As I look out my window on a bleak October afternoon, I’m reminded of the musings of a certain poet on this habitually melancholic time of year: “Autumn leaves [fall] down like pieces into place/And I can picture it, after all these days.” She knew all too well of the season’s inherent contradiction. The sorrowful frost rolls in on the furrows of deep grey clouds, bringing merciless death to flowers and small creatures ill-prepared for their only winters; yet what beautiful, flaming, vibrant murder.
Similarly, while the start of a uni year is pretty grim after a summer off, there are a lot of fun quiz tournaments.
I’ve had the good fortune to attend the first three tournaments of the year in some capacity. Here is the Autumn Tournament Catch-Up (10 Minute Read Version) (Abbie’s Version).
NASAT (UK Mirror)
The season started with a tournament whose traditional role in the British circuit has been to remind us limeys that, when it comes to quizbowl, the Americans are one step ahead of us. Well, not really; this may be a high school tournament across the pond, but it’s for the best of the best - the National All-Star Academic Tournament. Over here, it’s an open tournament held online and usually frequented by experienced or recently graduated players - not the most extraordinarily difficult tournament but still certifiably “tough”; focussed generally on quizbowl “canon”, though not without a few more left-field inclusions. As far as I can tell, the set has not yet been publicly cleared, so I can’t discuss specific questions, but there were some really creative stand-outs that felt very good to buzz on.
I mentioned in my preview I had high hopes for another member of the Chinese zodiac reigning supreme this year, and so I was very excited to see how “Dog” would fare. They finished third in the Twisted Flax bracket, just behind the tenuously named “Diego Thelastquiz” in second (I hope that team of Imperial graduates aren’t hinting towards their retirement with that name!) Winning that bracket though was the all-star UKQB committee line-up of The Four and the Cooked, with Kai Madgwick, Omer Keskin, Ben Russell Jones and Sam Moore going 7 for none.
Over in Horned Viper bracket, beating out my team to the top three were All Quiet on the Buzzing Front in third (who won the far more prestigious prize of this writer’s favourite team name of the of the tournament), Antipodes & Friends in second (a close second in both the bracket and the aforementioned team name prize) and another clean sweep for the mostly-Imperial Marvell Kinematic Universe, starring the Marvell-ous Michael Kohn, Ali Izzatdust, Felix Swift Roberts and Enoch Yuen.
The rebracket saw French Influence and Duels completely sweep Water division, with Abigail Tan, Ben LaFond, Matt Booth and Delia Cropper amassing a mighty 20.83 points per tossup heard in the afternoon, the highest across the tournament. Over in Lion division, the morning’s two standout teams continued to outstand, with both teams maintaining unbeaten records against anyone else in the competition. It all came down to the penultimate Round 10, with the two titans playing an incredibly close competition - and thanks in no small part to a valiant five 10s from Michael Kohn, it was Marvell Kinematic Universe who took the game, 310-260. Thus they were crowned champions of NASAT 2024, beating T4atC by just .5 PPG.
Despite his team finishing third in the Water division, HMS GMT+8’s star player Sam Foo was the only player to break 50 PPG, and so took home the honour of topping the individual table. Ben Russell Jones of The Four and the Cooked had to settle for second again, while my own team’s MVP Eoin O’Reilly slotted in at third. Congratulations to them as well as Freddy Leo, Frances Hadley, Agnijo Banerjee and Justin Lee, who all broke 40 PPG.
Lastly, I mentioned before that this tournament is almost exclusively attended by graduates and experienced players. With that in mind, I want to give a huge shout-out to the team from Lancaster, who rocked up despite never having played a quizbowl tournament before. They made a great showing for themselves and were an absolute joy to have around, and I really look forward to seeing them in future tournaments.
WaShBowl (Open Mirror)
And now, as they say, for something completely different. I had been assured by many who had attended this brand new pop culture tournament at the initial closed reading that we were in for a treat, but I can safely say I’ve never played a pop tournament that was so eclectic, well-researched and flat-out enjoyable before.
This Open mirror was a very tight-knit affair, with just the four teams competing in an eerily quiet Sheffield SU (well, it was quiet until the board gamers turned up). It’s impressive that despite only two rooms being required, in a largely empty building, the only rooms the University were able to offer us were two flights of stairs and half the building apart, and naturally across the six games of the morning we found our team had to change room between every single fixture. At another tournament I might have grumbled, but the vibes that day were simply so immaculate I began to feel something I didn’t know I was capable of: I began to enjoy the walk.
The walk still wasn’t nearly as good as the quizzes. I play a lot of pop culture tournaments casually in my own time, so it’s a godsend to play a British-written packet and not find myself zoning out at yet another MLB tossup. But the range here was beyond any other tournament I’ve played, giving regular space to video games, food and drink, internet culture, traditional gaming on top of a broad mix of the more standard disciplines of film/TV, music and sport. I would recommend reading the packets yourselves if you were not able to attend, which are now up on the QB packets archive. But I will from this point on be referring to a few specific questions, so spoilers are ahead.
I was amused by what counts under the remit of “pop culture” - there surely aren’t many definitions of pop culture that would include both Pier Paolo Pasolini and ‘the Josh Hutcherson Whistle meme’ - but it made for a tournament where anything and everything could come up. My somewhat last minute conglomerate of a team, Bit Commitment Enforcement Agency, which also featured Kai Madgwick, Aisling Skeet and Mikey Brown, soon found our general specialist areas - by which I mean, I’d mournfully rest my head on Aisling’s shoulder whenever a set of bonuses on 1980s new wave went begging to the other team, and she would return the gesture when we lost out on modern musical theatre. Power marks tended to be pretty generous, so the real bragging rights came from first-lining. And brag I will: the two I was most proud of were recognising lyrics to a lesser-known cut from Les Mis, and identifying Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. on the back of there not being many albums with a track that “features U2”. With that said, the best first line I saw had to be Thomas Hart identifying the ace attorney Phoenix Wright purely on the name of his houseplant. Quoth him: “you gotta know Charlie”.
