ACF Winter Southeast at UGA (1/16)

[Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant]

Use of the projector or whiteboard in the auditorium also would have been good for showing what the rooms were, since it was hard to hear in the back.

[cchiego]

I think I managed to reconstruct both the prelim and playoff brackets. Let me know if there's something amiss.

Prelims

Playoffs

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

So, Southside can be called Southside in the playoffs but not the prelims?

[cchiego]

More like I can be sent a stat file with pretty much no explanation and asked to post it, then asked to reconstruct the entire tournament/divide teams into divisions, then realize that some teams needed to be renamed for whatever reason. Should be fixed now.

[grapesmoker]

Could someone please explain in detail what problems this tournament ran into? As the head editor for ACF Regionals, I will be sending out emails with some points about tournament hosting and logistics management and I want to be sure that whatever issues this tournament had are not repeated.

I do want to point out that tiebreaker games on half-packets are entirely consistent with and provided for in the official ACF rules. In fact, hosts are explicitly encouraged to do so rather than use statistical tiebreakers, which are provided for when time constraints do not allow for tiebreaker games. Since I'm not sure what exactly went down, I don't know whether or not UGA did the right thing, but it's not immediately obvious to me that they made the wrong call here. In any case, I think we could all benefit from a hopefully unbiased and straightforward breakdown of any logistical problems with this tournament.

[Kwang the Ninja]

I don't know exactly the reasons why, but it took 11 hours to play 12 rounds, and we didn't even stay for the awards ceremony. We had a seven hour or so drive back, and decided we couldn't make it all the way because we didn't get out of Athens until close to 9/9:30. We ended up stopping in Newnan, and didn't even make it there until after midnight. Also, I would like someone to explain why we played on three different floors in two different buildings when there were a plethora of unused rooms (that I saw, maybe these rooms were unavailable). It seemed like this tournament was designed well, but executed poorly, and I think Wes (who I had assumed would be the TD) playing on the house team didn't really help things.

[AlphaQuizBowler]

Could someone please explain in detail what problems this tournament ran into? As the head editor for ACF Regionals, I will be sending out emails with some points about tournament hosting and logistics management and I want to be sure that whatever issues this tournament had are not repeated.

The tournament was supposed to start at 9, but was delayed at least until 9:30 because of the need to print out new brackets after teams dropped. Then there was an issue of having to shift brackets because they were unbalanced. The first round didn't start until around 10 because of the need to log everyone in to the wireless network. A missing first-round scoresheet meant that the second round didn't start until around 11 because everyone was waiting on a room to finish that had already finished. This was probably exacerbated by the fact that the tournament was split into two buildings. Generally slow reading meant that the fourth round didn't end until around 1:05, and confusion over the lunch schedule meant that round 5 didn't start until maybe 2:30. After that the tournament ran fairly smoothly, with playoff brackets being made quickly.

It seemed like this tournament was designed well, but executed poorly, and I think Wes (who I had assumed would be the TD) playing on the house team didn't really help things.

As much as I enjoyed playing Wes and the UGA House team, it did seem odd that you would have 2 of your most competent readers (Wes and Patrick) playing when there were other readers slowing things down.

[Ethnic history of the Vilnius region]

Could someone please explain in detail what problems this tournament ran into? As the head editor for ACF Regionals, I will be sending out emails with some points about tournament hosting and logistics management and I want to be sure that whatever issues this tournament had are not repeated.

I do want to point out that tiebreaker games on half-packets are entirely consistent with and provided for in the official ACF rules. In fact, hosts are explicitly encouraged to do so rather than use statistical tiebreakers, which are provided for when time constraints do not allow for tiebreaker games. Since I'm not sure what exactly went down, I don't know whether or not UGA did the right thing, but it's not immediately obvious to me that they made the wrong call here. In any case, I think we could all benefit from a hopefully unbiased and straightforward breakdown of any logistical problems with this tournament.

