sports! 2021: The Bob Gibson Memorial Set
Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2020 9:01 pm
I wanted to announce that the University of Waterloo is considering an undertaking that has been on the minds of many club members for a while now, a sports set. The goal of the set is to change the definition of sport from what Stephen A. Smith may make an incoherent rant about to something with greater range.
The final output would be 6 to 8 power-marked packets of 20/20 with sports of all kinds and from all time periods, skewed towards the present.
The distribution would be made up of about even parts "Pre-1990", "1990-2009", and "2010+" and would look something like the following:
2.5/2.5 Baseball
2.5/2.5 Gridiron Football
2.5/2.5 Basketball
2.5/2.5 Hockey
2.5/2.5 Olympics
2.5/2.5 Real Football
1.5/1.5 College
3.5/3.5 Other
Olympics may also feature some non-Olympic clues about Olympic sports and/or athletes, but clues will still be primarily composed of information relating to one or more Olympic Games. Multi-disciplinary questions with only a few topics would be taken from their respective portions of the distribution, but such questions would be rare. I.e. a question on Detroit via the Red Wings and Lions would be .5 Hockey and .5 Gridiron Football, not 1 from Other. Questions using clues from many topics would be classified as Other. We don't intend many of these questions either.
In the current distribution, things like the Nippon Professional Baseball League, the WNBA, and the CFL would be classified in their respective sports and not in "Other", but those categories would still be very heavily composed of the MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL.
"Other" would also likely have a tiered sub-distribution of "Major Other" (Tennis and Cricket among others) and "Minor Other" (Pro Bowling and Squash among others) with Major Other sports getting multiple questions throughout the set and Minor Other sports getting no more than one.
The tournament isn't intended to be overly difficult. The difficulty intends to be a happy medium between the sports content in most non-sports packets and sets like the "Let's Remember some guys" series. Giveaways intend to be pretty accessible. A die-hard Red Wings fan should still power a Red Wings tossup, but someone who passively follows hockey shouldn't expect to be competitive until fairly late into a hockey question, if at all.
The set intends to be ready to play by late July. We're only a team of 3 major writers with a myriad of minor contributors and this is our first venture to write this many questions. If people have any suggestions or advice, we'd love to hear it! A lot of this is flexible based on your feedback. It does no good to pour a bunch of effort into a set that no one wants to play.
Update: Everything is on track. We have written about 6 packets worth of tossups and bonuses. We still plan to reach our goal of 8 packets by the end of May. We still believe the set should be ready to play by late July, early August at the latest.
Update 2: Everything is still on track. We have almost all 8 packets written. Respond to the poll HERE so we can best schedule the tournament. The plan is to run the tournament on the Canadian circuit (pending sufficient interest) and then open it up to mirrors.
The final output would be 6 to 8 power-marked packets of 20/20 with sports of all kinds and from all time periods, skewed towards the present.
The distribution would be made up of about even parts "Pre-1990", "1990-2009", and "2010+" and would look something like the following:
2.5/2.5 Baseball
2.5/2.5 Gridiron Football
2.5/2.5 Basketball
2.5/2.5 Hockey
2.5/2.5 Olympics
2.5/2.5 Real Football
1.5/1.5 College
3.5/3.5 Other
Olympics may also feature some non-Olympic clues about Olympic sports and/or athletes, but clues will still be primarily composed of information relating to one or more Olympic Games. Multi-disciplinary questions with only a few topics would be taken from their respective portions of the distribution, but such questions would be rare. I.e. a question on Detroit via the Red Wings and Lions would be .5 Hockey and .5 Gridiron Football, not 1 from Other. Questions using clues from many topics would be classified as Other. We don't intend many of these questions either.
In the current distribution, things like the Nippon Professional Baseball League, the WNBA, and the CFL would be classified in their respective sports and not in "Other", but those categories would still be very heavily composed of the MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL.
"Other" would also likely have a tiered sub-distribution of "Major Other" (Tennis and Cricket among others) and "Minor Other" (Pro Bowling and Squash among others) with Major Other sports getting multiple questions throughout the set and Minor Other sports getting no more than one.
The tournament isn't intended to be overly difficult. The difficulty intends to be a happy medium between the sports content in most non-sports packets and sets like the "Let's Remember some guys" series. Giveaways intend to be pretty accessible. A die-hard Red Wings fan should still power a Red Wings tossup, but someone who passively follows hockey shouldn't expect to be competitive until fairly late into a hockey question, if at all.
The set intends to be ready to play by late July. We're only a team of 3 major writers with a myriad of minor contributors and this is our first venture to write this many questions. If people have any suggestions or advice, we'd love to hear it! A lot of this is flexible based on your feedback. It does no good to pour a bunch of effort into a set that no one wants to play.
Update: Everything is on track. We have written about 6 packets worth of tossups and bonuses. We still plan to reach our goal of 8 packets by the end of May. We still believe the set should be ready to play by late July, early August at the latest.
Update 2: Everything is still on track. We have almost all 8 packets written. Respond to the poll HERE so we can best schedule the tournament. The plan is to run the tournament on the Canadian circuit (pending sufficient interest) and then open it up to mirrors.