This autumn we will be putting on six tournaments over the course of October and November. Two of these, the Warwick Novice Tournament and the British Novice Tournament, are aimed at people with minimal experience of buzzer quizzing and would make ideal first tournaments for any societies interested in getting involved and for newer members of the more established societies. Links to the Facebook events for the various tournaments will be placed at the end of this article as they’re made available.
The Oxford Autumn Open will be held on the 13th of October in Oxford. This tournament is aimed primarily at non-student teams. It will be run on the Early Fall Tournament set head-edited by the University Challenge champion Joey Goldman, which describes itself as aiming to “cater to ambitious novices while providing a meaningful experience to stalwarts of the game”.
The following weekend, on the 20th of October, the Oxford University Quiz Society will be hosting Oxford Autumn Tournament. This will be run on the same set as the Oxford Autumn Open (with minor editing to replace any excessively American content with British content), but will only allow teams consisting of students to play, and promises to be a great opportunity for student teams to get back in the groove after a long (and hopefully relaxing) summer break.
The Cambridge Hard Autumn Tournament will be run at Cambridge on the 27th of October. This is (alongside Southampton End of Autumn Tournament) likely to be the hardest tournament played this term, as it will be played on the Penn Bowl set, produced by the University of Pennsylvania. While this tournament is likely to be open to non-student teams, the majority of the teams attending have historically been students, and it provides a good opportunity for more experienced players and societies to see how they stack up against each other.
The Warwick Novice Tournament will be hosted at the University of Warwick on the 3rd of November. This tournament will be played on the ACF Fall set with a few changes to remove the most egregiously American content and replace it with content more relevant to the UK. This tournament has always been a highlight of the season, and is particularly well suited for less experienced players due to its comparatively low difficulty and the relatively British nature of the questions.
The second edition of the British Novice Tournament will be hosted in London (likely at Imperial College) on the 17th of November. Like the Warwick Novice Tournament (and as the name suggests), this tournament is ideal for people with minimal experience of buzzer quizzing and would make a great tournament for putative University Challenge teams to get some buzzer experience. This tournament is being written by quizzers from across the UK, from Southampton all the way up to Glasgow in a process overseen by last year’s BSQC top scorer Evan Lynch.
The End of Autumn Tournament will be taking place on the 24th of November in Southampton. This will be at a similar difficulty to the Cambridge Hard Autumn Tournament and similarly is predominantly produced by a single American university, in this case UCSD, and should provide a fun and stretching close to the term.