Saturday, July 23, 2011 |
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Thirteenth annual |
Ninth annual |
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Vancouver |
VETO's |
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Estival |
Eastern |
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Trivia |
Trivia |
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Open |
Open |
With glowing hearts, we are pleased to announce the 2011 Vancouver Estival Trivia Open (VETO), the nation's longest-running annual quiz bowl tournament. There will be a mirror of this tournament the same day in Toronto. 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 22: Schedule posted for the round-robin in Vancouver.
July 9: Toronto location is the downtown (St. George) campus of the University of Toronto. Announcement for this location on hsquizbowl.
July 7:
Vancouver location is now the
University of British Columbia.
There will be 8 to 10 teams playing in Vancouver.
June 22:
Simon Fraser University's Burnaby Mountain campus will be the Vancouver
location.
June 20: University of Toronto announced as mirror site.
As in past years (other than 2009), VETO will be run "guerrilla" style, meaning:
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.
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:
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.
For quiz bowl tourists, this is one week before the Chicago Open.
If you would like to participate in VETO, please notify us by Canada Day, July 1, 2011.
The number
4 bus
goes directly from downtown Vancouver to UBC every 15 minutes on
Saturdays, and takes about 30 minutes.
Alternatively, the number
99 B-Line bus
goes from the Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station to UBC
every 10 minutes on Saturday mornings, and takes 33 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:
See below for other stuff to do in Vancouver, 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..."
Schedule in Vancouver
Here is the round-robin schedule in Vancouver. Teams:
[FrSd] FARSIDE: Peter
[SFUJ] SFU Junta: Hanson, Carlos, Matt
[B2B.] B2B: Brock, Shaun, Mischa, Brendan
[UBC.] UBC: Adam, Mike W., 2 more
[Oreg] Oregon: Sean, Phil, Amy, Erin
[SFQB] SFU Quiz Bowl Club: Brittany, Geoff, Ross
[BeBo] Bellevue-Boise: Mike B., Chris, Colin, 1 more
[Wash] University of Washington
Room 185 Room 191 Room 196 Pack Other staff -------- -------- -------- ---- ------------------- 9:30 Oreg-FrSd SFQB-SFUJ B2B.-UBC. | BeBo Wash 10:00 B2B.-BeBo SFQB-UBC. SFUJ-Wash | Oreg FrSd 10:30 FrSd-SFUJ UBC.-Wash SFQB-BeBo | B2B. Oreg 11:00 UBC.-BeBo SFUJ-B2B. Oreg-Wash | FrSd SFQB 11:30 FrSd-Wash Oreg-SFQB SFUJ-BeBo | UBC. B2B. Lunch break at the Student Union Building 1:00 SFUJ-UBC. Oreg-B2B. FrSd-SFQB | Wash BeBo 1:30 SFQB-Wash FrSd-B2B. Oreg-BeBo | SFUJ UBC. 2:00 Oreg-UBC. FrSd-BeBo B2B.-Wash | SFQB SFUJ 2:30 SFQB-B2B. BeBo-Wash ... | Tor1 Oreg FrSd SFUJ UBC. 3:00 FrSd-UBC. Oreg-SFUJ ... | Tor2 SFQB B2B. BeBo Wash
Tor1 and Tor2 are packets from Toronto.
Playoff format will be determined at the opening meeting.
There are a total of four Toronto packets that we can use.
Question Packets
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 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:
For our further amusement, we encourage rounds with hidden themes. In the past five years, we've had:
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, 2008, and 2010. 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.
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 |
Best science question | book, Proper Care of Turtles | Peter |
Special events to entice you to come for VETO:
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 9:06 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.
Updates will be posted on the web page
http://caql.org/events/veto11.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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