Timed play

Timed tournaments use a clock or timer to determine the length of each half of a game. At present, NAQT is the only question provider whose rules call for timed halves - 9-minute halves for high school games; 10-minute halves for college.

History

Reflecting the evolution of quizbowl away from College Bowl, the formerly nigh-standard practice of running games on a clock is now nearly extinct at the college level. In the early 1990s, only the most purist ACF events, such as the Georgia Tech MLK and ACF Nationals, were untimed. By the turn of the millenium, the only timed tournaments remaining were NAQT Sectionals and ICT, Stanford's Cardinal Classic, Michigan MLK, and Penn Bowl, plus of course all College Bowl-run events. Cardinal Classic dropped the clock starting in 2001, Penn Bowl in 2003, and MLK in 2006. In order to better simulate the ICT environment, the 2008 and 2009 FICHTE tournaments used the clock and NAQT's 2-second recognition rule.

Today

Now, only the NAQT SCT and ICT are timed among college quizbowl tournaments. Teams earn a discount by bringing a clock to their Sectional site. NAQT's timing rules allow for somewhat more sanity than College Bowl's used to, but are still open to games ending with a poor moderator reading 18 or fewer tossups.

At the high school level, despite the official NAQT rules' call for 9-minute timed halves, most tournaments using IS-sets run untimed 20/20 rounds, which NAQT allows. The HSNCT continues to use the clock, but many top competitors play no other tournaments on the clock during the entire competition year.

Strategies

In general, teams playing a timed match will want to hurry if they want more tossups to be heard or, inversely, use as much time as possible if they want fewer tossups to be heard. Accordingly, a team will often hurry the game in two cases:

• The team is behind near the end of the game and needs to hear more tossups to improve its chance to come back.
• The team believes itself to be better than the other team, so hearing more tossups will reduce the likelihood of an upset.

Conversely, the other team will want to slow the game.

Under the CBI and pre-2008 NAQT rules, the half ended immediately when time expired in the middle of reading a tossup, unless a team buzzed before time expired and answered correctly (earning the team a bonus as usual in NAQT). This rule allowed a team with a small lead in the closing seconds of the game to preserve a victory with the clock-killing neg, preventing the other team from answering the tossup and getting a bonus. Since CBI is defunct and NAQT has changed its timing rules, the clock-killing neg is no longer a useful strategy.