2022 CMST II at UC Berkeley (December 17th 2022)

[Shahar S.]

I am pleased to announce that Berkeley will be holding an open mirror of CMST II, a 3.5 dot college tournament. I (Shahar Schwartz) will be TDing the event, and information about the set can be found at this link: viewtopic.php?t=25364. We know that we'd like to host this event in one of the first 3 weekends in December, but we wanted to poll the community about which option worked best for them before we confirmed a date.

It's worth noting that we're also going to be hosting ARCADIA on Sunday, December 4th (forums post coming soon!), so do with that information what you will. In full transparency, the date with the most interest internally seems to be the 17th, so unless one of the other dates is more favored, we will likely be going with that. We will release more detailed logistics when we confirm the date. If you come across this post, we encourage you to share it with any prospective players you know who might be interested so their voice can be heard. Hope to see you all soon :)

[Shahar S.]

Due to the difficulties of hosting two tournaments back to back right before finals, and due to a combination of interest from Berkeley students and other local players, we've elected to host this tournament on Saturday, December the 17th.

Fees:
Tournament fees/discounts are the following:
+$140 per attending team
-$70 if playing shorthanded (1 or 2 players)
-$10 per working buzzer system (must have power cord and 8 functional buzzers, maximum three buzzer systems per organization)
-$15 per experienced moderator with laptop (must be familiar with quiz bowl rules/scoring, and have good pronunciation, speed, and reading skills)
-$10 if your team has to travel more than 200 miles one way, according to Google Maps
minimum fee: $50

Although rooms have not yet been reserved, it is likely that the tournament will take place at the Social Sciences Building (formerly Barrows Hall). There are plenty of great options for lunch close to the tournament venue, point to any restaurant 2 minutes walk south of Social Sciences and you're bound to find something good.

An unofficial sign up sheet can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing. Remember that this is an open tournament with no eligibility restrictions, so feel free to bring and team up with whoever you want! Email me at [email protected] if you have any questions or concerns and we look forward to seeing y'all soon!

[Shahar S.]

TLDR: Hosting CMST at Berkeley on the proposed date has become complicated and we're looking to implement alternatives.

Unfortunately, as of a few days ago, we were made aware that UC Berkeley is not allowing us to rent rooms on December 17th. This is immensely frustrating, but we're looking for alternatives to ensure that the tournament can still happen in some form. The following post is an attempt at transparency with regards to the challenges we're dealing with and what changes we might need to implement to get past them. As of right now we have 3 possibile scenarios.

1.) The tournament still happens at the proposed date, but it happens at Stanford instead of at Berkeley.
I have reached out to some Stanford people to see if it would be possible for them to reserve a couple of rooms on campus for the tournament to be run. With the number of open-player signups sitting at 5 I doubt we'll have more than 4 teams, so 2 rooms should be enough. However, this is a pretty large ask on pretty short notice, so it would take an unreasonably large amount of flexibility on Stanford QB's part to allow this to go through.

2.) The tournament happens at UC Berkeley, but is postponed.
The tournament would need to take place pretty much as soon as the semester begins due to the high density of spring competitons. Since Jan 28th is regs and Feb 5th is SCT, that really only leaves Jan 21st as a viable date. This is possible, but tricky, and there's no guarentee people will be available or that we won't run into the same problems as we did for Dec 17th.

3.) The tournament is cancelled or converted into an online mirror
This option is one we'd like to avoid but if everything else falls through we may not be left with another choice. We also currently don't have enough signups to support 4 teams, so we might end up needed to resort to option 3 if the player count remains too low.

These options have been listed in roughly the order we're going to explore them. I hope to confidently confirm or deny the adoption of option 1 by the end of this week and if need be start exploring option 2 afterwards, and so on. If you have any questions or concerns, you can email me at [email protected].

[naan/steak-holding toll]

As much as in person play is superior, the audience doesn't really seem there right now and it's not the most convenient time for traveling. I'd personally prefer this to be converted to an online event to draw a larger crowd.

[Cheynem]

i want to play but cannot enter California
please go online
thank you

[Shahar S.]

Stanford was unfortunately also unable to procure rooms for Dec 17th. Because we want to avoid burnout from trying to host CMST on the weekend before Regionals and SCT the week following that, I'm converting this tournament to an online competition to be hosted on Jan 7th (pushing it back to give more time for people from other regions to sign up + more time for me to handle logistics in lieu of the change). I'll get more of the details crystalized after finals, but for now feel free to use the sign up sheet earlier in this thread to form unofficial teams. My apologies to those who were hoping to play this in person, the next time we host an open it'll hopefully be farther away from the holidays.

[Shahar S.]

Some quick logistics updates:

First and foremost, registration. Any teams who want to register for this event should email me at [email protected] with your team name and your roster. In case you missed it, a team formation sheet can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

The competition will be held on zoom with buzzin.live and breakout rooms, but we will use a discord server for announcements and links and such. Since this tournament is happening online, I'm going to lower the price from 140 to 100 per team. Venmo is probably the easiest way to pay but we can discuss different payment options if you would prefer.

We're also looking for staffers! We'll be paying $20 to anyone who agrees to help staff. If you interested, you can either email me or put your name on the above sheet with your email address.

[Shahar S.]

Quick logistics clarification: our current plan is to begin this tournament at 10 AM eastern (7 AM pacific).

Also, I plan on sending out logistics emails on January 5th, so if you are planning on attending this competition and have a team in mind you want to participate with, please send me an email registering your team by that date so that I can add your contact info to the mailing list. Thanks in advance!

[Shahar S.]

The logistics email has just been sent out! (still waiting on a contact email for Egol et al. but they'll get theirs soon too). I've only sent it to one person per team so make sure to forward it to your teammates if you were the one who sent the registration email to me initially. See y'all on Saturday and good luck!