Florida Spring Tournament (FST) at Princeton University, 4/28/19

[Jack]

The Princeton University Quiz Bowl club is pleased to announce that our Mid-Atlantic mirror of the 2019 Florida Spring Tournament will take place on Sunday, April 28th, 2019. This tournament is a "Regular Minus" difficulty, or one dot of difficulty according to the college quiz bowl calendar. To learn more about the question set, click here. We will be using standard ACF rules for gameplay and scoring, but we will allow non-chimera high school teams (i.e. all from the same school) to compete as well (as long as they would be competitive). If you think you have a particularly good reason to play as a chimera HS team, please email me and we can work it out. I'm more than willing to allow it if there is a good reason.
Any questions about the tournament may be directed to me. Please use [email protected] to contact me.

Registration and Fees:
Base fee: $110
Shorthanded Fee (1 or 2 players): $60
"New Team" (see below) discount: -$30
Buzzer discount: -$5
Staffer discount: -$10
Minimum fee per team: $60

The "New Team" discount applies to the following: any team that is comprised entirely of...
players in their first year of college quiz bowl
OR
players who have ONLY played NAQT Collegiate Novice, ACF Fall, or similar-difficulty tournaments (FST, Delta Burke, NAQT DII SCT okay). Also, if they played something more difficult, but had low stats, they are still eligible for this discount. Please email me to clarify any questions about this you might have. I want to encourage less-experienced players to attend, so I will be more than happy to stretch the rules here if you think someone should be eligible. Basically, if they aren't familiar with more difficult quiz bowl, they are probably eligible for the discount.
Please note that high school teams are ineligible for this discount.

To sign up, please email me at the above address, and make sure to put [FST REGISTRATION] in the subject line.

Payment can be made in the form of cash or a check on the day of the tournament. Checks should be made out to “Princeton University Quiz Bowl.” Unfortunately, we cannot accept Venmo, as there is no way for us to deposit this money into our club account as of now. If this changes, this post will be updated to reflect that.

Field List (14*/16) (teams/buzzers/staffers)
Wilmington Charter (1/3/0)
Rutgers (3/1/0)
NYU (3/1/1)
Penn (3/2/0)
Delaware(1/2/1)
Caltech (1/0/0)
*Princeton (2/1/many)

You may register until Tuesday evening. If you do, I will drop the number of house teams we have to compensate.

[Sjenk225]

Looking forward to it! How may teams may we field?

User reminded to add signature and asked to change username -mgmt

[Jack]

Looking forward to it! How may teams may we field?

User reminded to add signature and asked to change username -mgmt

Right now, we don't have a hard limit imposed, but I guess if you're planning on bringing five or more teams we may ask you to contribute a staffer? I hadn't really thought about it. Seeing as it's unlikely that any one school brings five or more, I guess de facto there is no limit.

[Jack]

In light of the recent kerfuffle surrounding tournaments geared for newer players, I would like to issue an addendum to the eligibility of players for this tournament, whose purpose is, per the editors, "to provide an accessible tournament for new college quiz bowl players that will still be engaging and interesting to players with more experience"

Graduate Students are not permitted to play, unless they fall under the "new player" category (i.e. if you played qb as an undergrad and are now a grad student, you shouldn't play this tournament)
Do not send your top-30-ranked, full A team to this tournament. If you attempt to do so, I will be very sad and then will forcibly split it up into two shorthanded teams, and/or may ask that some players instead come as staffers.

I envision team composition looking similar to Columbia's mirror last year. Ideally, though, we'd have more teams of four playing, and not majority solo and shorthanded squads.

Thanks everyone! Looking forward to seeing you on April 27th!

[A Dim-Witted Saboteur]

In light of the recent kerfuffle surrounding tournaments geared for newer players, I would like to issue an addendum to the eligibility of players for this tournament, whose purpose is, per the editors, "to provide an accessible tournament for new college quiz bowl players that will still be engaging and interesting to players with more experience"

Graduate Students are not permitted to play, unless they fall under the "new player" category (i.e. if you played qb as an undergrad and are now a grad student, you shouldn't play this tournament)
Do not send your top-30-ranked, full A team to this tournament. If you attempt to do so, I will be very sad and then will forcibly split it up into two shorthanded teams, and/or may ask that some players instead come as staffers.

I envision team composition looking similar to Columbia's mirror last year. Ideally, though, we'd have more teams of four playing, and not majority solo and shorthanded squads.

Thanks everyone! Looking forward to seeing you on April 27th!

This is a good example of the way eligibility policies should be applied, and don't seem especially onerous for this tournament's difficulty. Good on Princeton for doing this!

[Sjenk225]

Looking forward to it! How may teams may we field?

User reminded to add signature and asked to change username -mgmt

Right now, we don't have a hard limit imposed, but I guess if you're planning on bringing five or more teams we may ask you to contribute a staffer? I hadn't really thought about it. Seeing as it's unlikely that any one school brings five or more, I guess de facto there is no limit.

Alright, thanks!

[Cody]

In light of the recent kerfuffle surrounding tournaments geared for newer players, I would like to issue an addendum to the eligibility of players for this tournament, whose purpose is, per the editors, "to provide an accessible tournament for new college quiz bowl players that will still be engaging and interesting to players with more experience"

Graduate Students are not permitted to play, unless they fall under the "new player" category (i.e. if you played qb as an undergrad and are now a grad student, you shouldn't play this tournament)
Do not send your top-30-ranked, full A team to this tournament. If you attempt to do so, I will be very sad and then will forcibly split it up into two shorthanded teams, and/or may ask that some players instead come as staffers.

