SKnow Bowl

Truman sKnow Bowl is an annual varsity and junior varsity tournament hosted by Truman High School in early January.

The tournament is run in MSHSAA format or a similar four quarter format and always consists of a pre-determined number of Swiss-paired rounds (traditionally 5, but increased to 6 in 2010), before determining final placement by record and points. The Varsity questions are usually provided by the vendor producing the season's MSHSAA districts and state sets.

The 2011 edition of the Varsity tournament used questions from NAQT IS-99A modified to a variant of the MSHSAA format that replaced the fourth quarter of tossup/bonuses with a third quarter worksheet, despite the fact that NAQT produced four MSHSAA format sets that year. One of these sets was assigned at the time to Savannah, which had originally been assigned IS-103A before that set was taken away for use in the districts/state series. Instead of giving Savannah IS-99A, which had only been seen by ten St. Louis area schools at the St. Louis University Academic Competition, NAQT assigned Savannah one of the Missouri format sets, so when Truman requested a set, none of the Missouri format sets were available. As a result, NAQT allowed Truman to use IS-99A for their tournament even though Savannah had originally requested an A-set and it would have been significantly easier for Truman to modify Savannah's Missouri set to their desired format. [1] (Savannah eventually switched to IS-98, which was not well-received by the smaller schools in its northwestern Missouri audience.)

The Junior Varsity questions are written by Truman's varsity team and are of poor quality, usually containing excessive random trivia [2] and difficulty-inappropriate questions like calculating derivatives [3].

The use of record and points to determine a champion without any additional playoffs has received widespread criticism on the Missouri Academic Competition Message Board because of the tendency for unusual placements. For instance, in 2007, North Kansas City, Liberty, and Savannah each completed the tournament with a 4-1 record; North Kansas City won the tournament despite the fact that their only loss came to Liberty and they never played Savannah, while Liberty and Savannah played each other twice, with each winning one. [4][5] Other unusual results include an undefeated Liberty JV team placing second behind another undefeated team [6] and instances of a large number of teams finishing 4-1 [7][8].

Results since 2005

Year	Varsity			Junior Varsity
	Champion	Second	Third	Champion	Second	Third
2005	Liberty	Savannah	Blue Springs?	Savannah	Oak Park	unknown
2006	Savannah	Liberty	Helias	Savannah	Oak Park	Helias B
2007	North Kansas City	Savannah	Liberty	Truman	Blue Springs	Lee's Summit North
2008	North Kansas City	Liberty	Truman	Blue Springs South	Park Hill	Lee's Summit North
2009	Truman	Hickman	Rock Bridge	Liberty	Hickman	Truman
2010	unknown
2011	Truman	Liberty	Smithville	Liberty North	William Chrisman	Pilot Grove