RESULTS: Cavalier Classic XII 10/27/07 @ UVa

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RESULTS: Cavalier Classic XII 10/27/07 @ UVa

Post by Oddi »

The Academic Competition Club at the University of Virginia is pleased to announce that the 12th annual Cavalier Classic will be held in Charlottesville on October 27, 2007.
As always, this will be a regular-season, house-written tournament for high school teams. Traditionally our tournament draws one of the most elite fields in the country, and we hope that this year will be no different.

We'll post more specifics at a later time.



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Post by STPickrell »

Any updates? I'm guessing/hoping that notification has been sent to your regular contact list.
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Cavalier Classic XII official invitation

Post by T-Stan »

Dear Academic Team Coach:

The Academic Competition Club at the University of Virginia cordially invites your school’s team(s) to beautiful Charlottesville for the 12th Annual Cavalier Classic on Saturday, October 27, 2007. The tournament will include schools from across Virginia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, and perhaps beyond.

The format will consist of untimed rounds of twenty toss-ups with non-related bonuses using questions written by undergraduate and graduate student members of our team. Each team is guaranteed at least five rounds of play, but most teams will play additional games.

A free breakfast will be provided during check-in (between 8:30 and 9:00), after which opening ceremonies will take place, all in Wilson Hall 402 (adjacent to Cabell Hall, on Jefferson Park Avenue). Competition will start soon after, with the preliminary rounds ending mid-afternoon. For lunch, you may eat on-Grounds or at one of the nearby “Cornerâ€
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Re: Cavalier Classic XII official invitation

Post by aestheteboy »

T-Stan wrote: Please let us know at your earliest convenience if you can attend; the registration deadline is October 24, but you will receive a discount if you register by Wednesday, October 10. If you have any questions, please e-mail [email protected].
But today is October 10...
PS. I'm in the middle of trying to convince my coach to take us.
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Post by wowitsquinthaha »

well, I know that Maggie Walker is planning on sending multiple teams.
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Post by pretzeldude92 »

I'm fairly certain that our coach here at Rappahannock County High School has signed us up for 3 teams. Will there be a small school division this year? If so, I think our A team will be in the "big school division" and our B and C teams will be "small school." At least, that's the way I planned it...
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Post by gonzagaeagleahy »

I don't know if Father Meehan has already signed us up or not (I don't think he has) but Gonzaga is definitely planning on coming, I believe our coach was just waiting for an update so we should be signing up soon I believe.
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Post by pretzeldude92 »

Any field updates, since there is only one week until the tournament?
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Post by No Sollositing On Premise »

I'm the only UVA person that regularly checks this board, I think, and I don't have access to the full list of teams attending. I'll talk to Tim later today and see how many we have coming.
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Post by yangsta »

It's a good field. Between 25 and 30 teams, with most of the regulars and some not-so-regulars.

Hopefully Tim will post a full update.

The tournament is also looking for several more moderator volunteers, so please contact Tim at [email protected] if you can help out. If you're from out of town, I'm sure they'll help you pay for gas.
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Field update

Post by yangsta »

PS: If there are any folks in the mid-Atlantic area who would like to help moderate on Saturday, we'll reimburse you for gas and feed you if you'll come... Please contact Tim at [email protected].


On behalf of Tim/UVa people:
Blake
Charlottesville A
Charlottesville B
Clover Hill
Douglas Freeman
Eastern Montgomery
Fairfax
Godwin
Gonzaga
Grafton
Maggie Walker A
Maggie Walker B
Maggie Walker C
Maggie Walker D
Marshall
Monticello
Parry McCluer
Rappahannock A
Rappahannock B
Rappahannock C
Richard Montgomery A
Richard Montgomery B
Robinson
St. Anne's-Belfield A
St. Anne's-Belfield B
St. Christopher's A
St. Christopher's B
Thomas Jefferson A
Thomas Jefferson B
Thomas Jefferson C
Thomas Jefferson D
Walt Whitman
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Standings after Prelims and Playoff brackets

Post by yangsta »

Just the facts:

Preliminary Round Robin Standings

Playoff Results

Semifinals:
Whitman def. Gonzaga 435-215
Thomas Jefferson A def. Richard Montgomery A 540-140

Finals:
Whitman def. Thomas Jefferson A 355-290
Last edited by yangsta on Sun Oct 28, 2007 8:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by MLWMathStar »

Not a good day for us. I was sick, and the rest of the team didn't seem to be on their game today either, except Greg.

