With glowing hearts, we are pleased to announce the 2010 Vancouver Estival Trivia Open (VETO), the nation's longest-running annual quiz bowl tournament. Like last year, there will also be a mirror tournament the same day at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. 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 13:   Now 9 teams playing in Vancouver.

July 12:   We'll have 8 teams playing in Vancouver.
Also updated prizes in Vancouver.

June 25:   Vancouver location has been confirmed as Simon Fraser University's downtown campus at Harbour Centre,

As in past years except 2009, 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 2010, 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 and will also be participating this 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. When we say "OLD" packets, we mean packets that you wrote for some past tournament. Don't send any new, original questions as part of your VETO application! Save those for the actual tournament.
• 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 may 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 HAMILTON, the size of the field is capped at 24 teams.

When

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

• July 10: Andy's Non-Guerrilla Summer Tournament in Guelph, Ontario
• July 17: VETO
• July 23 - 25: Chicago Open
• July 30 - August 1: Paléogénies XII, a francophone tournament des plus brillants exploits in Quebec City
• August 7 - 8: VCU Open at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, with mirrors at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of California at San Diego.

Teams

1. FARSIDE (VETO champions in 1999, 2000, 2001):   Peter
2. SFU Junta (VETO champions in 2002):   Carlos, Hanson, Mike C., Joanne
3. B2B (VETO champions in 2003):   Brock, Bruce, Victoria, Shaun
4. University of British Columbia Zarya (VETO champions in 2004, 2005, and 2008):   Zarya, Fred, Becca
5. University of Oregon alumni (VETO champions in 2009):   Amy, Erin
6. SFU Quiz Bowl Club:   Geoff, Brittany N., Ross
7. Bellevue College:   Mike B., Chris, Alejandro, Colin
8. University of Washington:   Brittany C., Steven, Nate, Andre
9. University of British Columbia Brendan (VETO champions in 2006 and 2007):   Brendan, Mike W., Jennie

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.

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. The brand-new Canada Line SkyTrain takes you straight from the airport to Waterfront station in 26 minutes.

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 Harbour Meats & Deli, Et Voila!, Soupzone, Sushi Harbour, Curry Express, Bali Thai, Little Japan, Joe Veg, Casablanca, Bronco Belle Texas BBQ, Vana Vietnamese Cuisine, Amazing Wok, Salad Loop, Taco Del Mar, and Quizno's Subs.

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.

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..."

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 five 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;
• a packet in which every word of every answer was monosyllabic.

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. There is a separate .zip file with the questions packets from 2009. 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
Fastest trigger finger	to be announced	Peter

VANCOUVER: Other stuff to do, and places to stay

Special events to entice you to come for VETO:

• The 33rd Annual Vancouver Folk Music Festival will take place on the same weekend as VETO.
• The 37th International Conference on Vacuum Ultraviolet and X-ray Physics ends the day before VETO, at the University of British Columbia.
• The 21st International Pig Veterinary Society Congress begins the day after VETO at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

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. 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, which is Canada's poorest large urban postal code.

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 misukjm -at- muss -dot- cis -dot- mcmaster -dot- ca

Updates will be posted on the web page http://caql.org/events/veto10.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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