Saturday, July 19, 2008
Tenth annual		Sixth annual
Vancouver		VETO's
Estival		Eastern
Trivia		Trivia
Open		Open

The Vancouver Estival Trivia Open (VETO) is the nation's longest-running annual quiz bowl tournament. There will again be a mirror in Toronto, and possibly a championship match via telephone between the site winners. This web page will be kept up to date with the most current information.

Also check out the VETO weblog at http://veto.caql.org

July 4:   Some prizes have been listed in Vancouver.

July 3:   We have 7 teams signed up to play in Toronto.

July 2:   We have 7 teams signed up to play in Vancouver.

June 25:   The Vancouver location will be UBC's I.K. Barber Learning Centre.

June 24:   The Vancouver location has moved to the University of British Columbia (instead of SFU).
The Toronto location will be the Bahen Centre, the same building as last year.

VETO will be run "guerrilla" style, meaning:

• each team must bring copies of an original packet of questions, which will not be edited by anyone else associated with the tournament;
• participants must moderate and keep score during rounds when they aren't playing.

VETO will be free of charge at both sites.

See the CAQL results page for links to full reports on previous VETOs and their mirrors in Ontario.

Who can play

However, recognizing that people come to VETO with vastly different levels of experience, we'd like to give priority to those who have a history of providing good questions in the tossup/bonus format.

So instead of accepting teams on a "first come, first served" basis until space fills up, this is what we'll do:

• Any team that has won VETO in a previous year (in Vancouver or in Ontario) has an automatic invitation to play this year. For winning teams that split up into new teams in 2008, the auto-invite goes with whichever subset of the original team scored the most total tossup points in VETO in the year of victory.
• If you want to play in VETO but your team hasn't won a previous VETO, then you will need to apply to the VETO Invitation Committee. This committee consists of one member from each team that won VETO in a previous year.
• Applications are simple: just e-mail two OLD full-length quiz bowl packets (at least 20 tossups and 20 bonuses in each), such that the majority of the questions in both packets were written by members of your prospective team. If your packets are on the Web (on the Stanford or ACF archives, for example), then it's easier if you send us the web page locations instead of e-mailing the actual packets.
• If some of your team members have written a lot of questions separately but you don't actually have two packets to which you've together contributed a majority of the questions, then send us 20 old tossups and 20 old bonuses that were all written by your members.
• Within a few days of receiving your application, the Invitation Committee will inform you of its decision either to accept or to defer your application. The Committee may also choose to list areas of improvement, or point out how VETO question guidelines may be different from those for the tournament for which the submitted questions were written. If your application is not accepted, you may appeal by sending us more old questions that you've written.
• Teams whose applications are deferred, either because they didn't have enough questions to show us or because their questions didn't meet our standards, will have another chance. After July 1, these teams will be allowed to play if there is still room. The Invitation Committee will decide whether each deferred team should write questions.

Even if your team doesn't write questions, we expect you to have enough familiarity with the quiz bowl format to be able to staff games during your bye rounds.

A team can have any number of players, but no more than four can play at a time. If you don't have a full team of four, we can match you up with other players. Solo teams are OK, too: we'll set the schedule so that other teams will have byes and you won't have to staff more than one room by yourself.

In VANCOUVER, the size of the field is capped at 8 teams.

In TORONTO, the size of the field is capped at 12 teams.

Teams

1. FARSIDE (VETO champions in 1999, 2000, 2001):   Peter
2. B2B (VETO champions in 2003):   Brock, Bruce, ...
3. SFU Junta (VETO champions in 2002):   Carlos, Hanson, Mike, ...
4. UBC A (VETO champions in 2004, 2005):   ...
5. UBC B (VETO champions in 2006, 2007):   ...
6. SFU students/alumni:   Geoff, Brittany, Rajon, ...
7. University of Oregon alumni:   Amy, Phil, ...

TORONTO teams as of July 1:

1. University of Toronto A
2. University of Toronto B
3. University of Toronto C
4. Lisgar alumni
5. University of Ottawa
6. University of Western Ontario
7. Queen's University

When

Note that VETO will be on the same day as the Chicago Open.

