The Quizbowl Resource Center

The time has come for Penn Bowl Trash II. Penn will be hosting its second annual house-written trash tournament on Sunday January 31, 2010. This is the day after Penn Bowl will be held. This tournament will be a regular difficulty trash tournament that should be accessible to casual players, but at the same time fun and entertaining for the more hard-core members of the trash community. We intend to provide 11-12 rounds of play. Although as of this moment, this is going to be a completely house-written tournament, we will happily accept any freelance packets for a discount of $40. Any people interested in submitting a packet should do so by January 15.

Basic Fees/Discounts:
$80/team
$10 discount/buzzer
$10 discount/moderator
$40 discount for freelance packet (mentioned above)
minimum fee: $0

Distribution:
20/20 Total
4/4 Sports
4/4 Movies
4/4 TV
4/4 Music
2/1 or 1/2 Video Games
1/0 or 0/1 Comics
2/2 other (This will include a mix of food, consumerama, internet fads, trash lit, and questions which combine multiple elements of the distribution)

We are also accepting bids for mirrors of this tournament. If you are interested in running a mirror or submitting a freelance packet, email me at [email protected]. Additionally, if you have any questions, feel free to send me an email or just post in the thread. Information on day-of-tournament logistics will come later as soon as I have that specific info for you.

I would be very happy if Northwestern decided to mirror this set . I might even be able to scrounge up a freelance packet if such a thing happened...

Would there be teams that are open to accepting free agents for this tournament and Penn Bowl too (and is this even allowed)? I ask because if there is no Canadian mirror, then I'd seriously consider making the drive down for this (but probably wouldn't be able to find too many others interested in doing the same)

edit: Nevermind...I didn't see that Penn Bowl was a packet sub tournament.

Hey, I have not gotten that much of a response yet from those planning to attend this tournament. This is what I have so far.

Teams:
Maryland
NYU
Nate Kane and team
Possible Penn House Team

Free Agents:
Delano Barnes
Gene Stoye


Please contact me if I missed anybody or if you intend to play this tournament, but have not yet contacted me. A post in the thread or an email to me will suffice. Thanks.

Could we possibly get a field update and some logistics information?

It would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Logistics-wise, we don't usually know anything until the week leading up to the tournament, but in this case the games and opening meeting will likely take place in Williams Hall on Sunday. I'll have Ben make a post with additional info once that is confirmed.

So far for teams, I have:

RIT
NYU
VCU
Maryland (Possibly X2)
Penn House team(s)

This is not finalized. There are still one or two teams that have not given me definitive answers yet. Once again, if you would like to play and have not contacted me yet to let me know, please post in the thread or send along an email. I will be finalizing things in the next several days. Thanks.

Also, in terms of logistics, registration will probably begin around 9 AM.

Please add 1 team from Delaware/Charter.

Team name: Flying Space Pimps. We'll bring 2 buzzers.

Logistics-wise, teams should plan on meeting in the Williams Hall lobby area (nominal address 255 S. 36th Street) for the opening meeting before 9am--map here: http://www.facilities.upenn.edu/map.php. Games will also be in Williams.

Maryland plus (Chris Ray, Jeremy Eaton, Andrew Lim and I'm really sorry fourth person whose name I don't know) beat VCU + (Matt Weiner, George Berry, Evan Adams and myself) in a one game final. Maryland had lost a game in the initial RR and had a tie in the playoff rounds to Penn that was resolved in about the worst way imaginable but it got done at least, with Penn winning.
We'd gone undefeated in the RR but gotten soundly beaten by Maryland in the playoff RR, and since prelims didn't carry over, the final was one game, and Maryland again won by a reasonable margin, so congrats to them, thanks to all the teams that came out making it a fun experience for me, and Penn and the staffers for running a decent, almost-entirely-in-house-event that was efficiently run, bargain priced, and just a good day.

For all of those interested in the stats. The first link is for prelims while the second is combined with playoffs.
Special thanks to Ben and Joe for doing an amazing job with running the tournament.

http://results.scobo.net/Penn/pbtrash2prelims

http://results.scobo.net/Penn/pbtrash2playoffs

Our playoff match vs. Temple appears to be missing from the combined stats. If you need the breakdown it was
VCU 565 Tample 50
Temple: Player 3 0/1/1 player 2 0/2/3 (don't have player names) 3 Bonuses heard for 40 bonus points
VCU
Matt: 0/8/1 Evan: 0/0/1 George: 0/1/0 Dan: 3/3/0 15 bonuses heard 410 points

We only got back to Rochester about a half hour ago, but I just wanted to thank Penn for this tournament. The questions were of a high quality and were generally of a consistent difficulty, with a few outliers.

I know the set hasn't been cleared, but is there someone I can contact about a sports question? For one of them, I either misheard the moderator (most likely), the moderator made an error (less likely) or there was just a factual error with a question (less likely). I just want to make sure that the question is correct for future iterations if there is in fact an error.

Thanks again!

All right here's the updated playoff stats. Thanks for the notification.

http://results.scobo.net/Penn/pbtrash2playoffs

Having written for the set and thus gotten a chance to look at some of the questions, I have mixed feelings. I don't want to sound too negative, as there were quite a few fine questions, but these are some general problems which should be reviewed for the next edition:

1. Questions are too long. Unless this is some odd experimental tournament, we don't need 12 line tossups, especially when in the majority of most cases, it's like Wikipedia clues ("A person who guest starred in one episode of Family Matters had this last name!"). A little more juidicious editing here would have been great. Bonuses could also be tightened up a bit too.

2. Questions sometimes tried to toss up things with little or no medium clues. What I mean here is that you are tossing something up that it becomes very evident early on what it is or who they are looking for and the only question is "Hey, do you remember this movie character's name?" or whatever. This is a little frustrating, particularly if nobody knows it and it goes the full 12 lines anyway.

3. Subdistribution needed to be checked a bit. There was one particular television genre that seemed especially prevalent, but maybe I'm just faux-remembering.

4. Some questions should have been tinkered with to produce a better answer line. Why toss up a character from a movie when you could just use the movie, particularly when the movie isn't that well remembered anyway? Why do these common link disambiguation questions when a word or surname is mostly associated with one thing anyway? This might be more of a personal preference.

All of that said, this is still definitely a decent set and for a house effort, a solid job and I hope Penn keeps it up.

I thought this was a really enjoyable tournament, especially given the fact that it was written entirely by two sophomores, save a Maryland-submitted packet. The bonuses in particular did a better job than last year of having clear easy-medium-hard parts as can be gleaned from the bonus conversion stats.