TRASHionals XII Field Update

[answerguy]

As of now, the field for TRASHionals XII is full with 36 teams.

Northeast Region: Boston College (2 teams), Brandeis Alumni, Brandeis Students, NYU (2 teams)

Canada Region: Toronto, American Bacon (Rochester Alumni), Wacky Deli Yeah! (Rochester), McMaster

Mid-Atlantic Region: Maryland, Team Juan Valdez, Clusterpitt (Pitt A), College Park Retirement Castle, Dans You Can Believe In, Evil League of Evil (Princeton), Silver Screen Test All Stars, Flying Space Pimps (Delaware A), Delaware B, Draft Day Busts, Villanova

Southeast Region: Berry/GPC, Chuck & Kilby Watch A Porno, Year of Living Johnny Dangerously

Great Lakes: Stone Cold Peter Austin (Chicago), Luminaries of Illinois QB (Illinois), Grinnell & Rom

Southwest: Insert Bill O'Reilly Joke Here, Liga de Justia (Oklahoma), Big 12 Coaches Gone Wild (Okla. State)

Rocky Mountain: Lutheran Jihad, Arizona State, Left-Handed Belladonna, Tia and the TRASHmen

West Coast: Stanford

Northwest: CUBE

I hope to provide updates if and when any changes to this list occur. It would be some kind of record, I think, if all 36 of these teams end up showing up in Philadelphia morning of the tournament.

There will also be a list of free agents circulating about shortly. If you want more information, feel free to contact me.

EDIT: I see that email addresses have been turned off again. For anyone who doesn't know, my email is dcanswerguy[atsymbol]gmail[dot]com.

[answerguy]

The TRASHionals field is no longer full, due to some recent drops. Out of a capacity of 36 teams, there are 33 teams currently occupying slots.

Anyone who played at any TRASH regional (one person or more than one person) who is interested in claiming one of those spots may do so by emailing the tournament director; they will be handed out on a first come, first served basis. (I don't, based on previous efforts to ask all such teams, expect anyone to claim any of these slots, but I am using my best efforts to produce as full a field as I can.)

Alternatively, even given the recent drops, it is still the case that there are, to the extent of my knowledge, more teams looking for free agents then there are free agents available.

[answerguy]

Update: Our TRASHionals field is now sitting at 31 teams, as one team has just dropped out.

Since I'd strongly prefer not to have lots of teams playing one fewer game than everyone else thanks to this late scratch....anyone interested in claiming the 32nd spot can email the tournament director at dcanswerguy["at"]gmail["dot"]com.

[EncyclopediaCDRom]

I have accepted an offer from Greg Weinstein to round out his team, no longer to be named after some Dixie Chicks Grammy-winning single but to be called Little Jack Slade instead.

Remember the Royal Mail Service Titanic,
Rom Masrour

[answerguy]

Update: As of now we're still stuck at the unfortunate number of 31 teams.

[Lapego1]

In case people are wondering, this tournament has concluded with "Bill O'Reilly A Bold, Fresh Piece of Insanity" (David Murphy, James Quintong, Jeremy White, Mark Richey) winning the first game of an advantaged final over "Degrees for Some, Miniature American Flags for Others!" (Arizona State Alums--Nathan C., Miguel Ruiz, Trevor Schultz, Jason Zuffraneri). The final match came down to the last question with a score of 275-260. The O'Reilly team was notably undefeated over the course of two days going something like 14-0-1 with their only-near loss being a tie (which is unbroken according to TRASH rules) to the runner-up Degrees in, I believe, their first meeting. Third place was the Chicago team, "Stone Cold Peter Austin" (Michael Arnold, David Seal, Nolan Esser, Adam Perkins), which finished half a game behind the ASU alums. Other teams rounding out the top bracket were "Luminaries of Illinois QB" (Mike Sorice, Andrew Ullsperger, Micah Hodosh, Chris Vicich), "Operation Manitoban Freedom" (Pitt--Michael Davies, Ryan Balthasar, Laura Pollanen, Steve Ziemak), and I think the Brandeis Alums, "Best Regards" (Dan Passner, Ted Stratton, Chris Rantz, Rob Jackel).

I didn't follow all of the bracketing/rebracketing/rerebracketing/rererebracketing enough to be able to post full results. Tim has all of the scoresheets and the various win-loss histories of the teams, so I'm sure he'll post everything when he gets the chance. Meanwhile, you can entertain yourself with these prelim stats (first 7 rounds). Scoring awards, etc. were given based on that.

I was mainly a spectator, moving things along whenever I could, so I'll comment a little on what ended up being the final format. In general, things started a bit too slow Saturday and all the rebracketing took way too long, so I think this tournament could have benefited from a slightly simpler schedule to avoid some of the mispairings. I'm glad NOW that we did it over two days, but with a simpler schedule, the 16 total rounds could've probably been done in one. I know putting 4 games with the various no-shows and byes resulted in several locals just not showing up Sunday. From some, a little heads-up would've been nice, but I can see why the bottom-bracket teams didn't have a lot of incentive to come on day 2. Thanks to everyone for coming out to Penn. I'm sure Tim will have more to add later.

[Dan Greenstein]

For those teams that did not show up Sunday without notifying anyone organizing this tournament: shame on you! How about you think about what you are taking away from others before rudely going AWOL on the teams you are scheduled to play. While there may be little incentive for one of the bottom teams to continue playing, to leave without informing the party in charge is just poor manners. I reserve particular disdain for a team by the name of Tax-Free Shopping or something similar, who was scheduled to participate in the Tommy Gunn bracket. From its name and from the musings of others, I believe this was supposed to be another Delaware team. Geographically, with the possible exception of the Flying Space Pimps, this was the closest team to the tournament site (43 miles per google maps). That is an hour drive. This team is also connected to the tournament site via public transportation.

