We are pleased to announce the 2018 Vancouver Estival Trivia Open (VETO), the nation's longest-running annual quiz bowl tournament. We hope there will be a mirror of this tournament in Toronto.

This web page will be kept up to date with the most current information.

June 4:   Website posted.

As in past years, 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.

As always, VETO will be free of charge.

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 2018, 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 Collegiate Quiz Bowl Packet 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 28, 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 6 teams.

Since 1999, more than a hundred different people have joined us in Vancouver to play at VETO. Players have included current or former members of the quiz bowl teams of the following universities and colleges:

• Bellevue College
• Boise State University
• Boston University
• The George Washington University
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Harvey Mudd College
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• McMaster University
• Princeton University
• Queen's University
• Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
• Sacred Heart University
• Simon Fraser University
• University of British Columbia
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Chicago
• University of Maryland
• University of Oregon
• University of Ottawa
• University of Toronto
• University of Virginia
• University of Washington
• University of Waterloo

When

For quiz bowl tourists, this is 3 weeks after the Chicago Open. It is a week after the B.C. Day / Simcoe Day long weekend.

If you would like to participate in VETO, please notify us by July 28, 2018.

VANCOUVER location

For drivers, there is lots of free sreet parking. If you're going by public transit, take the Evergreen Extension of the Millennium Line to Burquitlam, and walk from there for 15 or 20 minutes. Weekend transit fares are $2.95 for 90 minutes of travel anywhere on the system, including buses, SkyTrain, and SeaBus.

Vancouver International Airport, Canada's second busiest, is a premier global gateway served by 53 airlines with more than 109 non-stop destinations worldwide. The Skytrax World Airport Awards rank it as the best airport in the Western hemisphere, and number 14 in the world.

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.

Stay tuned for lunch options!

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

Format

Games will be conducted according to NAQT rules (and also NAQT's Correctness Guidelines), 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 recent years, we've had packets in which:

• every tossup answer was also the name of a school that had participated in the SmartAsk TV game show;
• every answer contained the name of an animal;
• every answer contained the syllable "NI" (ending with "the knights who say NI");
• 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;
• every tossup answer had some connection to the number two, and every bonus had some connection to the number three;
• the answer to every tossup contained the number of the tossup;
• every word of every answer was monosyllabic;
• every tossup answer was the name of a make or model of automobile;
• every tossup answer was alliterative;
• every answer ended with an "L" sound;
• every tossup answer began with a tree-related word;
• every tossup answer was the name of a heavy-metal band;
• every tossup answer was the title of a song;
• tossups related to Jordan alternated with tossups having clues with the name Palmer in them;
• every question was about women;
• every tossup answer was the name of a programming language;
• the initial letters of the answers to the tossups were symbols of chemical elements, in their order in the periodic table;
• every tossup answer was something that has appeared on Canadian currency.

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, 2009, 2010, and 2011; the Collegiate Quiz Bowl Packet archive contains the packets used at VETO in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. 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 2017 and categorized them by subject. This list gives you an idea of the kinds of things to ask about when writing your own packet (though we prefer you not pick these exact same answers).

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.

VANCOUVER: Other stuff to do, and places to stay

Special events to entice you to come for VETO:

• The 45th iteration of the world's premier annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, SIGGRAPH 2018, begins the day after VETO, at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
• The 12th annual International Federation for Research in Women's History Conference begins two days before VETO, at SFU's downtown Vancouver campus. "The theme, "Transnationalisms, Transgressions, Translations: Conversations and Controversies," probes the meanings of boundaries and frameworks, narratives and epistemologies, analytic terms and foundational categories, global, national and local understandings, interactions and power relations across time and space."
• Bring your sleeping bag and sleep inside the Vancouver Aquarium starting at 9 pm right after VETO! Yes, really. Theme for the night: Wonderful World of Pinnipeds!
• The Abbotsford International Airshow provides spectators an opportunity to watch one of the finest aerobatic performances in the world, the same weekend as VETO, 53 km east of Burquitlam.
• The 146th Annual Chilliwack Fair also takes place on VETO weekend, 84 km east of Burquitlam, and features carriage rides, tractor pulls, First Nations carver demos, pig racing, and a rodeo.
• The 28th annual Harmony Arts Festival runs August 3 – 12. The festival draws crowds from all over the Lower Mainland to celebrate a harmonious balance of visual, culinary, literary and performing arts on the spectacular West Vancouver waterfront.
• The incredible TD Vancouver Chinatown Festival, the biggest multicultural summer celebration in town, occurs on VETO weekend.
• The Asian-themed Richmond Night Market is Metro Vancouver’s biggest and most amazing night market, and the largest of its kind in North America. Open Fridays and Saturdays 7 pm to midnight, and on Sundays from 7 pm to 11 pm.
• The Vancouver Bach Festival is one of the largest festivals of its type in North America and runs this year from July 30 to August 10, the day before VETO, at Christ Church Cathedral downtown and at the Chan Centre on the UBC campus.
• The 30th Annual Queer Film Festival runs August 9 – 19 at seven different venues around Vancouver.
• Sunday Afternoon Salsa in Robson Square, downtown Vancouver, will take place the day after VETO. Take a FREE lesson at 3 pm, or watch the FREE performances at 5 pm.
• The Perseid meteor shower will illuminate the night sky above Vancouver just hours after VETO ends. "The moon is very favo[u]rable for the Perseids this year, and that'll make the Perseids probably the best shower of 2018 for people who want to go out and view it." — NASA meteor expert.

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

Updates will be posted on the web page http://caql.org/events/veto18.html which you're looking at right now.

"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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