrance to Lot E3 are available here.

The tournament will begin with registration at 8:30 A.M. in Room 219 Greg Hall. Fees are due at registration unless you make other arrangements with me in advance. Registration will proceed until 8:50 A.M. at which time a brief rules meeting will be conducted. Play will commence at 9 A.M on the third floor of Greg Hall. If circumstance delays your arrival, I can be reached the morning of the tournament on my phone at +17087173147; if I haven’t heard from you and you aren’t there by 9, expect to be forfeited.

Play will proceed until a lunch break around noon and should wrap up around 5 P.M. with finals and awards. There are plentiful vending machines in the basement of Greg Hall for your inter-meal food and drink needs.

If you have any questions about eligibility, our questions, fees, rules and game play, getting to the tournament, eating, or anything else, or if you wish to register, please contact me by e-mail at [email protected] immediately.

Hoping to hear from you soon,
Mike Sorice, [email protected]
TD, Matt Cvijanovich Memorial Novice Tournament 2009

Captain Sinico · Post by **Captain Sinico** » Wed Mar 04, 2009 4:17 pm

So far, I've heard interest from the following teams, who are bringing the following numbers of buzzer systems and staffers:

Illinois: 1-3,4,9
Michigan: 1,2,0
Missouri: 1,0,0
Missouri State: 1,0,0
Notre Dame: 1,1,0
Ohio State: 1,0,0
St. Viator High School: ?,?,?

If your team's entry is in italics, you haven't confirmed your registration by e-mailing me at [email protected], so please do so. If there are ?'s in any field next to your team's name, it means I don't have even a good guess of how many of those you're planning to bring, so please let me know. I'll update this entry periodically, so look back here for more information.

MaS

Jeremy Gibbs Lemma · Post by **Jeremy Gibbs Lemma** » Wed Mar 04, 2009 9:33 pm

millionwaves wrote:If we run this, it'll be with the same eligibility rules that the Minnesota site uses. Decision soon.

Captain Scipio wrote:
This event is open to players in their first and second years of collegiate competition.

Captain Scipio wrote: Truman State: ?, ?, ?

I expressed interest when I was under the impression that this was open to all undergrads...Truman won't field a team unless I am there playing solo as nobody else can make it due to Spring break. I guess remove Truman.

Captain Sinico · Post by **Captain Sinico** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 10:07 pm

Field: UPDATED.

MaS

Captain Sinico · Post by **Captain Sinico** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 3:01 pm

Updated the field again. If any high schools want to come, that's cool too, of course.

MaS

dtaylor4 · Post by **dtaylor4** » Sat Mar 14, 2009 1:23 pm

After first RR:

Missouri 5-0
Ohio State 4-1
Notre Dame 3-2
Illinois 2-3
St. Viator 1-4
Missouri State 0-5

Round 6 begins at 1. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to find a live stream of Ireland/Scotland (hopefully in English this time).

EDIT: Found one, but the video's subpar.

dtaylor4 · Post by **dtaylor4** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 10:20 am

Brief:

Missouri cleared the field, going 10-0. OSU got second with a record of 8-2.

Stats will be up soon.

Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) · Sun Mar 15, 2009 5:38 pm

UIUC did a fantastic job hosting this tournament. I just regret that I couldn't get more teammates to come to this to see a very ideally run novice tournament. We finished playing by 4 PM (!) but still got plenty of games in, and I really got a kick out of the all-star game afterwards (top scorers vs. some of the older Illinois folks staffing). I think I speak for me and my teammate Joey that we are definitely looking forward to more tournaments in Urbana, and I'm definitely going to go on a harder push next year to get my novice-eligible teammates to show up to this next year.
Also, I hope more high school teams show up to this in the future, it was really cool to see St. Viator come out and be competitive with college players (which you should be really proud of, especially for a team that is basically in its first year of existence), and I think any other interested high school teams could really get a lot of benefit out of a tournament like this in the future, especially for preparing for nationals. Keep it up guys, and the future of the circuit will be pretty bright!

jonah · Post by **jonah** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 5:42 pm

In case you didn't know, Charlie, yesterday was IHSA Sectionals. I think if it hadn't been for that conflict, more high school teams would've come.

Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) · Sun Mar 15, 2009 5:57 pm

Sure, but there are certainly teams that didn't make it to sectionals out there.