We in the quizbowl community are very understanding people if you communicate with us and let us know that you had a family emergency, your car broke down, or your flight was canceled. Most tournament directors give out their phone numbers to call them if something goes wrong on the day of the tournament. Email is another option for making that connection. Perhaps I would be more understanding if I knew the circumstances, but it is simply unacceptable to just not show up to a tournament or leave early without any good reason or any communication. That, and peruse this thread.

Now, onto the off the cuff tournament critique. I knew from talking to Tim before the tournament that this tournament would be very close to the limit for moderators. This, as well as an odd number of teams, led to the somewhat complicated tournament format. Truth be told, while I was not a fan of an unnecessary bye, I love the idea of what Tim was trying to do, and I would be happy to see this format be tried again elsewhere in centrally written tournaments. Instead of only taking the top two from the four prelim brackets, this format split top four-bottom four for the second stage of the tournament and rebracketed again for the third stage. While this added time to the tournament, it ensured that no potentially deserving team was eliminated from contention after 7 rounds and that all of the top teams played each other. Given the moderator scarcity, it is understandable that the rounds took a long time, but this tournament could have been more tightly run. I agree with Mehdi that it is a good thing this tournament was held over two days. It took until 7 pm Saturday to complete 11 rounds; had this tournament run its schedule only Saturday, the tournament would have lasted until almost 11 pm.

As for the moderators, while many of the moderators were excellent, there were some that were not befitting a tournament of this importance. The most egregious errors I saw were mostly based on experience, but they were errors that are inexcusable for someone with even one year of experience moderating. In multiple cases, the moderator prompted a player for more information in a situation that should never happen. For instance, a player answered with a work (and only the work) when it was the artist who was the subject of the tossup. In one instance, the moderator said "I need the author" or something similar. There were multiple instances of moderators prompting on titles of works. For instance, a player answered [name of original video game] or [name of video game series] on a question that was looking for a sequel; the moderator prompted for more information, namely the number or subtitle of the sequel. It is the player's responsibility to properly blitz or know which answer to give based on the content of the question. I do not think there were any non-trivial rules differences at TRASHionals compared to any other untimed tournament aside from the lames and claims, so any moderator familiar with the ACF format should know when and when not to prompt. The most egregious error was from a moderator who spoke the name of a completely different artist with the same number of letters in their last name, which completely changed the thought process of the players who were unable to see past the moderator's mistake.

I thought the question set was very good. Any distribution problems were minor and very few tournaments are going to be completely satisfactorily balanced from round to round, given each person has a unique set of knowledge. There were a few bad questions that I can share later once Tim gives the "all clear" and someone else does not beat me to it. I always look forward to the audio questions, which were excellent (with rare exceptions) and were handled very well by the moderators. The set could have been proofread better; I noticed moderators stumbling over misplaced or misspelled words in several cases. There were also many instances where a wrong name was put as a clue or even as the answer.

Overall, I thought going to this tournament was worthwhile, but there are several improvements that can be made for TRASHionals XIII that would make it to die for to attend and try to take away the belt from the Bill O'Reilly team.

[AKKOLADE]

I reserve particular disdain for a team by the name of Tax-Free Shopping or something similar, who was scheduled to participate in the Tommy Gunn bracket. From its name and from the musings of others, I believe this was supposed to be another Delaware team. Geographically, with the possible exception of the Flying Space Pimps, this was the closest team to the tournament site (43 miles per google maps). That is an hour drive. This team is also connected to the tournament site via public transportation.

Douglass' Law of Teams Leaving Early!

[btressler]

It was known by Thursday night that "Delaware B" barely existed. I suggested that they tell Tim to drop it, but alas my advice went unheeded. We added one of their players to our team, which turned out to be a very good acquisition.

Oh, and that public transportation doesn't start in these parts early enough to get you to campus before about 9:45am on a weekend. I know because we used to go to Temple's tournament last year.

I will admit that I was among the people on the Flying Space Pimps that voted not to return for Sunday's matches. We had the first bye and would have had only three more games, which would have been about as long of a drive (both ways) as actual match time. I think I liked it better two years ago when there was six matches on Sunday. (note: we at least told Tim on Saturday night.)

I miss the Saturday night theme rounds. It seems to me that years ago there was 8-10. This year there was 3.

But other than these factors, I had a pretty good time at the tournament.

[AKKOLADE]

You still bailed on a tournament that is roughly an hour's drive for you. That's not cool.

[Lapego1]

You still bailed on a tournament that is roughly an hour's drive for you. That's not cool.

To be fair to Bill, he had given Tim some indication that they weren't interested in coming the second day, but at that point I think it was too much of a mess to rearrange the schedule, so some teams got more byes than they should've. When I made the post above, I was more referring to Princeton, who failed to show today without telling anyone.

[Jamnman23]

I miss the Saturday night theme rounds. It seems to me that years ago there was 8-10. This year there was 3.

I certainly enjoyed the theme rounds after a long day of moderating. I would have certainly liked to see a greater volume and variety, but I am not sure how possible that would have been. From what I have heard, the theme rounds are usually run continuously and repeatedly, so you can go in and out of rooms and just wait for the next iteration to start. With respect to Saturday night, it was already really late and people were tired. I participated in half of a music theme competition, which had to be finished today because we had to close up the building when it was already 9PM. So, I would have also liked to see more theme rounds this year and would like to see more in the future as well, I just don't think there was sufficient time to go all out with it this year.