EFT IV Mirror at Macalester College--St. Paul MN

[rlheyman]

This is an announcement that an Early Fall Tournament IV Mirror will be held at Macalester College, in St. Paul MN. This tournament will be held at the same time of Saturday, October 3rd.

This tournament will replace the earlier announced mirror at the University of Minnesota, which was canceled due to scheduling conflicts. I apologize for the short notice, but due to unfolding events, this is how it has ended up working out.

To quote Gautam's original post:

"EFT 4 tournament is being written by several students and alumni of Brown University, including Dennis Jang, Eric Mukherjee, Aaron Rosenberg, Jerry Vinokurov, Guy Tabachnik, Ian Eppler, and Daniel Klein. Teams are not required to submit packets for this event."

"This tournament is written to be accessible to most novice players. Any teams or players seeking exposure to collegiate quizbowl are highly recommended to play EFT. If you want to browse through earlier incarnations of EFT, please download packets from the Collegiate Quizbowl Packets website: EFT 1, EFT 2, EFT 3."

Location: Carnegie Hall, accessible from Macalester Street.

Date and Times:
Saturday, October 3rd--Registration from 8:00-8:40 am, games start at 9:00 am

Fee Schedule--
Base cost: The base cost is $100.
Buzzer Discount: -$5 per buzzer (maximum of 2 buzzers)
Additional teams from same school: -$10
Travel: $10 off if over 200 miles (one way) as determined by Google Maps.

For registration please contact me (Robert Heyman) at [email protected]

We look forward to seeing you there.

[Gautam]

Minnesota will certainly be bringing a good number of teams to this. I project 3+, though we'll let you know the exact number soon enough.

[CarletonQB]

Carleton College will also certainly be sending at least two teams to this, maybe three.

[theMoMA]

Just to clarify, we had a major crisis with parking because this is scheduled on the day of the Gophers-Badgers game on campus, so Macalester kindly stepped in to host.

[rlheyman]

Hi folks,

I've heard interest so far from Minnesota, Carleton, St. Olaf, and St. Thomas. To those of you who have expressed interest, thank you. To those of you who haven't e-mailed me yet but are interested in coming, please do. Any information you can provide about how many teams would be attending is extremely helpful in our going ahead with planning.

Thanks,

Robert Heyman

Mac QuizBowl

[rlheyman]

Hi,

We are looking for another 4-6 teams to round out our field, and those spots will be filled on a first come, first serve basis. So, if you are interested, get in touch with me as soon as possible ([email protected]).

Robert Heyman


Field so far:
Minnesota--4 teams
Carleton--3 teams
St Thomas--1 team
St Olaf--1 team
Minnesota-Morris--1 team
Mount Mercy--1 team
Eden Prairie HS--1 team

[rlheyman]

Final Pre-Tournament Update:
We are up to 16 teams and are no longer[/b][/u]accepting new registrants.

For those teams already registered:
Hi everybody,

This e-mail has some information about the tournament on Friday. Some of this is old, some is new, hopefully all is useful.

Costs:
Base cost is 100 dollars. There is a 10 dollar discount for travel (over 200 miles one way), a 10 dollar discount for additional teams from a school, and up to 2 five dollar discounts for a school for bringing buzzers.

Payment:
You can pay either by cash or check. With checks, they are to be made out to Macalester College, and it should be noted that they are for quizbowl. Receipts will be provided at registration. I hope the late notice of this does not provide an inconvenience, if it does, we can work that out.

How to get here:
For those of you from out of town, Macalester is pretty easy to get too, at the corner of Grand and Snelling Avenues, two of St. Paul's main streets. The tournament building, Carnegie Hall, is accessible from Macalester Street. A map of campus has been attached to help.

Schedule:
Registration starts at 8am, there is a meeting at 840am, and games are scheduled to start at 9am. Hopefully, we can be on time.

Lunch (and breakfast):
We will not be providing either lunch or breakfast. Sorry. You can either bring your own, go to Cafe Mac, the campus cafeteria, or to some of the nearby restaurants on Grand Avenue (good, but expensive).