I envision team composition looking similar to Columbia's mirror last year. Ideally, though, we'd have more teams of four playing, and not majority solo and shorthanded squads.

Thanks everyone! Looking forward to seeing you on April 27th!

This is a good example of the way eligibility policies should be applied, and don't seem especially onerous for this tournament's difficulty. Good on Princeton for doing this!

After reading the definition for "new players", I mostly agree. (I think this should be more explicit because the way the post is worded, it makes it sound like no grad students who played in undergrad should be playing -- when that does not seem to be the intent.) Without stated goals for the field and some explicit eligibility rules, you'll always have some experienced players who decide to play when they shouldn't.

Where I disagree is in the decision to allow high schools to play the tournament, which it's my belief is at cross-purposes with the stated goal because the only high schools that are willing to play this level of college difficulty are good teams*. In order to "provide an accessible tournament for new college quiz bowl players that will still be engaging and interesting to players with more experience", you should not allow good high school teams to beat up on your target audience.

* not to call them out because they have done nothing wrong in following the stated eligibility rules, but Wilmington Charter is ranked #17 by HSQBRank.

[Jack]

After reading the definition for "new players", I mostly agree. (I think this should be more explicit because the way the post is worded, it makes it sound like no grad students who played in undergrad should be playing -- when that does not seem to be the intent.) Without stated goals for the field and some explicit eligibility rules, you'll always have some experienced players who decide to play when they shouldn't.

Where I disagree is in the decision to allow high schools to play the tournament, which it's my belief is at cross-purposes with the stated goal because the only high schools that are willing to play this level of college difficulty are good teams*. In order to "provide an accessible tournament for new college quiz bowl players that will still be engaging and interesting to players with more experience", you should not allow good high school teams to beat up on your target audience.

My idea is that grad students shouldn't play, unless they started playing as a grad student and have not played very long. My reasoning is that most grad students who have continued from undergrad tend to be people who already are strong players. Of course, if you played one or two games as an undergrad and didn't do too well, then I'd be willing to make an exception. I figured if someone wanted to play and fell into that gray area, they or their club president would reach out and ask regardless.
As for the high school teams, I figured that very few would sign up to begin with. Although you're probably right that Charter will do very well at this tournament, I don't think it will ruin the tournament experience for any team. Most likely they'll play them once or twice at most. Maybe it would be good for me to clarify that this isn't a tournament expressly designed for new players only, and that by "new teams" I don't mean only first-timers, but freshman/sophomores/maybe some juniors who aren't or haven't been as involved in the quiz bowl circuit and maybe don't always come to every tournament (but they could also be grad students or seniors as previously explained). When I said "I want to encourage them to come," I meant that I wanted schools to feel compelled to try to get their less-active members out for a fun tournament with the chance for them to have some good games. Getting blown out and losing to high school teams stinks for sure (having been on the 0-10 SCT team, can confirm), but I don't think it means teams will have a bad time. For this reason, I figured that the inclusion of high school teams would not ruin the purpose of the tournament. I wanted to have a similar type of field that Columbia had last year, but with more schools.
My original motivation for letting high schools play was that the Columbia field last year was very small, despite the fact that they basically let teams come for free, and I wanted to make sure we had a full field of teams.

[Sjenk225]

Is the train from Princeton Junction to Princeton still out? If so, I won't be able to make it. :(

[Jack]

I want to let everyone know that our FST mirror may be moved to Sunday, April 28th. Unfortunately, our scheduling office has decided that Mock Trial will be granted precedence over contested claims to rooms. What this means is that, unless we move the tournament, our new field cap is ten. That said, I fully intend on changing the date to Sunday, as long as all teams currently registered are able to make it that day. I felt that it would not be fair to change circumstances of the tournament and cause teams that registered first to be unable to play. Expect an update next week about the date.

[Jack]

Our mirror of FST is now taking place on Sunday, and we have once again raised the field limit to 16. Get your registrations in!

[Jack]

We are currently considering hosting the BUMPY II visual movie packet as a side event during this tournament. It is my understanding that the fee is $5 per person, so if you're interested, please let me know (staffers welcome to play!). JJ (or someone else from Rutgers) will be the point man for collecting the fees during the side event. I can't confirm that it'll happen, but as long as the projectors cooperate and the rooms can accommodate the players, we should be able to run it during lunch and/or after the tournament is over (though I am hoping we can start during the lunch break).

Also, teams should expect some logistics information very soon.

[Jack]

If there are any teams interested in registering at the last minute, please do so by Tuesday evening at the latest. Thank you!

Stats will also be available here, and I will try to upload the files at the end of each round people can follow along.

[Jack]

Congratulations to Nitin Rao and Will DiGrande of Penn A, who won the tournament. Wilmington Charter took second place. There were a ton of competitive matches throughout the day, with many close wins and upsets. Stats can be found here. I'd also like to thank Eric Wolfsberg and Rahul Rao-Pothuraju for staffing the tournament.

I'd also like to recognize that the tournament went a bit slower than we expected, but I think and hope that people had fun regardless. If you have any feedback you'd like to give, please email me. I would appreciate to hear how the tournament went for you, and if you have any ideas or suggestions for future tournaments we host. Thanks everyone! And congrats to Penn once again!