The Vancouver Estival Trivia Open (VETO) is the nation's longest-running annual quiz bowl tournament. There will be two mirrors in Ontario: one at McMaster University in Hamilton, and the other at the University of Ottawa. 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 16:   Updated team rosters and prizes in Vancouver.

July 8:   The deadline for submitting packets to the editor has passed. Updated lists of teams in Vancouver and Hamilton. Included more detailed directions for Vancouver and Hamilton.

June 25:   All packets must be submitted by JUNE 27 to Jerry Vinokurov at either grapesmoker -at- gmail -dot- com or jerry_v -at- brown -dot- edu (with the underscore).

June 15:   VETO will be a centrally-edited tournament. All packets must be submitted by JUNE 27 to an editor who will be announced.
Updated list of teams:   5 in Vancouver, 6 in Hamilton, 5 in Ottawa.
Harbour Centre (SFU downtown) has been confirmed as the Vancouver location.

June 13:   Started the list of teams expected at each site.

In a departure from the "guerrilla" style of VETO in previous years, this time the question packets must be submitted ahead of time to editors who will edit all of the packets. The result should be a higher-quality set of questions than VETOs of years past, thanks to experienced quizbowlers Jerry Vinokurov and Hannah Kirsch. Packets must be submitted to the editors by Saturday, June 27. Send them to Jerry at either grapesmoker -at- gmail -dot- com or jerry_v -at- brown -dot- edu (with the underscore).

VETO will be free of charge at all three sites.

See the CAQL results page for links to full reports on previous VETOs and their mirrors in Ontario. There will be no Trans-Canada Championship Match this year.

Who can play

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.

When

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

• July 11: Sun 'n Fun at the University of South Florida in Tampa, with mirrors at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and the University of Maryland, College Park
• July 18: VETO
• July 25 - 26: Chicago Open, mirrored at Bay Area Summer Quiz Extravaganza in Berkeley, Calif.
• August 1 - 2: Paléogénies XI, a francophone tournament in Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec
• August 8: VCU Open at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond

Teams

VANCOUVER teams as of July 14:

1. FARSIDE (VETO champions in 1999, 2000, 2001):   Peter
2. Simon Fraser University:   Geoff, Brittany, Rajon, ...
3. SFU Junta (VETO champions in 2002):   Carlos, Hanson, Mike, ...
4. University of Washington:   Mike, ...
5. University of Oregon alumni:   Sean, Phil, Amy, Daniel
6. B2B minus one B:   Brock, Mischa, Shaun, ...

HAMILTON teams as of July 1:

1. University of Waterloo A
2. University of Waterloo B
3. University of Guelph
4. University of Toronto A
5. University of Toronto B
6. University of Toronto C
7. University of Toronto D
8. McMaster University
9. Jordan Palmer + McMaster
10. University of Western Ontario

OTTAWA teams as of June 15:

1. University of Ottawa A:   Aaron, ...
2. University of Ottawa B:   Ben, ...
3. Lisgar Collegiate Institute alumni:   Chris, ...
4. Lisgar Collegiate Institute students
5. Paul Paquet and Philippe

VANCOUVER location

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 lots around 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 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, you won't even have to leave the building. The Harbour Centre Food Court downstairs contains L'Orange, Sushi Harbour, Curry Express, Harbour Meats & Deli, Bali Thai, Les Crepes Et Voila, Little Japan, Joe Veg, Casablanca, Bronco Belle Texas BBQ, Vana Vietnamese Cuisine, Amazing Wok, Salad Loop, Taco Del Mar, and Quiznos.

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

HAMILTON location

McMaster is about 45 minutes' drive from either downtown Toronto or Pearson International airport, which is Canada's busiest.
It's also about an hour's drive from Niagara Falls.

OTTAWA location

Format

At the OTTAWA site, there will be a double round-robin, followed by ACF-style playoffs, meaning:

• If the top two teams are tied in record, play a one-game final.
• If the top two teams are separated by one win, play a "best-of-3" where the team with the extra win has the one-game advantage.
• If the top team clears the field by 2 or more wins, they are the outright champions.

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 (sort of) 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..."

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 four separate clues. 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 four 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, 2007, and 2008. 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.

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
West Coast Dominatrix of Relevant Knowledge	handcuffs	Peter
worst neg	to be announced	Sean of Oregon
person travelling farthest from Canada	to be announced	Peter
best trash question	you'll see	Hanson of Junta

VANCOUVER: Other stuff to do, and places to stay

This will also be an opportunity for you to look around the city before you return to attend the XXI Olympic Winter Games five months later.

Special events to entice you to come for VETO:

• The 32nd Annual Vancouver Folk Music Festival will take place on the same weekend as VETO.
• The XVII World Congress of Aesthetic Medicine is at the downtown convention centre and will also take place the same weekend as VETO.
• The 7th International Conference on Imagination and Education is at Harbour Centre and ends the same day as VETO.
• The day after VETO, you may choose to partake in:
  • the 24th annual S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Walk with the Dragon in Stanley Park;
  • the 7th annual Classic Car Show at the A & W restaurant on Lougheed Highway in suburban Coquitlam;
  • the 21st Century Flea Market at the Croatian Cultural Centre on Commercial Drive.

The day before VETO, at noon on Friday, July 17, there will be a ceremony on the roof of Robert C. Brown Hall at Simon Fraser University's Burnaby campus, to celebrate exactly 10 years since the first VETO, which was also the first-ever quiz bowl tournament in western Canada.

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 9:09 p.m.

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
• Hamilton:   Jay at senator_jay -at- hotmail -dot- com
• Ottawa:   Ben at uotrivia -at- yahoo -dot- ca

Updates will be posted on the web page http://caql.org/events/veto09.html which you're looking at right now.
Also check out the VETO weblog at http://veto.caql.org .

"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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