How Collegiate Quizbowl Works

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How Collegiate Quizbowl Works: A Guide for New Players

Introduction

This guide is designed as an introduction to quizbowl as it is played on the collegiate level. If you are completely new to the game, you should look at the article on quizbowl to familiarize yourself with the game before returning to this guide.

This guide will not define several of the terms it uses. Please either click the hyperlink to the article on that term, or use the Quizbowl basics and Quizbowl lingo categories as a glossary.

A Few Basics

This section is devoted to the basics, or what you should know before you start playing quizbowl at the collegiate level.

Quizbowl

Collegiate quizbowl involves two teams of up to four players competing in tossup/bonus format. Links to several videos of 2013 ACF Nationals are available here. If you're completely new to quizbowl or the tossup/bonus format, those videos will give you an idea of what quizbowl (at a very high level) looks like before you read the rest of this article.

The Circuit

The circuit, broadly speaking, consists of all collegiate clubs who regularly attend weekend quizbowl tournaments. Your team will largely attend tournaments within a few hours' radius of your campus, since local circuits usually organize by geographic region.

The Clubs

If you want to play quizbowl, you're most likely going to have to join a club. A quizbowl club is responsible for organizing practices, running tournaments, and coordinating attendance at tournaments, as well as several administrative responsibilities.

See the (soon-to-be-created) article How to start a collegiate quizbowl club.

Communication

Almost all quizbowl communication is currently done via the Internet. The primary place for national discussion of quizbowl is on the forums. Most tournaments take registrations by email. In addition, players from around the country frequent the quizbowl IRC channel. Most clubs and some areas of the circuit also create their own e-mail mailing lists for sending messages about upcoming tournaments and the like.

Your best source of information will be the hsquizbowl.org forums, in particular the Collegiate Announcements and Results and Collegiate Discussion sub-forums. You should try to make sure that someone in your club is checking these areas on at least a weekly basis, so that your club is up-to-date on the latest happenings on the circuit. If you have a question about any aspect of collegiate quizbowl after reading this guide, you are encouraged to register for the forums and post your question in the Collegiate Discussion section, but please read the forum rules before posting.

The Question Sets

Events in collegiate quizbowl may be run by ACF, by NAQT, or independently.

ACF

ACF, or the Academic Competition Federation, is a loosely centralized organization that provides three high-quality academic tournaments each year. Games of ACF quizbowl are played on packets of 20 tosssups and 20 bonuses, untimed. The three sets provided by ACF are:

  • ACF Fall, a novice-difficulty tournament, which typically runs on the first or second weekend in November.
  • ACF Regionals, a regular-difficulty tournament, which typically takes place in February.
  • ACF Nationals, is a difficult tournament, which typically takes place in April at only one site for the entire country. With NAQT's ICT (see below), it is one of the two national championships for college quizbowl teams.

ACF is known for its commitment to quality, which includes limited trash (pop culture), and a focus on more academic topics. All ACF tournaments are packet-submission, which means that each team competing at an upcoming ACF event must submit a full packet of questions to the central editing team before they play (with some exceptions allowing newer players to opt out). Those packets are then centrally edited for factual accuracy, quality, and difficulty consistency by a team of central editors, who may also merge, pare down, or cut some packets to get a good set. When a team attends an ACF tournament, therefore, they play on packets written by other teams just like theirs. The schedule gives out "bye" rounds or skips over packets written by attending teams as needed, so no team gets an unfair advantage by playing on its own packet.

Collegiate Novice

Sponsored by ACF and founded by Andrew Hart, who has edited the first four incarnations, Collegiate Novice is meant to be many players' first exposure to collegiate quizbowl. Thus, strict eligibility requirements keep the tournament restricted to truly novice players, and difficulty and length are kept strictly under control. Many new writers are encouraged to get experience by writing for Collegiate Novice. Collegiate Novice sites are set up across the country each year in September and early October, so new players can attend their first tournament at a nearby school.

NAQT

NAQT, or National Academic Quiz Tournaments, is an incorporated organization that provides questions for high school and collegiate play as well as various quizbowl television shows. NAQT tournaments are played timed, in two ten-minute halves which can feature up to 24 tossups and 24 bonuses altogether. NAQT produces two collegiate sets each year:

Each of NAQT's college tournaments features Division I, in which any university students from the same school may play on the team, and a restricted Division II, which uses easier questions and restricts eligibility to newer or less-experienced players.

Notable quirks of the NAQT format include a higher emphasis on current events, geography, and popular culture. NAQT's questions are typically shorter than ACF's.

