Mid-Atlantic TRASH Regionals Update

[mrsmiley4]

Hi all,

As of 2:22 PM on October 31, I have the following teams registered for
TRASH Regionals at the University of Maryland:

We Ruin Your Show Every Week (Weiner et al.)
Castegna et al.
Team VD (Hu et al.)
Fine et al.
The Kimmie Meissner Effect (Keller et al.)
Villanova A
Villanova B
Four Dans and A Funeral (Goff et al.)
GWU
Georgetown
UNC A
UNC B
Charter School
CMU A
CMU B
CMU C
Maryland House (maybe)

If you are not on that list and think you should be, please send me an email at bhouston at umd dot edu. As there are 13 teams up there, I'd really like another team to register so that we don't have to have byes every round (plus 13 is just a really ugly number in general), but beyond that I think we probably won't be adding more teams to the field unless you have a really compelling reason for me to do so (e.g. you are bringing a truckload of moderators, you have mob connections, etc.). For those teams who have not submitted a name and wish to do so, please get that to me by Wednesday, November 9. An informational email should be going out sometime in the next week with where to go, etc. Otherwise, looking forward to seeing you all on the 13th!

Cheers,

Brad

P.S. I really mean it about the truckload of moderators; as of right now we are in rather desperate need of staff for Sunday so any help that anybody can provide would be very welcome.

[Edited to update the field]

[Dan Greenstein]

Brad, why not cap the field at 13 and insist that teams on their bye moderate/scorekeep? That way, you have 1-4 people each round to mollify your staffing problem.

[mrsmiley4]

As it turns out I missed the three teams from Carnegie Mellon, due to my own incompetence and need to clean out my email inbox. In addition, I forgot to add Maryland's own house team, which means that now with 17 teams, Dan's solution from above is in fact what we're going to end up doing. The original post has been updated for their inclusion. As of right now, registration is CLOSED.

Cheers,
Brad, who may have to appeal to the house team to have mercy on his soul

[insaneindian]

we at Charter School expect to get smoked, but we have sports heavy seniors and we wanted to have fun. Please dont take out your anger on us!

[mrsmiley4]

For those who care, results through round 5 of the Mid-Atlantic TRASH Regional are available at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhouston/quizbo ... dings.html .I think the field size is small enough that I can keep this reasonably current, but we shall see.

Cheers,
Brad

P.S. I should note that the Dummy Team has been thrown in there because of a quirk in the schedule, where we want the result of one team playing in an "exhibition" match factored into the standings but not that of the other. The fact that the Dummy Team is currently 2nd in the Harry/Draco division both amuses and depresses me.

[mrsmiley4]

Full Results for Mid-Atlantic TRASH Regionals can be found at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhouston/quizbo ... dings.html . Death Cab for Cutie put on a commanding performance at today's events, running the table to take home the championship. Close behind was College Park Retirement Castle: Older and Krustier, whose only loss came at the hands of Death Cab (They split a game with eventual 3rd-place team Carnegie Mellon Shuffle in their first match).


As noted in the above post, The "Dummy team" was not a competing team but a prop used to make SQBS count games for the 8-team bracket teams but not for the 9-team bracket teams, in those matches in which those teams played. Ranking was based on overall record, followed by head-to-head and finally PPG. (Happily I did not have to break any circles of death, which may be a first in tournaments I've run.) There was a mild snafu in rebracketing when a scoresheet that I entered incorrectly affected the placement of George Washington Georgetown Rejects into the higher bracket and UNC Mount Shasta McNasty into the middle one; both teams were consulted and determined that they were happy with their bracket positions, so the mixup was allowed to stand.

Thank you to everybody who attended and/or staffed; this literally could not have happened without you all. I was especially gratified at the number of people who stepped up to read/scorekeep and am massively grateful for the help.

Finally, I would like to offer commendations to the anonymous players whose amusing negs as reported to me offered much entertainment to an otherwise dreary stats room (I won't specify which ones as I am not sure
if any regionals are going on). I salute you, good sir(s) or madam(s).

Cheers,
Brad

P.S. I just noticed that the seeding brackets are not necessarily well-reflected in the final standings, and for that I apologize but can do little else as my sheet with the rebracketing assignments was apparently tossed. I believe, however, that the top bracket consisted of (in order): the 1st and 2nd overall team, We Ruin Your Show Every Week, Allentown, Four Dans and A Funeral, and GWU Georgetown Rejects. If teams have this information recorded otherwise they should let me know.

[sobek22]

Brad et al,

Thank you for the good tournament. Moderators were solid, and the questions were enjoyable.

One correction though: in Round 1, we beat the CMU team by 100 (300-200).

-Adam

[anth757]

How can CMU shuffle finish third? They were in our (middle) bracket, and they were allowed to jump the top bracket teams and finish third? That doesn't seem right. And if that was the rule, it definitely was not mentioned in the morning meeting.

