American Quizbowl League
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| President or CEO | Arjun Panickssery | |||
| Location: | Online | |||
| Status | Open | |||
The American Quizbowl League or AQBL is a quiz bowl organization that runs online tournaments. It was founded by Joe Feldman, who reorganized the Long Island Quiz Bowl Alliance into the AQBL in July 2020.
AQBL ran monthly tournaments throughout the 2020–21 season, and hosted the 2021 Online National Championship Tournament.
History
In March 2020, emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in the US prevented most quizbowl tournaments from occurring in person. This created a large demand for online competitions, leading the Long Island Quiz Bowl Alliance to host many tournaments for teams outside of just Long Island. Seeking to expand LIQBA's nationwide presence and use it to accomplish quizbowl outreach, LIQBA president Joe Feldman decided to rebrand the organization as the American Quizbowl League that July.
AQBL soon launched its official website and scheduled monthly tournaments over the upcoming season, capped by the inaugural ONCT. Some community members were skeptical of AQBL's ability to run all these events. However, AQBL was largely successful that season—they attracted sizeable fields to most tournaments with teams from across the country, including many teams new to quizbowl. The 2021 ONCT attracted 64 teams nationwide.
With in-person competitions likely to feasible by fall 2021, it is unknown to what extent AQBL will continue to operate in the future.
Format
All of AQBL's tournaments are run on Discord. They adhere to the standard 20/20 format, with the exception that about half of their tournaments are tossup only (considered less exhausting to play online). Some tossup-only events use questions produced by AQBL itself, though most events are mirrors of sets like SCOP A and CATT.