Other/independent question sets

Many invitational tournaments exist during the year which are not run by either NAQT or ACF. Most of these tournaments are written/edited by one or two college teams that work together to produce questions or solicit questions from playing teams in the packet-submission model (described above in the ACF section). Almost all independent tournaments imitate ACF's style of question writing and distribution of within packets, though some may make modifications such as the addition of powers to tossup questions. (This used to be called "modified ACF," or "mACF.") Independent tournaments may set their own eligibility restrictions, either on a national basis or a host-by-host basis.

Because talented/interested question writers and editors cycle in and out of the college quizbowl game with time, the exact schedule of independent events changes somewhat from year to year. Many long-surviving independent tournaments include Penn Bowl, organized by Penn, the Minnesota Undergraduate Tournament organized by students and alumni of the University of Minnesota, and the Terrapin Invitational Tournament, "organized" by the University of Maryland.

The Tournaments

During the School Year

With the exception of Thanksgiving weekend, winter break, and the summer, there is some tournament happening somewhere on almost every Saturday of the academic year. The quizbowl year is roughly divided between a fall semester from late September to early December, in which Collegiate Novice, ACF Fall, and several other invitationals happen, and a spring semester from late January through April, in which the NAQT SCT, ACF Regionals, and both national tournaments (ICT and ACF Nationals) all happen, with further invitationals filling out the calendar in the spring as well. Check the hsquizbowl.org forums or your area of the circuit's mailing list to become informed of all tournaments happening in your area.

Summer

Many people love quizbowl so much that they even want to play during the summer! From the time schools let out in mid-May through August, each summer usually features a few informally-organized quizbowl events that players can attend. Because school teams are usually disbanded for the year and might not be able to reunite for geographical reasons, summer tournaments are basically always open (any player from any school, and people from no school at all, may unite with any other player on a team with no eligibility restrictions).

Chicago Open

The "crown jewel" of independent quizbowl events, and almost always the most difficult event of the year, Chicago Open attracts players from all over the nation to a "nationals-plus"-difficulty event, and many side tournaments are organized to keep everyone awake playing lots of quizbowl for two to three days.

Attending Tournaments

Eligibility Restrictions

If a tournament is not labeled "open", then it has eligibility restrictions. Here are some of the more notable eligibility restrictions:

For NAQT ICT, teams must originally have qualified via either hosting or performing sufficiently well at SCT, and receive and accept a bid to the tournament. There is no longer any such restriction for ACF Nationals, although discussion for a new qualification system is underway.

For all official ACF and NAQT events, all team members must be enrolled at the same school. There are minor differences between ACF and NAQT on what constitutes "enrolled".

For NAQT events, a player may not participate in Division II if he or she has either (1) earned a bachelor's degree or equivalent, (2) played on a team that qualified for ICT in either division, (3) played on a team at ICT in either division, or (4) played at more than one sectional tournament in Division I.

For ACF Fall and other novice events, the gentlemen's agreement style of eligibility rules is in effect, in which players decide for themselves whether the tournament is right for them based on question difficulty and projected field strength.

Funding

Physical Travel - Getting To (and From) Tournaments

The most important thing any collegiate quizbowl player can learn for the game is how to drive.

Many clubs with a campus reasonably close to others with also take note of public transportation options such as bus, ferry, or train, and sometimes use public transportation options that might help you get to where you need to go. When using public transportation, it's always important to watch the time tables carefully to find a cost-effective travel plan which leaves lots of wiggle room in the event of delays or tournaments that run past their intended end time. [www.megabus.com Megabus] and other low-cost bus services are an increasingly-popular, if somewhat scrappy, service for traveling quizbowl teams.

Question Sources

There are many sources of the questions used in tournaments:

  • NAQT remains the only company to write good quizbowl questions for use in high-level collegiate play.
  • Several tournaments feature questions entirely written by one or multiple hosting teams.
  • For most tournaments, you will need to write a packet of questions. Discounts to the entry fee are typically given for questions submitted eight weeks and six weeks before the tournament, and additional penalty fees added for questions submitted less than four weeks before the tournament. New teams may operate on different schedules and are always encouraged to submit a packet regardless of whether one is necessary.

For more information on writing questions, please see Jerry Vinokurov's excellent treatise on How to Write Questions.

Tournament Formats

Almost all collegiate tournaments use a round-robin or bracketed-round-robin setup, with either an ACF-format final or NAQT-format final if sufficient packets and time are available. This means that you will almost certainly play teams at your knowledge level, while also typically playing teams both above and below that level.

Practicing

Most clubs spend between three and six hours a week at practice, practicing quizbowl by dividing club members into arbitrary teams and playing packets from old tournament sets. Currently, there are thousands and thousands of packets from old question sets available online for free (though NAQT sets are still only legally available by direct purchase). See below for packet repositories.

External Links

For more information about the college game, you are encouraged to visit the following websites:

Organizations

Packet Archives

Communication

hsquizbowl.org forums

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