2011 GINVIT (Gopher Invitational) 12/3

[eliza.grames]

The University of Minnesota will be hosting our annual winter tournament, the Gopher Invitational (GINVIT), on Saturday, December 3, 2011. Like last year, GINVIT will be held in Blegen Hall on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota; the building address is 269 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455.

We will be using NAQT Invitational Series #107. Depending on the size of the field, we will try to guarantee 6 prelim games. This number may be revised upward, but it will certainly not be revised downward. This is a regular difficulty tournament where teams have traditionally qualified for nationals (and we are expecting to be affiliated again).

Check-in runs from 8:15-8:45, with games starting as close to 9:00 am as possible. For information about parking, please consult the Parking and Transportation Services. The 19th Avenue Ramp and the 21st Avenue Ramp on the West Bank are the closest locations.

To register for the tournament, please contact me at [email protected]. In your email, please feel free to email me if you have any other questions as well.

Base fee: $80 per team
Working buzzer discount: -$5 per working buzzer system (no limit to the number of buzzers you can bring; only applicable to quizbowl buzzers and not knowledge bowl strips)
Qualified moderator discount: -$10 per qualified moderator provided (please email us at [email protected] by November 26 if you want to avail this discount)
New to Quizbowl discount: -$10 (If your school has only played Knowledge Bowl and never played Quizbowl, we are offering you a $10 discount; this discount is only applicable once per school.)
New to GINVIT discount*: -$10 (If your school hasn't played a tournament hosted by the Quizbowl at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, you get a $10 discount; this discount is only applicable once per school.)
Travel discount: -$10 (If your team travels over 100 miles to the tournament.)

*The New to GINVIT discount can be combined with the New to Quizbowl discount for a $20 discount.

Playing field:

This thread will be periodically updated with pertinent information.

[mtimmons]

Additionally this year, top scorers will be invited to form the Minnesota All-Star team for the National All-Star Academic Tournament.

I really hope the system is more complicated than just taking the top 4-6 scores.

[eliza.grames]

Additionally this year, top scorers will be invited to form the Minnesota All-Star team for the National All-Star Academic Tournament.

I really hope the system is more complicated than just taking the top 4-6 scores.

Eh, working on some other system. We might just use Collegiate Novice packets to run "tryouts" for interested parties so that teammate scores don't impact individuals.

[mtimmons]

Unless you guys have come up with some brilliant way to do tryouts, I don't really see the point. I think anyone who follows Minnesota quiz bowl or looks at some stats can tell who the best players are pretty easily.

[gaurav.kandlikar]

Unless you guys have come up with some brilliant way to do tryouts, I don't really see the point. I think anyone who follows Minnesota quiz bowl or looks at some stats can tell who the best players are pretty easily.

Look, dude, first you complain about there being a lack of hard questions for you to play on and a lack of competition. Then, when Eliza generously offers to run a tryout for NASAT (it's not like the club would have made any money on this) on adequately hard questions where the field would be made up of the best individuals in the state, you complain about how it's a dumb idea. Why not just think of it as an opportunity to play some harder questions? If we can already "tell who the best players are," why not just have a tournament to confirm it? What exactly do you want?

[eliza.grames]

Unless you guys have come up with some brilliant way to do tryouts, I don't really see the point. I think anyone who follows Minnesota quiz bowl or looks at some stats can tell who the best players are pretty easily.

You're welcome to figure this out on your own - I was just offering to facilitate it so that no high school teams feel the process was unfair by having a third party organize an All-Star team rather than having one school perhaps create a biased team. Unless you want people to complain about it being unfair, you need to have tryouts so that there's actual justifications for why people were selected.

[mtimmons]

Unless you guys have come up with some brilliant way to do tryouts, I don't really see the point. I think anyone who follows Minnesota quiz bowl or looks at some stats can tell who the best players are pretty easily.

Look, dude, first you complain about there being a lack of hard questions for you to play on and a lack of competition. Then, when Eliza generously offers to run a tryout for NASAT (it's not like the club would have made any money on this) on adequately hard questions where the field would be made up of the best individuals in the state, you complain about how it's a dumb idea. Why not just think of it as an opportunity to play some harder questions? If we can already "tell who the best players are," why not just have a tournament to confirm it? What exactly do you want?

If it's possible to play a sufficient number of rounds on the Collegiate Novice packets and do GINVIT in one day that would be fine. My main concern is that this could run into some logistical problems. In previous years GINVIT has been 11-12 rounds which probably wouldn't leave that many rounds for the tryouts. A lot of high school teams also travel to tournaments together so either entire teams would be playing or a bunch of people would just be sitting around. If these logistical problems can be solved I will happily withdraw my objections. This is somewhat unrelated by I don't really agree the Collegiate Novice questions are harder than IS questions. If you look at the stats from this year's mirror at Minnesota http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... s/prelims/ teams that were as good or slightly worse than the best teams in Minnesota last year broke 20ppb while no Minnesota team broke 20ppb on IS set last year.