The most remarkable thing I see on the stats is TJ A's negging. Minimum of 4 negs per game, one game with 10, all players with at least 6. Is this abnormal, or is this your strategy?
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Post by closesesame »

We had one bad round in the prelims against Monticello, I think it was, where we negged a lot, then for the rest of the day we were perhaps a bit buzzer happy. I'm not quite sure what happened in the playoffs, though I know we had less of a problem with negging then. I'm not quite sure how negging could be a strategy...

Anywho, my 2 cents about the tournament:

It was a well-run tournament considering the fact that UVA's class of 2007 staples, like our good friend Sidarth, have now moved on to bigger things. The question quality and moderator quality definitely improved towards the end of the tournament as would be expected. However, I thought that the question distribution was a little skewed towards things like literature and music. In one round, I counted a grand total of one science tossup and two science bonuses. Geography and world history were underrepresented as well. There were also a few problems with inexperienced moderators as well as moderators and scorekeepers who seemed unnaturally bent to call human nature "conferring".

Also, a good show by Whitman, especially at the end of our finals game against them. Congratulations, guys. I for one look forward to competing with everyone else again at Harvard. Wow, that was a long post. Sorry.
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Post by wowitsquinthaha »

Overall, I thought the tournament was pretty well run. It wasn't ridiculously long, and there didn't appear to be any problems with the buzzers/having enough moderators, so that was good.

The questions I would say were sub-par at best. Although they did get better as the tournament went on (even though all of our teams left after the first playoff round, I thought the playoff questions were actually not too bad). But, during the prelims, there were more buzzer races than I would have liked to see, and this gave our team some problems early.

I'm also gonna go ahead and agree with Naren on the moderators thing. Although I'm not known for being the moderators' favorite player, I don't think that my team and I were treated as well as we should have been throughout the tournament. Just as a suggestion, the TD should try to get all of the moderators on the same page BEFORE the tournament, because when all of the moderators in different rooms have different rules, it can be tough on players.

Third, and finally, is the playoff seeding. I think that the playoff seeding should have been given more thought and looked at a bit more closely. Seeds 1-8, to me, seemed fine. Seeds 9-12 is where it gets a bit odd. TJ C is 5-2 and ranked third in their bracket. TJ B, Maggie Walker B, and Maggie Walker A are all also ranked third in their brackets, but at 4-2 because they were in the small brackets, so they had a bye. TJ C is given the 9 seed, even though they have the by far the lowest PPG at 254. Maggie Walker B is given the 10 with PPG 371, TJ B the 11 with PPG 314, and Maggie B the 12 with PPG 301. TJ C's extra game got them the best seed in the bracket, even though Maggie Walker A should have gotten it (with TJ B at 10, Maggie B at 11, and TJ C at 12). I'm not trying to complain that my team was seeded lower and had to play RM rather than Charlottesville (because we had a great time playing RM B), I'm just pointing it out.
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Post by Stat Boy »

It was a very well run tournament, and I'd like to thank the staff for running eleven games efficiently enough to get people home at a reasonable time.

As for the questions, I agree with Quint and Naren that there were some issues, such as easier clues coming up too early in questions and some bonuses being almost painfully easy to 30. However, most questions were well-written and pyramidal, and the editors did a great job avoiding repeats.

TJ is a great team--even six hours later I'm still surprised that we pulled that off--and I'm also looking forward to playing some of the same teams again.

EDIT: Looking back at the round report, there seems to be a large fluctuation in total PPG, which I think underscores the difference in difficulty and pyramidality between the UVA-written and Vandy-written questions.
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Post by kpillai »

Yo nice post Naren.

A few things -- I'd have to agree that some of the rules varied significantly between rooms and that some rules perplexed me (such as the nonverbal nonsubstantive conferring = neg rule). Additionally, the distribution for some rounds was a bit off, and I thought there were an inordinate number of music and visual art questions. On the whole though, in my opinion a well-run tournament and definitely fun to play in.

Also props to Whitman -- you guys played pretty pro, and it was kind of neat to start off the day watching you play our C team and end it playing you in the final. In any case, I join Naren in looking forward to seeing you guys at Harvard.
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Post by Kyle »

I'm sort of out of it, but...Whitman is coming to Harvard? That's awesome, but you guys should probably register or something...
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Post by Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe »

Kyle wrote:I'm sort of out of it, but...Whitman is coming to Harvard? That's awesome, but you guys should probably register or something...
I'm pretty sure we have, actually.

The questions in the early rounds were pretty bad in terms of questions being transparent, lacking a smooth gradient of clue difficulty, etc. However, I thought the later rounds were excellent, and certainly leagues ahead of some of the NAQT packets we've been subjected to.

