2023 ACF Winter: Global Announcement (November 11)

[Ehtna]

This is the official announcement for 2023 ACF Winter, which will be held on November 11th, 2023. Like previous Winters, this set will target a difficulty halfway between ACF Fall and ACF Regionals. The tournament will be head edited by me, Ethan Ashbrook. The subject editors will be:

Rachel Ezrielev – American Literature, World Literature
Raymond Chen – British Literature
Chandler West – European Literature
Amogh Kulkarni – American History, World History, Social Science
Allan Lee – European History, Other History
Sharath Narayan – Biology
Ethan Ashbrook – Chemistry
Maxwell Ye – Physics
Michal Gerasimiuk – Other Science
Guy Indorante – Painting & Sculpture, Other Fine Arts
Jacob Egol – Classical Music
Eric Mukherjee – Mythology
Joel Miles – Philosophy
Evan Knox – Religion, Geography, Current Events, Other Academic, Pop Culture

SITES:

We are looking for hosts in the regions listed in the “Hosts” section below. The host bid form is here. Please submit bids by Sunday, September 3rd at 11:59 PM PT. If you have questions about hosting, please email ACF’s Site Coordinator at [email protected] and CC me at [email protected]. Online sites are optional. Hosts must abide by ACF’s Hosting Guidelines.

REGISTRATION:

The team registration form is available here. The staff registration form is available here. The fields for each site is available here.

FORMAT:

We hope that ACF Winter can be held in person. However, we acknowledge that some schools remain uncertain about the possibility of allowing large events due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, it is possible that some mirrors of ACF Winter will be held online, and we will work to create the most authentic and engaging quizbowl experience possible under these circumstances. We will continue to post updates as we learn more.

DISTRIBUTION:

The subject distribution is listed at this link.

FEES:

Fees and discounts for this tournament are structured as follows:

Base fee per team: $150
Shorthanded discount (teams of 1-2 players): -$75
Buzzer: -$10/functional system
Staffers: -$25 per staffer with functional laptop. Staffers must register with ACF in advance.
Travel discount: -$10 per 200 miles traveled one-way
Packet submission discounts: As noted below
New to quizbowl discount: -$100

The new-to-quizbowl discount is for schools that have not sent a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (exclusively Novice tournaments do not count) since September 2022, and have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school.

Host sites will bill teams as soon as possible after the teams register. Teams should pay their host sites by whatever method is convenient for the hosts, who will in turn pay ACF by check, cash, or PayPal.

PACKET SUBMISSION:

Any team with at least two people on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or high school student) prior to September 1st, 2022, is required to submit a half-packet, unless it is a high school team attending a high-school-only mirror. Please email [email protected] if you are unsure whether your team is required to submit a half-packet. A team that is not required to submit a packet may submit an optional packet by the no-penalty deadline for a $50 discount.

* For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT SCT (Division I or Division II), NAQT ICT, and typical college-level academic invitationals count as regular collegiate academic tournaments. Pop culture or “hybrid” tournaments, HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT’s Collegiate Novice series sets do not.

Here is the submission schedule.

September 2nd, 2023: -$50
September 16th, 2023: -$25
September 30th, 2023: no penalty
October 14th, 2023: +$25
October 28th, 2023: +$50

There is an additional $10/day penalty for each day after October 28th. If teams required to submit a half-packet have not submitted by November 4th, they will be dropped from the tournament, with no exceptions.

If your team is going to submit a half-packet, whether required or not, email [email protected] to request a distribution. All finished packets must be sent to that email before 11:59 Pacific time on the day listed to meet the deadline. Please format the half-packet in .doc or .docx before sending it. The email subject line should list the name of the school, the team number (if applicable), and the words “half-packet.”

Your assigned half-packet may ask for questions from more specific categories within the distribution. For instance, instead of being assigned an “American Literature” tossup, you might be asked to write a question on 20th-century American poetry, or an Economics bonus instead of “Social Science/Philosophy.” This should reduce redundancy in submissions and maximize the number of submitted questions we can use, without being too constraining.

If a team wishes to outsource part of its packet to a player not expected to play on that team (e.g., a student who has graduated), it must first receive approval from the head editors. Non-playing students are welcome and encouraged to help their newer club members write, but it's useful to know the contributors for both credit and logistical reasons.

If multiple teams from one school are submitting packets, they should NOT be aware of each others’ questions.