[mtimmons]

Unless you guys have come up with some brilliant way to do tryouts, I don't really see the point. I think anyone who follows Minnesota quiz bowl or looks at some stats can tell who the best players are pretty easily.

Look, dude, first you complain about there being a lack of hard questions for you to play on and a lack of competition. Then, when Eliza generously offers to run a tryout for NASAT (it's not like the club would have made any money on this) on adequately hard questions where the field would be made up of the best individuals in the state, you complain about how it's a dumb idea. Why not just think of it as an opportunity to play some harder questions? If we can already "tell who the best players are," why not just have a tournament to confirm it? What exactly do you want?

If it's possible to play a sufficient number of rounds on the Collegiate Novice packets and do GINVIT in one day that would be fine. My main concern is that this could run into some logistical problems. In previous years GINVIT has been 11-12 rounds which probably wouldn't leave that many rounds for the tryouts. A lot of high school teams also travel to tournaments together so either entire teams would be playing or a bunch of people would just be sitting around. If these logistical problems can be solved I will happily withdraw my objections. This is somewhat unrelated by I don't really agree the Collegiate Novice questions are harder than IS questions. If you look at the stats from this year's mirror at Minnesota http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... s/prelims/ teams that were as good or slightly worse than the best teams in Minnesota last year broke 20ppb while no Minnesota team broke 20ppb on IS set last year.

On further reflection perhaps I've been too harsh. I'll withhold further judgement until I see the format for tryouts.

[eliza.grames]

Field: (35)
Minnetonka (3)
Mpls South (2)
Wayzata (3)
St. Paul Central
Hudson
Chaska (6)
Armstrong (5)
Cooper (3)
St. Thomas Academy (2)
Chanhassen (2)
Eden Prairie (3)
St. Agnes
Orono
Red Wing (2)

[mtimmons]

So, are the NASAT tryouts happening or not?

[eliza.grames]

So, are the NASAT tryouts happening or not?

No, because apparently people are just going to complain about them, which gives me zero motivation to organize them.

[gaurav.kandlikar]

Here's what I think we did decide, though:

We figured it'd be unfair to hold these tryouts on such short notice after GINVIT, given that a lot of teams need to get back to their schools by a certain time because of their bus reservations or whatever. So we will talk to the teams about what NASAT is during the opening meeting, and try to decide on a date next semester (or even next saturday, 12/10, if that works for teams) on which we can have the actual tryouts. As to the format, we were considering doing something like having a shootout with all interested players on Collegiate Novice, and inviting the top 10 or so [contingent on interest] back for a shootout on some slightly harder set.

[mtimmons]

Here's what I think we did decide, though:

We figured it'd be unfair to hold these tryouts on such short notice after GINVIT, given that a lot of teams need to get back to their schools by a certain time because of their bus reservations or whatever. So we will talk to the teams about what NASAT is during the opening meeting, and try to decide on a date next semester (or even next saturday, 12/10, if that works for teams) on which we can have the actual tryouts. As to the format, we were considering doing something like having a shootout with all interested players on Collegiate Novice, and inviting the top 10 or so [contingent on interest] back for a shootout on some slightly harder set.

I think this format will work a lot better.

[gaurav.kandlikar]

St. Paul Central defeated Wayzata A in the finals of this tournament to win this tournament. Chaska A defeated Minnetonka A for the third place game. After prelims, Max Timmons of Central was top scorer. Full stats can be found here. I know there's some (well, a lot of) typos in stats; we might fix this and re-upload the stats at some point if we feel like it.

[mtimmons]

This tournament was really well run as usual for University of Minnesota tournaments. I also enjoyed the question set a lot more than typical NAQT sets and thought it was pretty good but it seems the bonuses were too hard for the field as 15/36 teams got less than 10ppb. While a lot is attributable to many teams not being very good perhaps the easy parts could be made a little easier. Also while I was fine with there being no computational math perhaps this could have been announced before hand so teams would know when selecting teams. Was Armstrong A involved in the tiebreakers in the Durey bracket? If prelim record are discarded than they STA A, and Chaska A all went 3-2 in their playoff bracket.

[Cheynem]

I thought the easy parts were sometimes excessively difficult. I thought myth in particular featured fine easy parts with just not enough clues.

Regarding comp math, we will certainly try to announce this beforehand next time. Also, I think we probably incorrectly counted Armstrong A's prelim record in deciding tiebreakers, although I'll let someone who looked at the stats more weigh in on this.

[mtimmons]

What teams finished 5th and 6th? The stat file includes prelim games so I assume the actual standings are somewhat different.

EDIT: Grammar.

