![[CAQL]](../images/caql.gif){kind=small}
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Saturday, July 17, 2004 |
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Sixth annual |
Second annual |
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Vancouver |
VETO |
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Estival |
Escapes to |
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Trivia |
Toronto |
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Open |
Ontario |
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and fourth annual |
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Trans-Canada Championship Match |
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It's over! See the results in Vancouver and Toronto, and the Trans-Canada Championship Match.
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 a championship match between the site winners. This web page will be kept up to date with the most current information about all three events.
July 15: Included matchings of Vancouver teams to Toronto teams in the list of packets.
July 11: Tentative schedule for Vancouver posted. List of all packets added. You may need to get your packet done by Thursday, July 15, to send to the other site. Brock of B2B has announced more prizes in Vancouver.
July 9: Deadline for Toronto has passed, and with the addition of Zhan's team there will be 6 teams there.
July 8: Vancouver players are warned about reduced SkyTrain service on VETO morning (thanks, Daniel!).
July 5: UWO alumni make it 5 teams in Toronto.
July 2: The Vancouver site now has 8 teams and is full. The Toronto site has 4 teams with a new deadline of July 8.
June 15: St. George's, national champions of Reach for the Top in 2004, are joining forces with Templeton, national champions of Smart Ask in 2004, to play on a combined über-team of fresh high school graduates in Vancouver. Also added links to other summer tournaments in Minneapolis on June 26 and Ann Arbor, Mich., on August 7.
June 11: Toronto information added.
June 4: UBC makes it 6 teams.
May 29: Added 14 lunch options in the same building, the list of game rooms and a link to a virtual reality tour of one of them, links to VETO packets from 2002 and 2003, and links to other summer quiz bowl tournaments to help you plan your holidays. There are now 5 teams including three previous VETO champions and the national Smart Ask champions.
May 18: Initial page posted.
VETO will be run ``guerrilla'' style, meaning:
As always, this event is FREE of charge.
See the CAQL results page for links to full reports on previous VETOs and their mirrors in Ontario. This year's event will be held on the fifth anniversary of the first VETO, which was the first quiz bowl tournament ever held in Western Canada.
We expect all teams to have enough familiarity with the quiz bowl format to be able to staff games during their 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.
Both the Vancouver and Toronto sites are closed to registration of new teams.
These teams will be playing in Vancouver:
These teams will be playing in Toronto:
As of July 9, both the Vancouver site and the Toronto site are full.
N.B.: Because of track maintenance on Saturday mornings, SkyTrain will be operating on a reduced schedule, running only every 10 — 15 minutes on VETO morning. Please allow extra time if you are taking SkyTrain, or consider other transit options.
By road, using Yahoo!'s directions but more realistic (longer) times,
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 runs up to about $5 at Harbour Centre.
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 anyone with a Canadian driver's licence is not permitted to do so. 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 another airline directly to Vancouver.
Check out Raymond Kam's QuickTime Virtual Reality tour of Vancouver's harbour. Harbour Centre is the building with the big saucer on top.
Take a QuickTime Virtual Reality tour of actual VETO 2004 game room 1510! The other game rooms, 1500, 1520 and 1530, are adjacent to this one and are virtually identical to it. All game rooms have exterior windows. These are the same rooms we used for VETO in 2002 (but not in 2003). We'll meet in room 1525, the Scotia McLeod Conference Room.
For lunch, you won't even have to leave the building. The Harbour Centre Food Fair downstairs contains Amazing Wok, Vana Vietnamese Cuisine, Salad Loop, Arabella Mediterranean Cuisine, joe veg Natural and Organic, Kamakura Japanese food, Phoenix Dim Sum, Curry Express, Cinnamon City, Carmelo Ricco, Orange Julius, A & W, Fusion (soups, wraps, frozen treats), and Harbour Deli and Meats. At the same level there are a Pharmasave drugstore with a full-service post office, and shops selling books, clothes, flowers, etc.
See below for other stuff to do in Vancouver, and places to stay.
For those coming from out of town, Toronto is easily accessible by airplane, train, bus, and car. See below for other stuff to do in Toronto, and places to stay.
Games will be conducted according to NAQT rules, except that:
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..."
As of July 13, here is the tentative round-robin schedule in Vancouver. Key:
1510 1520 1530 staff packet
1. FrSd-B2B OUTC-CAWU UBC -NTC : FOMO/SFUJ : SFUJ
2. UBC -FOMO OUTC-NTC SFUJ-CAWU : FrSd/B2B : B2B #1
3. B2B -CAWU SFUJ-NTC OUTC-FOMO : UBC /FrSd : FrSd
4. FOMO-NTC UBC -CAWU FrSd-SFUJ : OUTC/B2B : B2B #2
5. B2B -SFUJ FrSd-OUTC FOMO-CAWU : NTC /UBC : UBC
6. NTC -CAWU FrSd-UBC B2B -OUTC : SFUJ/FOMO : FOMO
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lunch break
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7. SFUJ-OUTC B2B -UBC FrSd-FOMO : CAWU/NTC : NTC
8. FrSd-NTC B2B -FOMO SFUJ-UBC : OUTC/CAWU : CAWU
9. OUTC-UBC SFUJ-FOMO : FrSd/B2B /CAWU/NTC : Toronto via CAWU
10. B2B -NTC FrSd-CAWU : UBC /OUTC/FOMO/SFUJ : Matt Bruce via SFUJ
The round-robin schedule is subject to change. Contact Peter if you see a problem with it.
After the round-robin, 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 Toronto.
Detailed question guidelines are on a separate web page, which includes a section with useful links categorized by subject.
Rounds will be untimed, with 20 tossups played in each. But you will have to write more than 20 tossups and 20 bonuses, because:
| 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. 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:
For our further amusement, we encourage rounds with hidden themes such as all answers beginning with the same letter or each question being connected to the next one.
Aim for a difficulty level approximating that of 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 and 2003. You might note that some writers did not follow all of the guidelines. :)
Anyone may sponsor a prize and select a winner according to any criteria. Last year, there were 21 prizes awarded to individuals and teams 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) topic, 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 |
| Best question on popular culture from before 1981 | a collection of pre-1981 pop culture | Brock of B2B |
| Best question, as voted by players | NoFrigginClue.com Prize Pack | Braintrust Games |
| Best question on food from non-animal sources | a ReBar nutritious organic food bar, made in B.C. | Peter of FARSIDE |
| Worst music question | a Barbra Streisand biography | Brock of B2B |
| Player most protective of his or her teammates | a VHS copy of The Bodyguard | Brock of B2B |
| Team that takes the longest to answer a bonus question | a set of Kokanee "do not disturb" hangers | Brock of B2B |
| Team that looks as if it wants to leave but sticks it out anyway | some stickers | Brock of B2B |
| Best children's/science fiction/fantasy literature question | undisclosed | Daniel of NTC |
Special events:
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 9:10 p.m.
There are quite a few reasonably priced hotels in downtown Vancouver, within walking distance of the tournament location. The placestostay website is a good one for looking up accommodation online, but we urge you not to be tempted by cheap rates in the East Hastings neighbourhood. This is the V6A postal prefix area, which has the lowest median income in all of Canada.
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 (except, unfortunately, on VETO morning, when they'll run every 10 — 15 minutes). Weekend fares are $2 per person for 90 minutes of travel anywhere on the system, including buses and SeaBus.
A 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 2.1 km from the tournament.
"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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