Harvard International

The Harvard International, often abbreviated as HI, is an annual open tournament, house written by the Harvard quizbowl team. Harvard International is traditionally held in the spring and is intended to be similar in difficulty to ACF Nationals.

History and Conception

A Nationals-difficulty tournament written by Harvard was first proposed by (non-Harvard student) Charlie Dees, and first begun by Bruce Arthur and Ted Gioia. The name Harvard International was a reference to the fact that the tournament took place in the week between the two national championship tournaments.

The First International (2009)

Harvard International was first held on April 11, 2009 at Harvard, on a set edited by Bruce Arthur, Ted Gioia, and Andy Watkins. Mirrors occurred at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Missouri-Columbia the following week.

The Harvard site was won by VCU (Matt Weiner, Evan Adams, Andrew Alexander, and Brendan). Stats can be found here

Overall the reception was lukewarm. The science and social science was both more difficult and much more verbose than the rest of the set, with some tossups approaching 16 lines. Apart from that, however, a good time was had; the literature, history, art, and RMP were all quite decent, except for the occasional tossup on Efnisen.

The Second International (2010)

HI 2 took place on March 20, 2010, and was advertised as a fake ACF Nationals. It was written by Andy Watkins, Dallas Simons, Bruce Arthur, Ted Gioia, Shantanu Jha, George Berry, and Auroni Gupta. It was won by a team of Matt Weiner, Jonathan Magin, Evan Adams, and Cody Voight. Stats can be found here.

The tournament was seen as really disjointed with some very hard questions being mixed in with much easier answers randomly; overall it was decently recieved, however, and the science was certainly a huge improvement.