My other complaint would be that the brackets were severely unbalanced. Let's just say that I wasn't too surprised our team went 4-1 in the playoffs. And the cross-bracket results would seem to indicate that was the case as well.

It was a fun tournament though, and I enjoyed it a lot, and the staff was very good. Always appreciate the donuts and the juice in the morning, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing people that are still in quizbowl before I even started playing college, and I thought I was old. Oh well, back to the retirement home.

Andy

[Matt Weiner]

I think the idea is that the "real" standings are done with playoff brackets in mind, but the SQBS output doesn't currently reflect that. For future reference:

1) SQBS can be set to recognize playoff brackets and produce separate standings/stats accordingly.

2) Counting bye games, or half of bye games, or any cross bracket play, in prelim standings is definitely the worst idea I've ever heard today.

Other than that, the organizational side of the tournament was very good. I definitely appreciated the fact that this tournament featured 100% excellent moderators and 100% working buzzers, which is sadly not something one can expect from an average event, and that between-round delays were minimal. So thanks again to Maryland for knowing how to run a good tournament. I have some thoughts on the questions which I will post once all TRASH regionals are done next week.

[insaneindian]

Yes, it was a very fun tournament, especially because we exceeded our expected win total of 2-3 games. The questions were great except for the country music questions, pop literature, country music questions, etc. I look forward to coming back when I am actually in college, and getting owned by the same people.

-The Mouth, Team Holding the Nuts

[mrsmiley4]

Yeah, there were a lot of issues with ranking, some of which were my fault (not resetting SQBS divisions to deal with rebracketing, the aforementioned counting of bye games which seemed like a good idea to me until about round 7, by which point it would have been more of a pain to take them out) and some of which were endemic thanks to the vagaries of the schedule (17 teams is, quite possibly, the worst possible number for logistics in the history of bad numbers, and I'm pretty sure that if I had ranked by win percentage as originally planned that people would have complained about that as well). I included the top bracket standings at the end of my results post so people can take away what they like about who actually took 3rd through 6th place (I'm inclined to favor those, but again not having the actual bracket breakdown in front of me I can't be sure of their accuracy. I suppose I can attempt to reverse engineer it from the SQBS data and repost the final standings by division once my brain stops hurting ;).

I did mean to apologize to all teams about the unbalanced initial bracketing, which I completely failed to notice until someone pointed it out to me at the rules meeting. Teams were assigned... well, to say completely randomly would not be QUITE accurate, but pretty close to, so it completely failed to occur to me that "Oops! I put 3 masters teams in the same bracket as the high school team and a bunch of virgin teams [the latter of which, in my defense, I did not actually get from many of the emails I received]!" So yes, that was dumb and I am sorry about it. I'm glad to hear that people enjoyed the tournament otherwise, though.

I suppose as long as I'm on the topic, I'll throw out to the community at large the question of ranking an uneven field. The tournaments I've directed before have had even number of teams, or at least a non-prime number like 15 or 21, which while not ideal is at least workable. Seventeen is just brutal, however, and until Friday I had been working on getting the number either up or down one so that I wouldn't have to deal with it (A notion I probably should have pursued more vigorously). So how DO you rank a field where one division plays one more game than the others? (A question I should have asked before now, but at least I can squirrel away any advice I get so as to avoid this kind of debacle in the future)

Cheers,
Brad

[anth757]

I guess I wasn't paying attention earlier, but did the exhibition matches count for the Draco bracket? That would be kind of unfortunate for the team we played (Allentown), who I don't think was aware that it counted in the standings against them that they lost, not sure if it ultimately mattered, but they probably wouldn't have been too happy if they didn't make top bracket because they lost what they thought was an exhibition game.

Anyway, back to the retirement home, I need my meds....

[mrsmiley4]

Let's try this again, shall we?

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhouston/quizbo ... dings.html now has final standings by playoff bracket, which I think more accurately represents the overall ranking I intended for teams 3-17. As predicted, it was fairly easy for me to go back and reverse engineer the brackets, and why I did not do so before is anyone's guess.

Right. Now I wash my hands of the logistical nightmare that was the 2005 Mid-Atlantic TRASH Regionals, except to receive constructive criticism (of which certainly there is no shortage of potential cause). Thanks again to everybody who came out and played or helped.

Cheers,
Brad, who's gonna go collapse over there now

[Dan Greenstein]

In the case of this tournament, the best solution would have been to devolve to a 16-team field by removing the house team (Maryland P.I.M.P.S.), Casey-be-damned. There would have been two divisions of eight, which would take seven rounds. The field could then be divided into two brackets, top-four and bottom-four. I am not sure if Brad had a 16-team schedule on hand, but ceteris parabus, it would have been very easy to balance the divisions once P.I.M.P.S. was axed. Just move Andy Hu's team to the opposite division. Another solution would have been to add a second house team, although it appeared the moderator situation--less than two staff per room and one or two inexperienced moderators--would have prevented that.

As implied above, for nasty field size numbers, in a central-source tournament like TRASH, the best solution is to add or subtract house teams as needed to make the field size a happier number.