The half-round thing was probably the right call, but if things had run properly, we would have had plenty of time to run full packets and not had to have worry about the police running the teams out of the building at 9:00 P.M. I wasn't there when they were voting on which tie-breaker to use, though, so perhaps someone from Vandy, Clemson, Carolina, or FSU could fill us in. Anyway, I'll be posting a more detailed critique later. Honestly, I've probably been to worse run tournaments, and as a moderator I experienced things from a different perspective. But like Hannah and others have posted, there are plenty of minor things that could have been done to avoid the delays that kept this tournament from being all that it could have been.

[wd4gdz]

After the rebracketing resulted in four teams with a 3-2 record, I looked up the ACF Rules and found the following applicable rule: "When two or more teams have the same record and are competing for fewer spots available in the next phase of the tournament than there are teams involved in the tie, the tournament director should break ties based on play-in games on full or half packets when time constraints and available packets permit, using rules I.1.1 and I.1.2 to
determine how to seed the play-in games."

So, UGA ranked the teams 1-4, and we had a half packet "semifinals" (only because of time restraints) featuring 1vs4 and 2vs3, followed by a full packet finals featuring the two winners of the semifinals.

[cchiego]

Could someone please explain in detail what problems this tournament ran into? As the head editor for ACF Regionals, I will be sending out emails with some points about tournament hosting and logistics management and I want to be sure that whatever issues this tournament had are not repeated.

I know they knew about pretty much all the things that went wrong because I told them specifically on several occasions. "Teams always drop at the last minute; make sure you have alternate schedules planned out," "Get there early and have all the rooms set up as you check teams in," "Don't run a house team without making sure all the moderators are good enough," "Some moderators will be slow, always make sure you keep up the pace and replace slow ones", etc. etc.

It seems like it was less a question of knowing and more a question of listening to advice and understanding that running tournaments is a business, not a fun thing to do with your friends. I hate to be harsh but it's not like there were tons of unforseen issues here (the special playoff rules are a notable exception and a consequence of a highly competitive field); this is part of the responsibility of hosting a tournament and should have been planned for beforehand.

Also, I would like someone to explain why we played on three different floors in two different buildings when there were a plethora of unused rooms (that I saw, maybe these rooms were unavailable).

This is something that's just an issue with UGA in general; the only building that can fit all the teams at once for a large tournament is Journalism and when that's not available for whatever reason you get stuck with these two, where only a few rooms can be unlocked at any given time.The ideal though is to have someone running the 2nd building separately and not waiting on the first building between rounds.

[AdamL]

First off, thanks to UGA for hosting this tournament. Despite some logistical issues, our team had fun and it was *by far* the most competitive college tournament I've ever been to.

William and some others have already commented on the most obvious/major issue with the tournament (the delays), but there were a few other things I wanted to mention.

I'm not sure if this is related to the missing scoresheet William mentioned, but my teammates, who were acting as staffers at the time, told me that at some point they were chewed out by the TD for doing something that another tournament staffer said they should do (namely, something to do with delivering a scoresheet somewhere, I'm not clear on what happened exactly). So, it seems like general lack of direction was an issue.

The moderating at this tournament was fairly poor from my team's perspective. With a tournament this size it's not unheard of to have some less than ideal readers, but what sucked was that all 3 of the people playing on the house team would have, in all likelihood, made better moderators than the ones we got. I want to echo Chris in saying that fielding a house team should have much less priority than making sure the moderators/rest of staff are up to par. I also heard that, for some non-zero number of rounds, Robert Slade (a fine moderator) was made to keep score, which is pretty puzzling. Another minor issue (exacerbated by the poor moderating) was that our team was in the same room 5 out of 6 prelim rounds (out of 3 rooms). I imagine that wasn't exactly the highest priority for the UGA folks since the schedules needed to be created rather hastily, but therein lies the problem.

I know the tournament was running a lot slower than the staff planned, but I don't think "making lunch time shorter" is the right way to go about trying to get back on track. Our room happened to finish that round the latest, at around 1:20, and we were told to come back at 2. 40 minutes was not enough considering it was a 7-10 minute walk, one way, from the tournament location to the food places and the service was so slow that we didn't even get our food until 5 minutes past the time the TD asked us to be back. We ended up taking our food back to the building and the next round started a short while later, giving us a couple minutes to eat, but it's not really good form to make the teams rush themselves at lunch when avoidable huge delays at the beginning of the day necessitated that in the first place.

