Ottawa Quizbowl Tournament VIII (11/17/2012)

[bsmith]

The 8th Ottawa Quizbowl Tournament will be held November 17th at the University of Ottawa. All high school teams are welcome, including those who may be "coachless" during the labour dispute. I, Ben Smith, will be a contact person for the tournament and possibly the tournament director.

We will use NAQT IS-118, with roughly 1/1 of Canadian content added. "Pencil and paper" calculation questions will be omitted. Games will follow NAQT rules, and will have 9-minute timed halves. In addition to prizes, top teams will also receive qualifications for national championships in the US.

Unfortunately, there is some coordination difficulty between the club and the administration, but I expect to have the games on the second floor of Brooks again, with a possible field limit of 11 teams.

Fees and discounts:
$50 for the first team from a school
$40 for each additional team from a school
-$10 for each working set of buzzers
Fess are payable the morning of the tournament either with cash or a cheque written to the "University of Ottawa Trivia Club".

Finally, some further notes about situations that may arise because of the dispute:
-If payment is a problem because you have no access to funds, contact me in advance to work something out.
-Teams can compete without official school support (contact me in advance if you need pseudonyms), but the U of O club assumes no responsibility for supervision. If you suspect that you will have trouble if there is no supervision, bring along a parent for your team.
-Even if you are an unofficial team, all players must be attending the same school.

If you have any questions about the tournament or would like to register teams, please contact me by email at president -AT- onqba.ca . Thanks for your interest, and good luck to the teams!

[bsmith]

Field update:

Colonel By (3)
Earl of March (2)
Lisgar (2-4)
Nepean (1)

The tournament will be on the second floor of Brooks, with an initial meeting in room 202.

[bsmith]

The eighth Ottawa Quizbowl Tournament saw 10 teams from 4 local schools compete.

After a full round robin, Lisgar B sat at 8-1 with Lisgar A and Colonel By A at 7-2. A "semifinal" for the right to face Lisgar B saw Lisgar A beat Colonel By A 285-220. In the advantaged final, Lisgar B won the first game 340-250 to win, giving the school 7 victories in 8 OQTs. Ian from Earl of March A was top scorer at 78 ppg.

Stats are here: http://onqba.ca/stats/oqt2012/oqt2012_standings.html

Thanks to the teams and Ottawa staff that participated.

[Fado Alexandrino]

This tournament was well received by the students from Lisgar and we'd like to thank you for hosting this for the 8th time.
I have some issues with the actual set as I felt it didn't really match with the usually quality of NAQT sets. I've never had a problem with the distribution or content of a set before. But here, I noticed:
The art distribution was much lower than usual, I felt - there were no classical music tossups until the afternoon
There were science questions on the same type of science (not just chemistry for example, but something more specific such as experimental chemistry) in the same pack, and both time this happened, the questions were separated by 2-3 questions.
Other people were complaining about repetition of a generic answer (such as the many Chicago questions at QUARK)

I would probably dismiss these comments if it were another question writing group, but seeing this is NAQT I felt I needed to say something about it.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

If the matches are timed, it's really easy to miss a bunch of random questions that are in fact in there. NAQT has a truly fixed distribution, and I ran another tournament on this set last month, and despite what it felt like, you're just not correct about what you are saying.

[Important Bird Area]

I have some issues with the actual set as I felt it didn't really match with the usually quality of NAQT sets. I've never had a problem with the distribution or content of a set before. But here, I noticed:

-The art distribution was much lower than usual, I felt - there were no classical music tossups until the afternoon.

-There were science questions on the same type of science (not just chemistry for example, but something more specific such as experimental chemistry) in the same pack, and both time this happened, the questions were separated by 2-3 questions.

Other people were complaining about repetition of a generic answer (such as the many Chicago questions at QUARK)

Please let me know the details, and we'll fix these issues for future uses of the set.