Fifth annual Vancouver Estival Trivia Open and mirror in Toronto Saturday, July 19, 2003 The Vancouver Estival Trivia Open (VETO) is our country's longest-running annual quiz bowl tournament. Updates will be posted on the well-hyperlinked web page http://caql.org/events/veto03.html This will be a "guerrilla" style tournament, meaning that each team must write an original packet of questions, which will not be edited by tournament staff, and in fact there will be no tournament staff other than players, who are expected to moderate and keep score during rounds when they aren't playing. As always, this event is FREE of charge, but please bring buzzers if you have them. For comprehensive reports on previous VETOs, follow links from http://caql.org/results.html In 2003, an independent survey of this very Yahoo! group found VETO tied for second as "best tournament"! The only tournament to receive more votes was the (Canadian-directed) MLK Memorial at the University of (Canadian-governed) Michigan. When Saturday, July 19, 2003, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. This is one week after Viva TRASH Vegas, and one week before the Chicago Open. In order to allow enough time to coordinate teams from the Vancouver and Toronto sites, please notify us by July 1, 2003, if you would like to participate. This date should be easy to remember because it's Canada Day, a day when the media give us more than the usual amount of Canadian trivia -- which may become useful question material. Where In the heart of downtown Vancouver, B.C., Canada: Simon Fraser University at Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings St. This attractive, intelligent, and extremely convenient location is directly across the street from the Waterfront SkyTrain station, the SeaBus terminal, and, for those who really want to arrive in style on a Sikorsky S-76, the Harbour Heliport. By road, Vancouver is about: 3 hours from Seattle; 9 hours from Eugene, Oregon; 18 hours from Berkeley, California; 24 hours from Los Angeles, California, or Las Vegas, Nevada; 39 hours from Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Chicago; 60 hours from Fairbanks. All-day parking on Saturday at Harbour Centre costs about $5. Vancouver International Airport is served by more than 40 airlines offering scheduled direct flights from 31 communities in British Columbia, another 33 locations elsewhere in North America, 12 cities in Asia/Pacific, and 3 cities in Europe. Devotees of Southwest Airlines or JetBlue may prefer to fly to Seattle/Tacoma and then take the Quick Shuttle or rent a car (non-residents of Canada should have no problem driving a rental car across the border). Although the flight may possibly be cheaper, if you factor in the time and money you spend on the 3--4 hours ground transportation each way, it may still be more worthwhile to take Air Canada or another airline directly to Vancouver. Our web page has links to QuickTime Virtual Reality tours of both Vancouver's harbour (where you can see Harbour Centre) and an actual game room that we'll be using for VETO! For lunch, you won't even have to leave the building. The Harbour Centre Food Fair, better than your typical mall food court, offers a wide variety of European and Asian cuisines, reflecting the multicultural nature of our city, plus A&W and joe veg. Accommodation There are quite a few reasonably priced hotels in downtown Vancouver, within walking distance of the tournament location. The worldres website is a good one for looking up accommodation online. You may also want to consider staying near a SkyTrain station, since trains on the main stretch from New Westminster to Waterfront run every 3--4 minutes on weekends. Who can play VETO is open to anyone, provided space is available. There is no entrance fee, but every team will be expected to provide: * staffing of games during bye rounds; * sufficient copies of a question packet ready for play, and also emailed in a timely manner to a designated player at the mirror site; * sufficient copies of a question packet emailed from the mirror site. A team that is overflowing with question-writing talent may choose to use its surplus energies to help out a team with less experience in this area. Each team can have any number of players, but no more than four can play at a time. As in previous years, if you don't have a full team of four, we can match you up with other players. Solo teams are OK, too: other teams will have byes so that you won't have to staff more than one room by yourself. The size of the field is capped at 10 teams in Vancouver (and 6 teams in Toronto). The host, Simon Fraser University, currently has the top non-U.S. team in NAQT Division I! Vancouver is also home to the University of British Columbia, which is currently the top non-U.S. team in NAQT Division II! Previous VETOs have also had teams of students from the University of Washington, University of Oregon, University of Waterloo, University of Chicago, and Maple Ridge Secondary School, as well as retired players from many other educational institutions. Format As stated above, VETO 2003 will be run "guerrilla" style without central editing and will be staffed by players. We'll play at least a full round-robin, as many rounds as packets from the two sites, likely ending in a site final (which some may consider an unfair format). Playoff