For quiz bowl tourists, here is how VETO fits into the North American summer weekend quiz calendar:

• June 21: Open mirror of NAQT high school NCT in Chattanooga, Tenn., open to all.
  Sun 'n Fun mirror in College Park, Maryland, also open to all, will be harder than the Chattanooga tournament.
• June 28: Zot Bowl in Irvine, Calif., for players who are either in high school or recently graduated from high school.
• July 5 - 6: nothing we know of yet
• July 12 - 13: nothing we know of yet
• July 19: VETO and Chicago Open
• July 26 - 27: nothing we know of yet
• August 2 - 3: nothing we know of yet
• August 8 - 10: Paléogénies X, a francophone tournament in Thetford Mines, Quebec. Check out their website, which is much cooler than ours.
• August 16 - 17: two-tournament weekend in Richmond, Virginia. At least one of the tournaments will be open to all.

VANCOUVER location

The number 4 bus goes directly from downtown Vancouver to UBC every 15 minutes on Saturdays, and takes about 30 minutes. The Barber Centre is one block from the bus loop.
Transit fares are $2.50 for 90 minutes of travel anywhere on the system, including buses, SkyTrain, and SeaBus.

By road, using Yahoo!'s directions but more realistic (longer) times, UBC 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.
If you're driving, the closest place to park is the North Parkade, 6115 Student Union Blvd, one block from the Barber Centre. Parking costs $4 for the whole day.

Vancouver International Airport is a premier global gateway served by more than 40 airlines with 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 an American rental car across the border, but Canadian residents aren't allowed to do this. Also keep in mind that even if it's cheaper to fly to Sea-Tac, if you factor in the time and money you spend on the 3-4 hours ground transportation each way, it may work out to be more worthwhile to take Air Canada or WestJet or another airline directly to Vancouver.

For lunch, there are a variety of food options in the Student Union Building, across the street from the Barber Centre:

• Bernoulli's Bagels (Montreal-style bagels), open 10 - 4
• Blue Chip Cookies (cookies, Fair Trade organic coffee), open 9 - 3
• The Honour Roll (sushi), open 11 - 3
• The Pit Pub (pub style, licensed), open noon - midnight
• The Pendulum (breakfast, lunch & dinner menus), open 11 - 3
• Starbucks, open 8 - 3

See below for other stuff to do in Vancouver, and places to stay.

TORONTO location

Format

Games will be conducted according to NAQT rules, except that:

• Matches will be untimed. Each half will end after 10 tossups together with their associated bonuses.
• There will be no 15-point "power" marks on tossups. All tossups will be worth 10 points.
• Since this is a guerrilla tournament, instead of an overall Tournament Director as final authority for appeals, in each round there will be appointed a Round Director to take this role. The Round Director will be one of the people who brought the packet played during that round. For the finals, the Round Directors will be chosen by consensus of the two participating teams, with input from the other teams that didn't make it.

It is to your advantage to print out and bring a copy of the rules. If some discrepancy occurred in a game and you want to protest it, it's a lot easier to convince a judge if you can point at the text that justifies your case, rather than to point into the air and say "I think the rules say..."

After the preliminary rounds, the teams will be ranked on their performance, first by win-loss record, and in the case of a tied win-loss record, then by average normalized points per game (ANPPG). ANPPG is computed as follows: In each round, find the mean total score of all games played during that round. Then, for every team in every game in every round, compute the normalized score by dividing the actual score by the mean total score in the round. A team's ANPPG is the mean of the normalized scores over all of the games it played.

The top two teams will advance to the finals, which will consist of one or two rounds. This will be a best-of-three series in which the round-robin game between the two teams will count retroactively as the first game of the series. These rounds will be played on packets from the other site.