Irreligion in Bangladesh · Sun Mar 15, 2009 6:50 pm

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:Sure, but there are certainly teams that didn't make it to sectionals out there.

Not any teams that would be interested in playing college teams on college questions. Viator got upset by a team that doesn't play anything outside conference and Regionals, or else they'd have been playing Sectionals too. There are 64 schools statewide that play Sectionals, and a total of 3 schools that had played college tournaments so far this year. As HSAPQ questions become more prevalent, I think we'll see more high schools interested in playing on novice level college questions against college teams (even novice college teams), but even if we have 30 schools playing at that level, they'll still all be playing on Sectional Saturday.

I do think that if MCMNT moves to the Saturday of IHSA state, you'll have some teams interested in making a weekend of it with IHSA State and MCMNT, as well as teams that get beat in Sectionals (of which you'll always have at least 2 or 3 from the North Suburban Class AA Sectional alone) looking for a good tournament to finish the brunt of the schedule.

Post by **theMoMA** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 8:18 pm

Since there are still mirrors of the MUT set to be run, please let me know if anyone noticed problems with the questions. My email is [email protected]

jonah · Post by **jonah** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 10:06 pm

Stats are up.

Post by **Auks Ran Ova** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 1:02 am

jonah wrote:Stats are up.

Man, you didn't use powers? Weak.

Captain Sinico · Post by **Captain Sinico** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 10:33 am

Ukonvasara wrote:
jonah wrote:Stats are up.
Man, you didn't use powers? Weak.

Solly, dude. Pre-announced rules, 10-year-long traditions, etc.

Captain Sinico · Post by **Captain Sinico** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 11:07 am

After a double round robin, Missouri (Charles, Joey) were 10-0, two games clear of a six-team field, and therefore won the 2009 Matt Cvijanovich Memorial Novice Tournament without need of final. Ohio State came in a strong second at 8-2. The full stats for this tournament are now available here. An all-star game between the top four scorers (Charles, Missouri; Jacob, Ohio State; Bryce, Notre Dame; Kirun, Ohio State) and ABTers past and present (Micah Hodosh, '08; Trygve Meade, '10; Tom Phillips, '06; Donald Taylor, '09) was won by the latter team 280-335 after Tom Phillips' exciting power on question 20.

Things ran on-time excepting a small delay restarting after lunch and it seemed to me like everyone had at least some fun. If you have anything to say about your experience at this tournament, good or bad, please post in this thread or e-mail me: we're always striving to give our teams the best tournament experience. This tournament used questions from the Minnesota Undergraduate Tournament, which will eventually be discussed in the discussion forum after this coming weekend's mirrors are complete. Please refrain from discussing questions until then.

I'd like to acknowledge everyone who made this tournament possible, particularly: all the teams who made it out; ABT alumni staffers Sudheer Potru, Tom Phillips, and Andrew Ullsperger; Minnesota, for providing questions; ABT members who came out to staff the event (Micah Hodosh, Trygve Meade) or who played on our house team (Anna Gormley, Charles Martin, Craig Messner, Shabab Mustafa, Jeet Raut); and especially Donald Taylor, who ably controlled* the tournament and handled stats, having an updated report posted every round. Thanks to you all for another great year.

Mike Sorice
Tournament Director, 2009 Matt Cvijanovich Memorial Novice Tournament

*This tournament sent stats and rounds over instant messenger and e-mail. Stats reached the stats room immediately upon conclusions of each round, no moderators or scorekeepers were ever required to leave their rooms, and reading of the wrong round was impossible. This is yet another success for this system, which I hope more teams will adopt. In fact, it was suggested, and is entirely feasible, that a tournament could be controlled in this fashion remotely; I look forward to making that experiment at some point. If you want to discuss this system more, please post in this thread.

Post by **Auks Ran Ova** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 6:19 pm

Captain Sinico wrote:*This tournament sent stats and rounds over instant messenger and e-mail. Stats reached the stats room immediately upon conclusions of each round, no moderators or scorekeepers were ever required to leave their rooms, and reading of the wrong round was impossible. This is yet another success for this system, which I hope more teams will adopt. In fact, it was suggested, and is entirely feasible, that a tournament could be controlled in this fashion remotely; I look forward to making that experiment at some point. If you want to discuss this system more, please post in this thread.

