Zot Bowl

Zot Bowl was a "novice"-level tournament held at UC Irvine and mirrored at Truman State and VCU in the summer of 2008. It is believed to be the first packet-submission tournament edited by the Irvine club since some long-ago version of the Irvine Open.

Dwight Wynne served as head editor for the tournament, with assistance from Ray Anderson and Ray Luo.

Irvine

The Irvine tournament was held on June 28, 2008 and featured a 5-team double round robin. Packets were of extremely variable quality, especially as two teams turned in parts of their packet less than 3 days before the tournament.

Rancho Bernardo featuring Auroni Gupta dominated the field with an 8-0 record.

Stats can be found here.

Following the tournament, four additional packets' worth of questions were added for mirrors, and most of the terrible clunkers from the tournament were heavily edited. Thus, the Truman State and VCU mirrors were held on 14-packet sets, while the original tournament had only 10 packets.

Truman State

Originally intended to be a side tournament after Truman State's mirror of the VCU Open, the realization of field strength caused the Zot Bowl mirror to be played as a main event on August 16, 2008.

This tournament got off to a rocky start after tournament director Kent Buxton managed to sleep through the start of the tournament. Once the tournament finally started, a modified doubles tournament was played. The doubles tournament was won by a doubles team featuring Matt Chadbourne from the Missouri University of Science and Technology and Julia Price, captain of the Fort Zumwalt West High School team. Chadbourne was also the tournament high scorer, while Francis Howell Central High School captain Charles Hang answered the most tossups of any non collegiate player. Live stats can be found here.

VCU Novice

A Sunday complement to the VCU Open, VCU Novice was attended by 14 teams. Six teams (the top three in each prelim bracket) made the upper playoff bracket and played a full round robin; the other eight teams played a cross-bracket series of games. At the end of all this, Lima Time (Andrew Hart, Brendan Byrne, Gautam Kandlikar, and Trevor Davis) finished at 10-1, two games ahead of the next closest team.

Stats can be found here.

Reaction to the Tournament

In general, people enjoyed the tournament. There were some deserved complaints about between-packet difficulty swings, difficulty cliffs, vague clues, and some questionable bonus answer selection.

Some at the VCU mirror criticized the tournament for mixing "gimme 30s" with impossible bonus parts.

One of the more seemingly paradoxical statistics from the tournament is that the statistically easiest packet at the VCU mirror featured a 65-60 game at Truman State. The explanation for this lies in the fact that it was played by four high schoolers generally unfamiliar with ACF style questions.

Reaction after all three mirrors

The Future of Zot Bowl

Dwight has indicated interest in editing another summer-level novice tournament should demand arise, and will attempt to learn his lessons from the first one.