SCOP Novice mirror at the University of Waterloo (Nov. 30th)

[Deepika Goes From Ranbir To Ranveer]

The University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) is pleased to announce it will be hosting a mirror of the SCOP Novice tournament on Saturday, November 30th, 2013.

The packets that will be used for this tournament are the ones announced here : viewtopic.php?f=109&t=14514

Registration:
In order to register, please contact Aayush Rajasekaran (arajasek94 (at) gmail (dot) com). Rooms for the tournament will be in the Math and Computer Science building (MC).

Entry Fees / Discounts:
$60 base fee per team
-$5 per team for a working buzzer system
-$5 per team per 75 miles traveled (one way)
-$10 per missing player (for underhanded teams)

Eligibility:

We welcome all high-school teams to participate in this tournament. Teams must comprise of currently enrolled high-school students from the same institution. Having said that, this is a novice tournament, so we ask that schools use their judgement to not send stacked teams of experienced players (maybe balance them out across multiple teams).

We look forward to a successful tournament and invite all inquiries to be addressed to arajasek94 (at) gmail (dot) com.

[TheDoctor]

How'd this go?

[Bartleby]

There were five teams in attendance. We played a round robin before lunch. Two of the teams were essentially new to academic competition, and found the level of competition overly challenging. They elected to leave over the lunch break. We had the remaining three teams play a double round robin in the afternoon. I had to leave before the last game of this round robin, and do not know how the tournament was concluded.

Aayush has the stats files, and I'm sure he'll post them promptly.

[bsmith]

I thank Waterloo for the effort they put in. It is unfortunate that the turnout wasn't as great as hoped.

Two of the teams were essentially new to academic competition, and found the level of competition overly challenging.

I sincerely hope that "new to academic competition" also means they were not Reach teams. I tire of hearing "quizbowl being harder than Reach" when 83% of tossups were converted at last year's OQT on an IS set compared to 57% conversion at that year's Ottawa Reach preliminaries.

[Theodore]

I tire of hearing "quizbowl being harder than Reach" when 83% of tossups were converted at last year's OQT on an IS set compared to 57% conversion at that year's Ottawa Reach preliminaries.

This is a common "illusion" resulting from long, pyramidal questions. To me, it is one of the biggest issues in terms of spreading good Quizbowl. One of the first things I have to tell players and schools new to Quizbowl but familiar with non-pyramidal questions is that Quizbowl is not more difficult than short, non-pyramidal questions. If anything, it's easier, as exemplified by Ben's conversion stats.

Huge thanks to Waterloo for hosting this. It's great to see high school Quizbowl tournaments in Canada outside of Ottawa. Hopefully, there will be more of these tournaments in the future.

[Fado Alexandrino]

http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... all_games/

WCI and Georgetown both went to Reach Provincials. I've never heard of Westlane before. If they're truly new to academic competition, then it's good that they took the challenge and I hope schools continue to do so in the future.

[Bartleby]

I thank Waterloo for the effort they put in. It is unfortunate that the turnout wasn't as great as hoped.

Two of the teams were essentially new to academic competition, and found the level of competition overly challenging.

I sincerely hope that "new to academic competition" also means they were not Reach teams. I tire of hearing "quizbowl being harder than Reach" when 83% of tossups were converted at last year's OQT on an IS set compared to 57% conversion at that year's Ottawa Reach preliminaries.

This is the school's first year participating in any type of academic competition -- Reach or otherwise.

[Deepika Goes From Ranbir To Ranveer]

First off, stats may be found here : http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... all_games/

After a double round-robin (of sorts, because of the shrinking of the field size), WCI A emerged the winners, losing only one game to WCI B. Gavin was the day's top scorer with 105 PPG. Congratulations to all teams and I hope everyone enjoyed themselves.

With the exception of Westlane who said they felt they had misjudged everything about the tournament (not just the difficulty, but also the overall feel of how QuizBowl works), I was pretty happy with how everything turned out. Most crucially every team asked me 1) where they could find other questions from previous tournaments and 2) whether Waterloo would be hosting more such tournaments in the future.

I want to think Ben Smith, Joe Su, Patrick Liao and Jj Li for convincing me to host this tournament and helping me at every step, unaccustomed as I am to the HS circuit. Thank you to my other staffers Aaron Dos Remedios and Brian McNamara.

And most of all thank you to all the teams that came out. We sincerely hope you had a great time and stick around the QuizBowl scene. It's quite fun!

[Fado Alexandrino]

We sincerely hope you had a great time and stick around the QuizBowl scene. It's quite fun!

And most importantly, if Colonel By A beats you by a score of some ridiculously high number to zero at provincials in March, don't be discouraged. Being often creamed during my younger age is one of the reasons I had to try and become better at quizbowl.