I was also not fond of having to play five games in the playoffs, especially since the playoffs did not begin until almost 4 pm, on a Sunday. Two of the games were reruns from the prelims. Furthermore, the games were scheduled such that your cross-over-placement opponent (D1 v. G1, D2 v. G2, etc.) was the first game of the playoffs, removing much suspense. Just playing the three teams from the opposite division would have sufficed and gotten everyone out by 6:30.

Other than those concerns, it was a good tournament, I was quite pleased with the results, and, other than the large number of questions of the form "he was born on x date in y city," the question set was very good.

[anth757]

Ok, one last post. Since I've been out of it for a while, are there any other trash tournaments or plans to have one in the Mid-Atlantic area this year? I can't find a calendar that lists events for college or masters tournaments on the Yahoo Group or Collegequizbowl.org.

[Howard]

Another solution would have been to add a second house team, although it appeared the moderator situation--less than two staff per room and one or two inexperienced moderators--would have prevented that.

I would have actually leaned in this direction. The sixteen team solution seemed like it just left too many people not playing. It's definitely my opinion that there were enough experienced moderators present that scorekeeping and moderating at the same time wasn't really a big issue. Presumably, we can select the staff we're going to use to make a second house team in order to optimize the staff talent pool. And there's no requirement that either house team needs to be four people. We could have taken a PIMP and moved them to another house team of three people. I offer this under the principle that the idea was for people to play. Anyway, that's my $.02.

[Matt Weiner]

Ok, one last post. Since I've been out of it for a while, are there any other trash tournaments or plans to have one in the Mid-Atlantic area this year? I can't find a calendar that lists events for college or masters tournaments on the Yahoo Group or Collegequizbowl.org.

I'm keeping a calendar for the Mid-Atlantic and I've heard of no more announcements for trash tournaments this year, although that is sure to change as the spring calendar continues to take shape.

[cvdwightw]

Seventeen is just brutal, however, and until Friday I had been working on getting the number either up or down one so that I wouldn't have to deal with it (A notion I probably should have pursued more vigorously). So how DO you rank a field where one division plays one more game than the others?

I was charged with the ugly task of making a 17-team tournament schedule for a high school tournament last year (which, of course, means you can't add or delete house teams). I split the field into 6,6, and 5 team brackets (5 prelim rounds each), then into an upper 9 and lower 8. The upper 9 played each team not in their prelim bracket (6 games and 1 bye). The bottom 8 played a full round robin (7 games). This resulted in a 12 round tournament in which every team got 10 to 12 games (of course, one team failed to show up, giving an easy 16 teams to work with, but I had no 16 team schedule available). Furthermore, this schedule works with 18 teams if you place the 18th team in the former 5 team bracket and work the bottom 9 as you would the top 9, and gives every team 11 games in 12 rounds. Then rank the field by total winning percentage inside each bracket. Consequently, this means that a 7-3 team is better than a 7-4 team which is better than a 6-4 team, which isn't always the case, but oh well.

[matt979]

The best way to handle 17 teams is probably the same way you would have handled 18 teams had one of the teams just always forfeited.

If there isn't already a place on the web where one can grab & print schedules for the most common QB field sizes, there will be soon.

[The Goffman Prophecies]

If there isn't already a place on the web where one can grab & print schedules for the most common QB field sizes, there will be soon.

There already is.

[btressler]

Other than that, the organizational side of the tournament was very good. I definitely appreciated the fact that this tournament featured 100% excellent moderators and 100% working buzzers, which is sadly not something one can expect from an average event, and that between-round delays were minimal.

I want to ditto the part about the moderators. Our team includes a player with a hearing impairment. All too often, I find out later that Chris couldn't hear in some round. Yet, when I am his moderator in a round he goes like 2 powers and 5 tossups. I just don't understand what's going on, and it frustrates me as a coach.

To the best of my knowledge, I only heard Chris make one "I couldn't hear" comment all day. Ironically, he heard the only two words he needed to hear to get the tossup right. He smoked me twice in two of my niche categories, but I won't say what since the questions are still in use.

I also want to thank everyone for treating the "high school" team with the respect they would extend to every other team (at least to our faces). I hope with 5 matches won, including one against the team that eventually finished sixth, that we weren't perceived as a pushover opponent. I'd like to do this again, the next time I have upperclassmen with deep sports knowledge, or at a lower-level academic event that welcomes masters teams.

- Bill Tressler
Charter "Holding the Nuts"

[csrjjsmp]

If there isn't already a place on the web where one can grab & print schedules for the most common QB field sizes, there will be soon.

There already is.

We also have a guide to creating schedules on the Berkeley quiz bowl website.
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~quizbowl/schedules.html

[Howard]

I also want to thank everyone for treating the "high school" team with the respect they would extend to every other team (at least to our faces).

To the best of my knowledge, this respect was present at all times in all places. I'm glad you had a good time and were able to visit the DC area again.

Edit: rephrased to actual English.