[eliza.grames]

Sorry it took so long to get the final rankings - I had to go through the stats and fix some spelling errors. There was no match to decide between 5th and 6th place, so Armstrong A and Chaska B are ranked based on PPG during playoffs.

1. Central
2. Wayzata A
3. Chaska A
4. Minnetonka A
5. Armstrong A
6. St. Thomas Academy A
7. Chaska B
8. Minneapolis South A

EDIT: I can't do math at all, and it turns out that 8 teams qualified for NSC at GINVIT! Chaska B moved in the stats because now 5-8 are all ranked on PPG (and W-L record, which happened to be the same). We already had the top four teams, so I then took the 3rd and 4th place teams from each of the top two brackets and ranked them on PPG. I'm terrible with stats, so someone should correct me if this is wrong. This is only counting playoffs, not prelims.

[mtimmons]

Sorry it took so long to get the final rankings - I had to go through the stats and fix some spelling errors. There was no match to decide between 5th and 6th place, so Armstrong A and Chaska B are ranked based on PPG during playoffs.

1. Central
2. Wayzata A
3. Chaska A
4. Minnetonka A
5. Armstrong A
6. St. Thomas Academy A
7. Chaska B
8. Minneapolis South A

EDIT: I can't do math at all, and it turns out that 8 teams qualified for NSC at GINVIT! Chaska B moved in the stats because now 5-8 are all ranked on PPG (and W-L record, which happened to be the same). We already had the top four teams, so I then took the 3rd and 4th place teams from each of the top two brackets and ranked them on PPG. I'm terrible with stats, so someone should correct me if this is wrong. This is only counting playoffs, not prelims.

I think Chaska B should be ahead of St. Thomas A as Chaska B was third in the Auric bracket and St. Thomas A was fourth in the Durey bracket. This is how NAQT has it too.

[eliza.grames]

I think Chaska B should be ahead of St. Thomas A as Chaska B was third in the Auric bracket and St. Thomas A was fourth in the Durey bracket. This is how NAQT has it too.

We never actually played those matches to decide though, and even though they were higher in their bracket, they had a much lower (54 points lower) PPG so I ordered them that way. I'll double-check this with Gaurav/other people who actually understand numbers and make changes if they recommend it.

[mtimmons]

I think Chaska B should be ahead of St. Thomas A as Chaska B was third in the Auric bracket and St. Thomas A was fourth in the Durey bracket. This is how NAQT has it too.

We never actually played those matches to decide though, and even though they were higher in their bracket, they had a much lower (54 points lower) PPG so I ordered them that way. I'll double-check this with Gaurav/other people who actually understand numbers and make changes if they recommend it.

I don't think PPG is a valid comparison tool in this case because they have no common opponents. In the second round robin the results in the Auric bracket were Central 5-0, Minnetonka A 4-1, Chaska B 2-3, South A 2-3, EP A 1-4, Wayzata B 1-4. Based on PPG tiebreakers Central placed first in Auric and get to play in the final, Minnetonka A placed second and got to play in the third place game, Chaska B got third in Auric, South A got fourth, Wayzata B got fifth, and EP A got sixth. In the Durey bracket Wayzata A went 5-0, Chaska A went 3-2, Armstrong A went 3-2, St. Thomas A went 3-2, Chanhassen A went 1-4, and Armstrong C went 0-5. Thus Wayzata A placed first in Durey and got to play in the final, Chaska A got second because of PPG, Armstrong A got third because of PPG, St. Thomas A got fourth because of PPG, Chanhassen got fifth, and Armstrong C sixth. Some combination of tiebreakers probably should have been played between Chaska A, Armstrong A, and St. Thomas to sort out their places in the bracket. I'm not entirely sure what happened as no tiebreaker games got entered in the stats but it seems like someone forgot about Armstrong A and had Chaska A play St. Thomas A in a tiebreaker which Chaska A. The placement of the top 4 is clear as a final and third place match were played. After that things get slightly trickier. The way NAQT does things is to say the third place team in each bracket ties for 5th, the two fourth place teams tie for 7th, the two fifth place teams tie for 9th, and the two sixth place teams tie for 11th. The advantage of this method is that it does not require cross bracket comparisons when games weren't played. The way it seems you did things was to look at teams from both brackets when determining placement for spots after 4th. I think NAQT's way is better as given that Chaska B and St. Thomas A had no common opponents in playoffs it's hard to say if the fact that St. Thomas A initially won 1 more game or had higher PPG is meaningful or if just resulted from them being different brackets.

[eliza.grames]

Well in that case, NAQT has it right and it no longer matters and people have access to the full stats and can write up their own rankings and post them wherever they want to. I'm not changing mine, because A) Chaska B had a lower PPG; B) They had a worse W-L record than STA A; and C) I can write my rankings based on whatever stats I please - just be glad I didn't rank them based on "awesome buzzes" or "hilarious negs"