details will be worked out once we see how many teams and packets we'll have. Tie-breaking criteria will definitely be finalized before play begins. Games will be conducted according to NAQT rules, except that matches will be untimed, with a fixed number of tossups per round. Toronto mirror and Trans-Canada championship match The Vancouver Estival Trivia Open will be mirrored in Toronto. Packets will be shared between the two tournaments. The climax of the day will occur at 5 p.m. (Pacific time), when the third Trans-Canada Championship Match pits the winning team from VETO against the winning team from the Toronto mirror, through an ingenious use of Canadian technology. As far as we are aware, this is still unique in the quiz bowl world. Stay for a whole separate trash tournament! On Sunday, July 20, the third annual Count Chocula's Toilet Bowl, a popular culture quiz tournament, will take place at Harbour Centre. Details on this will be posted separately. In the previous two editions of CCTB, most of the questions were borrowed from a recent American popular culture tournament. Question Packets Detailed question guidelines are on a separate web page: http://caql.org/events/veto03q.html which includes a section with useful links categorized by subject. Rounds will be untimed, with 20 tossups played in each. Packets should include (at least): * 24 tossups, each worth 10 points -- no 15-point "powers"; * 22 bonuses, each worth 30 points -- but no single-part, single-answer questions. Use the following subject distribution for both tossups and bonuses: Science, Math, Technology 3 -- 4 History 3 -- 4 Literature 3 -- 4 Geography 2 -- 3 Current Events 2 -- 3 Fine Arts 1 -- 2 Religion, Philosophy, Mythology 1 -- 2 Social Science 1 -- 2 Popular Culture, Games, Sports 1 -- 2 General Knowledge 0 -- 3 Canadian content quota: Of the first 20 tossups, at least 4 must refer to Canadian people, places, things, events, and created works. The same goes for the first 20 bonuses. But overall, don't exceed 50% Canadian content in your packet. The person who wrote last year's all-Canadian packet has been made to regret doing so. Tossups should include at least two separate clues, preferably at least four. Multiple-choice bonuses should be used sparingly, if at all, and should provide at least four choices. In order that we can keep to a reasonable schedule, questions must not be too long: * No tossup question, and no part of a bonus question, should be longer than 6 lines if using a fixed-width font with 79 characters per line. * No bonus question should ever require more than four separate team conferrals. To promote fun and variety, teams are encouraged to bring multimedia questions (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory). These tend to work better as bonuses than as tossups. Cassette tape players will be available for auditory questions. Every packet must contain at least one multimedia question: It can be as simple as presenting a printout of a picture you found through http://images.google.com and asking a few questions about the picture. Aim for a difficulty level approximating that of NAQT sectionals. Prizes The leading individual scorer at VETO will take over the title of West Coast Dominatrix of Relevant Knowledge (WC-DORK). Anyone may sponsor a prize and select a winner according to any criteria. Last year, there were 22 prizes awarded to individuals and teams. Contact us if you're sponsoring a prize that you want listed on the web page. Having it posted there is a good way to encourage others to write questions of your favourite type or on your favourite (broadly defined) topic. Other stuff to do in Vancouver Both the Economist Intelligence Unit (October 2002) and Mercer Human Resource Consulting (March 2003) agree that the quality of life in Vancouver is #1 among cities in the western hemisphere, and Toronto is #2. We are not making this up. In a separate ranking of personal safety, Mercer says that Vancouver and Toronto (tied with Calgary, Montreal, and Ottawa) are also the safest cities in the western hemisphere in 2003. The 26th Annual Vancouver Folk Music Festival will take place on the same weekend as VETO. For more information about Vancouver, including links to special promotions, see http://www.tourism-vancouver.org While Vancouver has a reputation for heavy rainfall, it does not rain much in the summer. Average precipitation during July is below that of seven of the 10 largest United States cities (by 2000 census population), the exceptions being the desert or semi-desert cities of Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Diego. And of course, during July, Vancouver has more hours of daylight than any American city outside of Alaska. On VETO day, sunset will occur at 9:08 p.m. Contact If you are interested in participating, please contact the appropriate site coordinator by July 1, 2003, so that we can sort out teams. * Vancouver: Peter at pmcc_at_... (pmcc at alumni.sfu.ca) * Toronto: Zhan at pi_at_... (pi at drivel.ca) Updates will be posted on the web page: http://caql.org/events/veto03.html "A lot of Imperialist ladies asked me to tea to meet schoolmasters from New Zealand and editors from Vancouver, and that was the dismalest business of all." - John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
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