Finally, stats were posted after round 4 (lunch) but as far as I know weren't updated after that, which was a mild annoyance.

[gwaustin4]

I can't really get into a lot of things here on the boards, but I will state the following with implicit meanings: I am not an officer on uga's team, and besides some influence in decision making I carry no authority. With that said, this tournament from its start was a project of UGA's officers; most were content with me being just something of a publicity guy and the designated board poster, or at most a reader.

Ample advice was given, to the extent that nearly all of the errors should have been covered. Also, skilled volunteer moderators came out in sufficient number to make the house team's existence seem not too egregious an error, and ensuing facades of efficiency made me actually think this would be pretty ok, and thus I accepted playing. What I was not expecting was that some of these skilled moderators were put as scorekeepers, and unskilled moderators were used instead for various reasons. I was also not expecting that much advice would be more or less ignored. In the end, the facades fell apart, and guarantees that 'i got this' were unfounded with like, actually getting anything.

[Mettius Fufetius]

Finally, stats were posted after round 4 (lunch) but as far as I know weren't updated after that, which was a mild annoyance.

I'm 100% certain that I saw a version of the stats after round 7, and fairly sure that I saw at least one later version. But I can't confirm how widely those editions were distributed.

In fact, I would say that this tournament did a much better job of regularly posting stats than the typical SE tournament. I also didn't notice any major scorekeeping errors. The only major stats issue was that players' names were comically mangled in the first version of the stats (e.g. "Freddy D'argalis," "Adm Lien," "Hannah Brandies") -- but even these mistakes were ultimately corrected.

[Not That Kind of Christian!!]

"Hannah Brandies"

Yeah, I corrected this multiple times. I'm glad it finally got corrected one last time.

[SnookerUSF]

I think given the situation, the half-bracket solution was a reasonable one, and fell solidly within the guidelines of ACF. I have spoken off-line with UGA, but to offer some suggestions that Jerry can provide to hosts:

1. Encourage TDs to limit House teams to newer, less experienced players, so that more experienced players can moderate as needed. Also, it is important for TDs to know who are the good moderators both inside their organization and in the region. In more "intimate" regions, perhaps this is common knowledge, but where such knowledge is lacking, asking can be helpful. Perhaps, it would be worthwhile to encourage teams that are considering hosting, to make sure that as many members of their club as possible get practice moderating AT PRACTICE!

2. One need not print out extra schedules, but just make soft copies until the situation is clear as to which teams will be there. Also, there is no need to make and print out separate playoff brackets AFTER the prelims are over, it is sufficient to bracket seeds and rooms, and have the teams fill it out at the appropriate time.

3. TDs themselves should actually be paying attention to what is happening during the tournament, like if it looks possible that some horrific tie breaking situation is about to occur, one can plan ahead before the last round to determine how to move to the next phase of the tournament. Communication with the stats person is key here.

4. Streamline, Streamline, Streamline. One need not have three separate areas to register teams, hold teams until game time and an HQ, this can be condensed. Keep the circle of information flow as tight and small as possible.

5. TDs should be in constant contact with teams that are registered to come within the final week. It is easy, just make a little mailing list of all the appropriate contacts, and fire off e-mails until they are sick of you.

6. Have the moderator/scorekeeper pep talk...read fast, read clearly, don't allow chatter, it makes a difference. Make sure that teams understand that if the moderator starts reading, they should not be talking. Feel free to maybe check out a room that has had reports of idle chit-chat, and give them dirty looks (flex, make intimidating gestures, whatever it takes).

[Crimson Rosella]

If you're moderating at a tournament, read as quickly as you can while enunciating clearly. I know that biochemical compounds are hard to pronounce on the fly, but do your best to keep moving through the question when you're reading. Don't stop rounds to make extended commentary about how Robert MacNamara taught James Whistler how to play the xylophone. Don't wait for teams that are holding up the match by talking. Also, Ahmad, Robert Slade, Eric Douglass, and Bryn Reinecke are all very experienced and articulate moderators [and awesome people for showing up to tournaments that they're not playing in or hosting to moderate]. Make sure they and other more experienced moderators are moderating and not scorekeeping, particularly if your tournament is short good moderators.