I disagree with Keshav and Naren about the music and art distribution; I don't think that any given round had more than 2/2 Fine Arts, which is precisely where it should be. Similarly, I thought the literature distribution was more or less on target at about twenty percent of any given packet. I also recall hearing at least one geography question in every round, which seems adequate to me, but I agree that both science and world history were underrepresented.

Also, you guys (TJ) are frighteningly good. At halfway through our match, I thought we were pretty much finished. I'll join in on hoping for more such matches in the future.
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Post by MLWMathStar »

Quint, I believe you just called us Maggie. There will be mandatory therapy on Monday.
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Post by yangsta »

Addressing comments about moderators:

It's true that there was not a full training/practice session for moderators; however, due to the high number of non-quizbowl volunteers, it was difficult getting barely enough people to show up at 9 AM on a Saturday. We conducted a brief session for the more inexperienced folks, but apologies are due if this did not cover some of the more basic rules.

On the other side of the coin, I would hope that when players at any tournament encounter newer moderators who are interpreting or enforcing the rules incorrectly to point it out to the moderator immediately so that he/she can take corrective action rather than stew about it all day long (passive-aggressive behavior is rarely effective at causing change). Alternatively, I'm sure the tournament director would have been happy to address moderator issues if it were brought to his attention. In one single instance when I just happened to take over reading a room for a round, I overheard complaints about moderator/rules and addressed the issue immediately thereafter with the individual. So don't just sit there, do something about it. Fair?


Regarding questions/distribution:

I'm not in a position to address this, but from what I know, both Vanderbilt and UVa both followed a very strict distribution for each round.
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Post by pretzeldude92 »

I also believe this tournament was very well run. Granted, Omni bracket seemed loaded, and I'll admit that I wasn't the only one to feel that way. I heard this said over the course of the day multiple times. But there always must be a "bracket of death," and if we were randomly placed in it, so be it. We met a lot of great people being in that bracket. And a lot of people laughed when my friend sang her name.

That said, I found our moderators to be great, and funny all the while. I had no problems with moderators. Our B team, I believe, was playing TJ's A team, and our coach came to me saying that the moderator was going to penalize TJ's A team for "conferring" by raising their buzzers. My coach, had you been penalized in that match, was willing to argue that the penalty should not be applied. Oh well. Our team brought a moderator along, so I feel that complaining against moderators is currently against any necessity of mine.

Plus, we got to eat at Mello Mushroom. Overall, it was a great day.
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Post by wowitsquinthaha »

Sorry, Palmer. I was getting tired of typing Maggie Walker over and over again
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Post by Blackboard Monitor Vimes »

In response to yangsta's comment, the two moderators that gave MLWGS the most trouble were definitely not n00bs. They were both there last year and the same issues came up this year. I agree with Quint that he really is not well-liked by the moderators and i admit that sometimes he is off base, but this time he was justified. Conferring is definitely soemthing that should have been addressed before the moderators were sent off to their rooms. As for the tournament overall, the question quality gradually increased, from what I saw. Also, while the bracketing was a little odd, RM-B was the closest game we played and I look forward to competing against them in the future.
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Post by closesesame »

A few questions for the tournament organizers (and I guess Dr. Chuck, too):

Was Cav Classic a PACE qualifier? If so, how many teams have qualified? If not, Dr. Chuck, could you retroactively qualify the top 8 teams or something? If I recall correctly, UVA Cavalier Classic was a PACE qualifier last year.

Looking ahead to the spring's UVA Cavalier Open (I assume on NAQT questions), will that be a NAQT qualifier?
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Post by gonzagaeagleahy »

Wigner's friend wrote:I disagree with Keshav and Naren about the music and art distribution; I don't think that any given round had more than 2/2 Fine Arts, which is precisely where it should be...but I agree that both science and world history were underrepresented.
While there may be some exceptions in science's representation where there was only one tossup in a game, I also saw that there were some games that had a good number of science tossups, at least 6 for one. I found also that pertaining to fine arts there were some games where there was only one tossup if any about fine arts while others were more balanced.
Anyways, I thought the tournament was pretty well run but as some people have mentioned that some of the questions were iffy. The bonuses in the prelims as a whole I also saw much easier to 30 than average bonuses on say an NAQT packet.
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Post by closesesame »

Perhaps it would be clearer to say that the tournament was too heavily weighted towards "fine humanities", that is to say music, fine arts, and literature. There were indeed some rounds with several science questions, but other rounds had next to none. I also noticed that current events and politics questions that could normally be found in a NAQT-style question distribution were largely absent.