TIPS AND GUIDELINES:
- Please make sure your questions are harder than questions in ACF Fall and easier than at ACF Regionals. 2019 EFT and 2020 ACF Winter are good difficulty targets. A majority of your tossup answers should conceivably be a tossup answer at ACF Fall.
- Questions should be written in 10-pt Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Although you may submit longer questions, tossups will be capped at seven lines for the tournament. Each bonus part should be a maximum of three lines in length, with the majority being one or two lines long.
- When writing bonuses, aim for the easy parts to be converted by around 90% of teams. The giveaways for tossups should also conceivably be answered by the majority of teams. Answers should generally emphasize playability over creativity; aim for creative and interesting clues with straightforward answerlines.
- Especially if you are submitting for one of the later deadlines, the frequency of topic clashes means that broad common-link questions are unlikely to be used.

More information can be found in ACF’s packet submission guidelines.

HOSTS:
The host sites will be updated below.

Northeast: Tufts University
Upstate NY: Binghamton University
Upper Mid-Atlantic: Columbia University
Lower Mid-Atlantic: University of Virginia
Southeast: Georgia Tech
Florida: University of Central Florida
Great Lakes: Kenyon College
Midwest: Northwestern University
North: University of Minnesota
South Central: Kansas State University
Northern California: UC Berkeley
Northwest: University of British Columbia
Eastern Canada: University of Toronto
UK: University of Oxford
Online Overflow: Purdue University

PACKETS RECEIVED:

-$50 deadline:
ASU A
Berkeley A
Claremont Colleges A
Columbia A
Cornell C
Harvard A
Iowa A
JHU A
Maryland A
McGill A
McGill B
Murray State A
Sheffield A
WUSTL B

-$25 deadline:
Cambridge B
Durham A
Florida A
Nebraska A
Ottawa B
Rutgers A
Sheffield B
SIUE A
SIUE B
UNC A
Vanderbilt A
Waterloo A
Yale A

+$0 deadline:
Cambridge C
Duke A
Edinburgh A
Illinois A
Imperial A
Indiana A
Kentucky A
Liberty A
NYU A
Ohio State A
Oxford A
Purdue A
Purdue B
South Carolina A
Swarthmore A
Tennessee A
Tennessee B
Toronto A
Toronto B
Truman A
UBC A
UCF A
UGA A
UNC B
UW A
UW B
Virginia Tech A
Warwick A
Waterloo B
William & Mary A
William & Mary B
Yale B

+$25 deadline:
Auburn A
Boston A
Florida B
Northwestern A

+$50 deadline:
Brandeis A
Chicago B
JMU A
Kenyon A
Miami A
Miami B
Mississippi State A
Notre Dame A
Pitt A
VCU A
WUSTL A

+$70 deadline:
Chicago A
Texas A

+$80 deadline:
Iowa State A

+$90 deadline:
UNF A

+$110 deadline:
Kenyon B
WUSTL C

+$120 deadline:
Penn A
RIT A
Syracuse A

[Ehtna]

This is a reminder that the -$50 half packet submission deadline is this Saturday (September 2nd). Don't forget to request a distribution and get those half packets in!

[Ehtna]

This is a reminder that the -$25 half packet submission deadline is this Saturday (September 16th). Remember to send requests and submissions, as well as any questions, to [email protected]!

[Ehtna]

The announcement post has been updated with site locations, as well as links to the team registration form, staffer registration form, and fields for each site. Additionally, the team discount for providing staffers has been changed from -$15 to -$25 per staffer.

[Ehtna]

This is a reminder that the no-penalty deadline for half-packet submission is this weekend. Additionally, the -$50 deadline for packet-sub optional teams to submit is this weekend, after which no discounts will be offered to packet-sub optional teams.

[Ehtna]

This is a reminder that the +$25 deadline for half-packet submission is this Saturday, October 14th. If your team is required to submit a half-packet and hasn't requested a distribution yet, please do so soon!

[Ehtna]

This is a reminder that the +$50 deadline for half-packet submission is this Saturday, October 28th, at 11:59 pm Pacific Time. Submissions past that point will receive an additional +$10 penalty for each day after the 28th. Any teams required to submit that have not done so by November 4th will be dropped from the tournament.

[Ehtna]

Thank you to everybody who played ACF Winter this year! The set is now officially clear. Packets will be uploaded to the question archive in a day or two after we fix some typos.

[Ehtna]

The final packets have been uploaded to the packet archive.