I'd also want to emphasize that the only reason half-packets in the finals were appropriate was because of the time restrictions. In any case where full packets are available and time permits, we should be using full packets to break ties. I don't like the fact that a team could lose a shot at the tournament because the Geico gecko and sports accounted for 10% of the available points in their tiebreaker round. I don't want to see that become common for tiebreaker games.

I'm pretty sure some hooligans took a third place trophy and ran off with it. Harrumph.

[theMoMA]

If you're moderating at a tournament, read as quickly as you can while enunciating clearly. I know that biochemical compounds are hard to pronounce on the fly, but do your best to keep moving through the question when you're reading. Don't stop rounds to make extended commentary about how Robert MacNamara taught James Whistler how to play the xylophone. Don't wait for teams that are holding up the match by talking. Also, Ahmad, Robert Slade, Eric Douglass, and Bryn Reinecke are all very experienced and articulate moderators [and awesome people for showing up to tournaments that they're not playing in or hosting to moderate]. Make sure they and other more experienced moderators are moderating and not scorekeeping, particularly if your tournament is short good moderators.

I'd also want to emphasize that the only reason half-packets in the finals were appropriate was because of the time restrictions. In any case where full packets are available and time permits, we should be using full packets to break ties. I don't like the fact that a team could lose a shot at the tournament because the Geico gecko and sports accounted for 10% of the available points in their tiebreaker round. I don't want to see that become common for tiebreaker games.

I heartily endorse the contents of this post. Also, it's an early frontrunner for post of the year.

[gabobo]

Yes, Bevill State did leave early. I know that is considered tabboo b many, but at least we showed up, unlike those who caused the aforementioned re-bracketing. Now, a few items:

We were told that play would begin at 9, with registration beginning at 8, and to park in lot W03 and that someone would be there to guide us.

We found the lot with no problem, but no one was there. Fortunately, I had printed a campus map and we were able to find Sanford Hall fairly easily. However we didn't enter the door that was intended for us (since no one was there to tell us) and found ourselves in an auditorium at 830 with only 4 people in it. I asked if we were in the right place and was told yes... I asked where everybody was, and was told "no one's here yet". At 830! I then left to go back to the bus to get my forgotten checkbook to pay the fees, and found out upon my return where registration was taking place. I stood in line, got bypassed a couple of times, watched four girls try to get one person registered while I stood by ignored, and finally got us registered.

Then, the tournament finally began at around 950. When lunch was announced, no directions were provided to possible eateries, and not being familiar with Athens, we were late returning because we spent all of our time walking back to the bus, and driving in circles looking for a parking place before deciding to go all the way out to the Varsity. By the time round 6 ended, we had had enough. Even leaving then, we still didn't get back to campus until nearly 11 (Midnight Athens time).

Griping aside, having seen some comments about reader speed, I'd like to know how those who came through the room where I read felt about the job I did. I was in Caldwell 107 for most of the first 6 rounds. At one point, I was asked to speed up. I didn't feel like I was wasting time, and I don't think trying to talk as fast as an auctioneer is appropriate.

[Auroni]

Yes, Bevill State did leave early. I know that is considered tabboo b many, but at least we showed up, unlike those who caused the aforementioned re-bracketing.

I want to single this part of your post out because it illustrates a clear case of harmful thinking. Teams drop out of the tournament last-minute for completely understandable reasons. Yes, sometimes these dropouts are frustrating for directors and cause a lot of issues with re-bracketing and re-creating schedules.

Leaving the tournament early without notifying the tournament director in advance is never justified and subjects the director to more work than last minute dropouts does, and on top of that is a very selfish move that diminishes the experience of everyone involved. Please don't do this again.

[gwaustin4]

Griping aside, having seen some comments about reader speed, I'd like to know how those who came through the room where I read felt about the job I did. I was in Caldwell 107 for most of the first 6 rounds. At one point, I was asked to speed up. I didn't feel like I was wasting time, and I don't think trying to talk as fast as an auctioneer is appropriate.