Oh well, I think the point here is that the distributions between rounds were somewhat random, with the additional fact that geography, politics, and current events were underrepresented.
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Post by ijustwannapostlikeonce »

hey as the person who wrote like 40% of the tournament and set up the packets i thought i might as well register and apologize that some of what i wrote was bad. i tried to make it a lot easier than you guys would like early on so the bad teams' frustration at getting completely destroyed every single round would be at least a little bit ameliorated. that's no defense for non-pyramidality or just plain bad questions, of course, or for misplacing some of those easy questions in later rounds, so don't think i'm trying to explain that away. i probably should've gotten my hands on some of the other good tournaments you guys have been playing this year and taken a look at what their questions were like, since i haven't played high school quiz bowl in years now.

oh yeah, distribution. we did a packet swap and had a lot of repeats to replace and while i tried to replace repeats with stuff from the same topic i bet some awkwardness crept in there. other than that, i dunno, i guess i just underperformed, my apologies.

sorry we had so much trouble finding experienced volunteers to moderate.

i thought it was kinda crazy that i only had to deal with one protest the whole tournament, i guess they didn't happen in close games or somebody else resolved them or something

despite my user name, i'll hang around in case you guys want to like ask me questions or expect me to respond when you yell at me or anything
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Post by BuzzerZen »

closesesame wrote:geography, politics, and current events were underrepresented.
Naren, keep in mind that you're like designed to succeed at NAQT. They have a nonstandard distribution. You shouldn't expect most house-written tournaments to align with NAQT's distribution.
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Post by closesesame »

still, Evan, wouldn't you consider at least some science and geography to be a part of the "high school quizbowl canon"?

In any case, the tournament itself was well-run and I'm not saying that any of the questions themselves were bad. They were good questions, just a lot of them had to do with literature and the arts.
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distribution

Post by pfeffernuisance »

Gotta agree on the music-lit-art distribution, though I can't say I want to complain about it. People who disagree may be right in that there weren't as many music tossups as everyone is saying. Take a look at the bonuses, however, and you'll see what they're talking about. I counted at least four music/composer bonuses, which I'm mostly sure of because those were the only points I was scoring for our team.

Now let me get started on the chemistry bonuses and how frustrated I am that most of them went to our opponents. Every 30-point sweep was painful to sit through.

Overall, good tourney. I did find it odd that TJ C, our (awesome) team, was seeded 9th, had a better prelim record than TJ B, etc. Sometimes the numbers just don't follow the abilities and true rankings.
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Post by Blackboard Monitor Vimes »

*shameless plug* GSAC is house-written and follows NAQT distribution fairly closely. We definitely aren't skewed in any direction. But a lot of housewritten tournaments are. That's just how it goes.
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Post by Nine-Tenths Ideas »

Terrible, terrible day for us [Blake.]
1-5, and I negged us into oblivion in our game against Monticello. One of my teammates blew a game against Fairfax by trying to confer with me on the last tossup of the game. Fairfax was given their own qustion, and we lost 180-190.
Well run tourney though. Lots and lots of science questions, but I'm sure the people who don't flunk Chemistry appreciate that.
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Post by jbarnes112358 »

NeverHitTina wrote:Terrible, terrible day for us [Blake.]
1-5....
I am confident your team is better than that record indicates. Sometimes a team is in a funk and things just don't go well. Our A team did not feel especially good about its day either.

Was your teammate really conferring or was it an example of pseudo-conferring that the one moderator was so upset about?

And, yes, I agree the tournament was well run on the whole. Any complaints I might have about the tournament are too insignificant to mention.
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Post by yangsta »

jbarnes112358 wrote:Any complaints I might have about the tournament are too insignificant to mention.
On that note, attendees can email Tim at [email protected] with any comments, especially if there are things that can be improved upon very easily.

Alternately, if you would like for me to serve as an anonymity filter for you, feel free to contact me directly too.
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Post by Nine-Tenths Ideas »

jbarnes112358 wrote:Was your teammate really conferring or was it an example of pseudo-conferring that the one moderator was so upset about?
I have to say I pretty much agree with the moderator. He buzzed in on the last question of the game, turned to me quickly and said "It's Mount McKinley, right?" I only replied, "You can't... talk to me..." So, the moderator was pretty much right on.
I did decently [#17 in individual stats, whoo,] but we were missing our 2nd best player and our 3rd best fell asleep during 3 of our games [I'm beginning to suspect he's narcoleptic.] Hopefully, we'll do better on Nov. 17. Still, no excuse for a performance as lackluster as that.
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