2019 NHBB Online

See also: Question recycling

The 2019 "NHBB" Discord Tournament, also known colloquially as "NHBB Online", was an online history bee-style "tournament" held during April 2019 on Discord servers. The brainchild of 8th grade Laurel Springs NHB player Ameya Singh, the "tournament" was won by Sam Brochin in a small field. Asides from the fact that some called it a logistical "mess", the event also attracted controversy after it was revealed that a large number of questions it used were knowingly plagiarized from existing packets, rendering it not a true tournament, but instead a scrimmage, indicating deceit on the part of the organizer(s), and resulting in a minor scandal. This incident was important because it helped raise several questions pertaining to the honesty of student tournament directors. It was derided as a farce by some commenters, who expressed they were glad that this tournament had not charged any players money to participate.

Aftermath & "scandal"

Onset of the controversy

The event had consistently promoted itself on the HSQuizbowl.org forums as a housewrite. (Ameya Singh said early on that it would be "based off of NHBB/IHB packets"; the ambiguity of this statement helped contribute to the later ensuing confusion.) After its preliminary stages had concluded, attempts were made to upload the first three packets onto the packet archive, leading many observers and noted members of the QB community to note that comments on the Discord had implied that the questions had been adapted from existing questions, which would have barred them from being posted. The packets in question were instead posted to the forums for review, where many of the tossups were verified to have been directly copied from past tournaments. It was pointed out that the above actions taken by the organizer(s) would probably constitute, aside from the obvious blatant dishonesty (whether intentional or not), copyright infringement. Other writers participating in the project provided chat logs that indicated that this plagiarism was very much intentional (though perhaps not totally malicious).

There was also additional concern over the choice to explicitly label the event as the "NHBB Discord Tournament", despite not being affiliated with or connected to NHBB or International Academic Competitions (IAC) in any way. Though such connections were admittedly denied and stated on "most places", such denials were only found in niche areas of associated discussion, thus preventing most from accessing them.

Further developments

In the midst of this controversy, the organizer of the event elected to continue in his proceedings, indicating that he would continue to draw questions from existing packets, but not post them. This drew additional censure, as did a later attempt by the organizer to run multiple other such events. Ultimately, the final round was run on a packet of housewritten tossups.

Conclusion

Perhaps as a direct result of these events, a new category on the forums was created to advertise for and organize events, tourneys, scrimmages, etc. with greater transparency with regards to packet usage.

Furthermore, fortunately, to his credit, Singh eventually later apologized for any errors on his part.

Packets used

Samples from the prelims include:

• Packet 1
• Packet 2
• Packet 3