Most of the things you said are very unfortunate, and the griping is pretty well justified. I honestly don't know why there weren't people there at least before teams were told to arrive ...

You were a good reader, I thought. You pronounced words well and didn't stumble or stutter when moving through jumbled phrases that pyramidality sometimes necessitates. I don't think you were going slowly, either. I recall you mispronouncing some of the more difficult words on occasion, but you kept moving and didn't slow down or restate them, which is about all anyone can ask for. I thought you were a good reader.

[Jesus vs. Dragons]

I personally thought that this may be the best set I have ever heard. I felt that the questions were accessible enough to keep me interested yet challenging and well-written, thus avoiding any super early buzzes. With that aside, I felt this tournament was pretty much a disaster. As stated previously, my team played in the same room for 5 rounds, but this was not an egregious problem since we had an excellent reader. We did not start the tournament until almost 10 oclock after being told it would start at 9, and then being rudely instructed about the changes in our schedule. Yeah, I get she was stressed and that her tone of voice was probably pretty low on her list of things to care about, but if you are in a large auditorium waiting to be told what to do after waiting an hour and someone finally comes in with information and you can't hear said informant, it is not appropiate to say "let me repeat in case anyone else was not playing attention... or did not hear me". This did not happen to me or my team, but at least half of the people in the auditorium seemed to have missed the information, and that comment seemed to be inappropiate for a host/hostess. After the first round, the scoresheet from our room was lost, perhaps due to the fact that the tournament was being ran in two seperate buildings. I understand that that situation was unavoidable according to Chris, but it definitely led to a few problems and delays. I will second the problem with stats not being posted; they were posted once after round 1, once after 4, and the last I saw of them were from round 7, which I saw after we had already played the rebracketed playoffs.

where I read felt about the job I did. I was in Caldwell 107 for most of the first 6 rounds. At one point, I was asked to speed up. I didn't feel like I was wasting time, and I don't think trying to talk as fast as an auctioneer is appropriate.

I felt you were a good reader, but in the round you read for us, you stopped play 3-4 times to tell a joke or make an aside. While it probably only added an extra minute or so to our round, it was still an unwanted extra minute that could have been avoided. I believe you have read for our team a few times in the past and I feel that you have excellent pronunciation and do not get caught up on words you can't pronounce, which is great for play.

[The Ununtiable Twine]

I felt you were a good reader, but in the round you read for us, you stopped play 3-4 times to tell a joke or make an aside. While it probably only added an extra minute or so to our round, it was still an unwanted extra minute that could have been avoided. I believe you have read for our team a few times in the past and I feel that you have excellent pronunciation and do not get caught up on words you can't pronounce, which is great for play.

It is absolutely horrid moderator etiquette to make jokes or laugh during tossups, especially if the match is important. Such actions have made me disinterested in playing for the duration of a round before. The moderator should at least know that excessive joke-telling can and often is annoying to players. This happened once at Fall and I was most displeased.

[Jesus vs. Dragons]

I felt you were a good reader, but in the round you read for us, you stopped play 3-4 times to tell a joke or make an aside. While it probably only added an extra minute or so to our round, it was still an unwanted extra minute that could have been avoided. I believe you have read for our team a few times in the past and I feel that you have excellent pronunciation and do not get caught up on words you can't pronounce, which is great for play.

It is absolutely horrid moderator etiquette to make jokes or laugh during tossups, especially if the match is important. Such actions have made me disinterested in playing for the duration of a round before. The moderator should at least know that excessive joke-telling can and often is annoying to players. This happened once at Fall and I was most displeased.

Yes it is pretty annoying, but the match was not important and the jokes were not excessive, so I will pardon you this time Bobo.

[ValenciaQBowl]

I'm sure he's tremendously relieved, Ethan.

[geekjohnson]

having has Bobo moderate numerous of my matches, I can say, from those experiences, he is not one of "those" who impede on the game. He tells a few jokes, before/after questions, and, in my opinion, never degrades the quality of the matches he is reading. Also, he is a good moderator, in terms of speed and ennunciation. I would perfer him over many other moderators I have had.