Teams Attending:
We have a full field of 16 teams, with 4 from Minnesota, 3 from UM-Morris, 2 from Carleton, 2 from St. Olaf, 1 from St. Thomas, 1 from Mount Mercy, 1 from Wisconsin, 1 from Eden Prairie HS, and 1 from St. Paul Central HS. With this field we do not need additional teams.

Thank you all for signing up. If you have any questions, please contact me at [email protected].

[Cheynem]

While I am grateful for Macalester to step in and mirror this tournament, I wish to register several complaints about logistics of this tournament, hopefully which can be used in a constructive manner.

1. In my team's first two rounds, a clock was used for two nine-minute halves (NAQT timing rules), despite our team questioning the application of NAQT timing rules for a non NAQT tournament. This was later determined to be staff confusion in the first two rounds. While this was apparently just a genuine error, it stresses the need for staff to be properly briefed.

2. After lunch, it was decided that to save time (we were running a bit slower than originally anticipated, but I wouldn't say dramatically way behind) only 18 tossups would be read in each round. I question that this does not actually save that much time and instead might lead to problems in gameplay.

3. For the playoffs, it was decided to use a single elimination process. While I am sympathetic to staffers having other things to do, I feel like a quick rebracket round robin would have been a better way of finding a champion and allowed for more matches for more teams. Part of the issue here was that we were not informed what the playoffs process was until the end of the original prelims.

I understand that there were some unavoidable problems today like a packet being read at the wrong time, possibly inexperienced and undermanned staffers. These things happen and cause delays. But I feel like these additional problems could have been corrected and wish to strongly urge for them to be corrected in the future. It's great that Macalester hosted this and I hope they continue to host things/attend tournaments.

[No Rules Westbrook]

You sir, Mr. Cheyne, win the diplomacy award for your impressively constructive tone in registering those complaints.

Seriously, all of those things are pretty terrible. Teams should be doing more than "questioning" the running of tournaments in this manner.

[Cheynem]

Yeah, I really wasn't sure what exactly to do in the first round when the clock was being used. I expressed surprise and asked several times if this was really what should be happening. Perhaps I should have sought out the tournament director or just flat out refused to play on a clock.

[Terrible Shorts Depot]

While we await stats:

Minnesota (Brendan/Lauren) beat Carleton (Andreas/Frank/Carsten) in the final, and, if I remember correctly, Minnesota (Andrew/Rob/Bernadette) beat Minnesota (Gautam/Eliza) in the 3rd place game.

[theMoMA]

Mac people, please post your stats using SQBS. I saw you were using some kind of proprietary spreadsheet thing at the tournament, but trust me, SQBS is the way to go. Especially since you're going to be hosting things in the future, you're going to want to know how to use this program. It won't take more than twenty minutes to enter in the stats, and it will allow you to post to the web all of your results. It should be pretty easy to figure out how to enter the stats, but if you need any help, my email is [email protected]. Thanks!

-Andrew

[OctagonJoe]

These would seem to be prelim stats. I am not responsible for any of the content of the stats, but Mac sent the SQBS file around and I needed a reason to procrastinate. I have no idea if playoff stats exist or will exist. Thanks to Macalester for getting this finished, though.

[Cheynem]

Yeah, these stats are a little off on some places. Notably, my team did not have a game where we had a 0 bonus conversion, and we did not get to hear the same amount of tossups as everyone else as we played the first two rounds on the clock.

[Kanga-Rat Murder Society]

Yeah, these stats are a little off on some places. Notably, my team did not have a game where we had a 0 bonus conversion, and we did not get to hear the same amount of tossups as everyone else as we played the first two rounds on the clock.

Our individual stats are wrong. They are actually:
Me 21 3
Vince 5 4
Andy 23 7
Devin 23 2


The game that seems to be screwed up the most is the game with Carleton Silver, which seems to be screwed up fairly badly, with nobody having the correct stats. Also, in the game against Minnesota Black, my stats are switched with Vince's.

We also are not the only team this problem, as multiple teams have bonus point totals that end in 5.

Another complaint would be that we played Brendan in the first round of the playoffs, despite the fact that this appears to be a 2 vs. 8 matchup.