Our MUT site used passworded rounds (with passwords sent over email), but for scorekeeping we used the Excel scoresheets, uploaded to Google Docs. Each room had a separate spreadsheet containing pages for each individual round. While there were some problems with passworded zip files being unopenable by people who use toy computers Macs, the Google doc scoresheets worked wonderfully.

naturalistic phallacy · Mon Mar 16, 2009 6:26 pm

Ukonvasara wrote:
Captain Sinico wrote:*This tournament sent stats and rounds over instant messenger and e-mail. Stats reached the stats room immediately upon conclusions of each round, no moderators or scorekeepers were ever required to leave their rooms, and reading of the wrong round was impossible. This is yet another success for this system, which I hope more teams will adopt. In fact, it was suggested, and is entirely feasible, that a tournament could be controlled in this fashion remotely; I look forward to making that experiment at some point. If you want to discuss this system more, please post in this thread.
Our MUT site used passworded rounds (with passwords sent over email), but for scorekeeping we used the Excel scoresheets, uploaded to Google Docs. Each room had a separate spreadsheet containing pages for each individual round. While there were some problems with passworded zip files being unopenable by people who use toy computers Macs, the Google doc scoresheets worked wonderfully.

My computer is prettier than yours, just like a toy.

Post by **Auks Ran Ova** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 6:32 pm

tetragrammatology wrote:
Ukonvasara wrote:
Captain Sinico wrote:*This tournament sent stats and rounds over instant messenger and e-mail. Stats reached the stats room immediately upon conclusions of each round, no moderators or scorekeepers were ever required to leave their rooms, and reading of the wrong round was impossible. This is yet another success for this system, which I hope more teams will adopt. In fact, it was suggested, and is entirely feasible, that a tournament could be controlled in this fashion remotely; I look forward to making that experiment at some point. If you want to discuss this system more, please post in this thread.
Our MUT site used passworded rounds (with passwords sent over email), but for scorekeeping we used the Excel scoresheets, uploaded to Google Docs. Each room had a separate spreadsheet containing pages for each individual round. While there were some problems with passworded zip files being unopenable by people who use toy computers Macs, the Google doc scoresheets worked wonderfully.
My computer is prettier than yours, just like a toy.

Yep. All the sharp edges on mine are a serious choking hazard.

dtaylor4 · Post by **dtaylor4** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 6:56 pm

Ukonvasara wrote:
Captain Sinico wrote:Our MUT site used passworded rounds (with passwords sent over email), but for scorekeeping we used the Excel scoresheets, uploaded to Google Docs. Each room had a separate spreadsheet containing pages for each individual round. While there were some problems with passworded zip files being unopenable by people who use toy computers Macs, the Google doc scoresheets worked wonderfully.

During Round 1, I queued up individual emails for each of the remaining rounds with .pdf and .doc versions of each of the rounds. Given that none of the packets we used were written by any of the teams, even if I managed to screw up and send the wrong round, the issues were minimal. As for the scoresheets, the template was sent out over email a couple days before the tournament, and it takes all of one minute max to set up the team/individual names for each round.

As for the password-encoded rounds, in my opinion, the effort one takes to password-protect them (and hopefully store the passwords in a secure place) outweighs the gain, as you yourself pointed out the trouble with using them with Macs.

Captain Sinico · Post by **Captain Sinico** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 10:58 am

Please note that the trope of Macs being unable to read encrypted zip files is a hobgoblin. Any OS X Mac can open any pkzip-compatible encrypted file as-is; just launch the terminal and use "unzip -p [password goes here] [name of zip file goes here]". If that's too complicated for people, you have them get any number of free, easy-to-use Mac zip frontends that handle encrypted files. This one seems to be popular, for example. I guess I'm not sure what to do for OS 9 or earlier, but I'm sure a likewise simple solution exists.
I echo Donald's sentiment, though: sending the packets round-by-round is more straightforward. I don't see what of value the encryption approach gains, since cleaving to it still requires that something be sent (the password) each round and more things can go wrong (wrong password as has happened to me at least once, people don't know how to use the encryption as has happened several times already, etc.) I guess it would be marginally easier in the case of a network outage to transfer encryption keys rather than rounds, but that's the only argument for the encryption route I can see and, as you could have guessed, I think that dubious and in-all-events-small benefit is more-than-offset by the potential costs.

MaS