Question Packets

Rounds will be untimed, with 20 tossups played in each. But you will have to write more than 20 tossups and 20 bonuses, because:

• if a game ends in a tie, you'll need extra questions to break it;
• if a question must be thrown out, for example because the moderator reads the answer prematurely by mistake, then you'll need a replacement for it;
• if a question asks about information that was repeated in a previous VETO packet, you should also replace it, because it'll bore or irritate the players who have just heard the same thing that day.

• 24 tossups, each worth 10 points — no 15-point "powers";
• 22 bonuses, each worth 30 points — but no single-part, single-answer questions.

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. Your Canadian questions should also cover diverse subject areas and not be clustered in Geography or Literature, etc.

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.

For our further amusement, we encourage rounds with hidden themes. In the past three years, we've had:

• a packet in which every tossup answer was also the name of a school that had participated in the SmartAsk TV game show;
• a packet in which every answer contained the name of an animal;
• a packet in which every answer contained the syllable "NI" (ending with "the knights who say NI");
• a packet in which every tossup answer began with the letter T, and every bonus had either answers beginning with the letter B or a theme that began with the letter B;
• a packet in which every tossup answer had some connection to the number two, and every bonus had some connection to the number three;
• a packet in which the answer to every tossup contained the number of the tossup.

Aim for a difficulty level approximating that of Division I NAQT sectionals.

Please do read the separate packet guidelines page, because it offers many helpful tips. If you can't think of what to write about, we have loads of categorized links to websites you can browse to find possible material for questions.

The Stanford archive contains most of the question packets used at VETO in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. You might note that some writers did not follow all of the guidelines. :) We've taken the list of answers that have come up in VETO in 2005 through 2007 and categorized them by subject. Try to write about things that are not on this list.

Prizes

Anyone may sponsor a prize and select a winner according to any criteria. In previous years, we've had up to 22 prizes awarded to individuals and teams, though last year there were only three in Vancouver.

Contact us if you're sponsoring a prize that you want listed on this web page. If you want to encourage others to write questions of your favourite type or on your favourite (broadly defined) subject, then announcing a prize here is a good way to do so.

Here is the list so far of prizes in Vancouver:

Award criteria	Prize	Sponsor
Worst repeat	a broken record	Peter of FARSIDE
Best question on food from non-animal sources	a gluten-free, fat-free, GMO-free, vegan ReBAR 100% organic energy bar	Peter
West Coast Dominatrix of Relevant Knowledge	handcuffs	Peter

VANCOUVER: Other stuff to do, and places to stay

Special events to entice you:

• The 31st Annual Vancouver Folk Music Festival will take place on the same weekend as VETO.
• The day before VETO, the West Point Grey Community Centre will be hosting the 18th annual Sandcastle Competition on Spanish Banks West Beach.
• The day after VETO, you may watch or participate in the 23rd annual S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Walk With The Dragon in Stanley Park.
• The 6th Congress of the International Society for Theoretical Chemical Physics begins on VETO weekend at UBC's Life Sciences Center.

Read or listen to the French consul's poetic tribute to Vancouver: Parler de Vancouver, / C'est vancouversifier.

See http://www.tourismvancouver.com for more information about Vancouver, including links to special promotions.

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.

The Pacific Spirit Hostel on the UBC campus would be the most convenient place to stay. Including taxes, single rooms are $37.29 per night, and double rooms are $74.58 per night.

If you want to stay closer to other city attractions, there are quite a few reasonably priced hotels in downtown Vancouver. Try findinghotel.com for looking up accommodation online, but do not be tempted by cheap rates in the East Hastings neighbourhood. This is identified by the V6A postal prefix area, which has the lowest median income in all of Canada.

Another cheap option is a dorm bed at the HI Vancouver Downtown hostel, which we've checked out and found is pretty good as hostels go. It is in a nice neighbourhood in downtown Vancouver.

Contact

• Vancouver:   Peter at pmcc -at- alumni -dot- sfu -dot- ca
• Toronto:   Jason at jason -dot- dickson -at- utoronto -dot- ca

"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

Back to CAQL events page.

  Webmaster e-mail: caql -at- caql -dot- org