The two finalist teams, minus Joseph “I’m also here” Krol, but featuring me, clutching a shark.
Coming to the last game of the round robin, both my team and El Otoño del Pop Cultura sat on 6 wins and 2 losses. But alas, it was their team that prevailed in both our final round robin game and a grand final, winning both games on just a single TU’s worth of points. How different things may have been if, when buzzing on a routine “two answers required” TU on actor buddies Simon Pegg & Nick Frost, Kai Madgwick hadn’t buzzed in and negged with an unfortunate malapropism, “Nick Clegg”. So congratulations to Thomas Hart, Joseph Krol, Delia Cropper and Brendan Bethlehem for a tournament that was ultimately much more about the journey than the destination. In the second final, Tomfoolery Perchance (who were fielding a three person team after we had cunningly poached Kai a couple of days prior to the tournament) prevailed over Quiz Me the Horizon to take third.
Thomas Hart took the individual prize with 56.60 PPG, in a top 5 dominated by Thomases and Josephs (T. de Bock, J. Krol and J. Middleton-Welling). For the first time at any tournament, I got to claim an individual prize for a joint-fourth PPG of 41.50. I took home two DVDs of Pitch Perfect 2 and Twilight. I have not seen Pitch Perfect 1. Nor do I own a DVD player.
Once again, this was an absolute riot of a tournament. Warwick and Sheffield’s quiz societies have absolutely outdone themselves, and I’m delighted that work has already begun on WaShBowl II. The ball is now in CUQS’ court, with Trash in the Attic in just a couple of weeks.
ACF Fall
This year’s ACF Fall was one of the biggest tournaments in British quizbowl history, with an overwhelming 32 teams and 123 players taking part in the most prominent novice tournament in the international quizbowl calendar. I want to start by saying that, for me, that’s far more important than winners and losers - it’s wonderful to see the format continue to grow, and I was delighted to see new players celebrate incredible first lines, kick themselves over bonuses that seemed so obvious in retrospect, and lean forward in their seats when the game’s on a knife’s edge at tossup the last. I look forward to those new faces becoming familiar friends.
The questions are up on the website in non-Briticised glory, so please check those out and stop reading if you don’t want spoilers. Many of these topics will be familiar, of course, as ACF Fall usually runs through the essential quizbowl canon, though as ever the occasional playful non-academic set of bonuses punctuate the set (I enjoyed a lovely set of questions on Sabrina Carpenter singles, and a TU that went criminally unused in my room on Wario). Due to some quirk with the Briticization, participating teams will now be incredibly familiar with the history of the Mali Empire, and by the end of the day more than one team was throwing out a hopeful “Mansa Musa” as a response to any world history bonus that seemed at least a little gold-or-salty.
The Southern Mirror saw teams fielded from Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Warwick, Bristol, Birmingham, LSE and hosts Southampton. Oxbridge teams dominated the preliminaries, with unbeaten runs for Cambridge A’s five-strong team of Ian McDowell (with a whopping 95 PPG, or 38/80 tossups heard), Kyan Cheung, Alison Craig-Greene, Jing Hao Liang and Sherwin Wang; and conversely an outstanding three-hand performance for Oxford A’s Benjamin Kramer, Arthur Bellamy and Benjamin Liu. Despite a loss to Southampton A, Oxford B took four wins to top the remaining bracket.
After the rebracket, it was the five of Cambridge A who continued their unbeaten run, conquering their otherwise-unvanquished rivals Oxford A with 340-275 with yet another incredible showing for Ian McDowell. In the second division Southampton A (featuring the wonderfully epithet-ed Jaz the Mononymous) reigned supreme with four wins to one defeat since the rebracket, while the third division was impressively topped by Jacob Taylor and Malcolm Orrange of a two-person Bristol B.
So with Cambridge A a game up on Oxford A, we were set for an advantaged final. Cambridge led early, but Oxford chased their tails the whole game through, and with three to go the scores were 260-255 in Cambridge’s favour. But Oxford pounced, and clinched the last three toss-ups for a final score of 260-355 and a deciding grand final. This time, Oxford were the ones to stretch an early lead, hitting 35-150 after six TUs - before the next three fell kindly to Cambridge, bringing the scores to a dead heat at TU10. That back and forth continued, each side taking and giving away the lead, right up to the game being tied back up with just two TUs remaining - and after Oxford took TU19 with no bonuses, the whole tournament fell on the last buzz. And that buzz went to Oxford’s Benjamin Kramer, who saw the game out for Oxford A, 275-315, giving the title to Oxford, while Cambridge had to settle for what the Discord assures me is something called “being Cambridged”.
Ian McDowell of Cambridge A can reassure himself with a staggering overall PPG of 81.00. Also scoring well over 50 PPG were Benjamin Kramer, Sohan Vohra of Cambridge B and my erstwhile WaShBowl teammate Mikey Brown of Birmingham. Congratulations on being banned from all future novice tournaments!
UKQB’s Caitlin Libeaut presides over Imperial B v Southampton A; fantastic dungarees are in fact required uniform for UKQB committee members.
The northern site, where I had the pleasure of modding, hosted eight teams from home team Durham as well as competitors from York, Edinburgh and Sheffield. Unlike down in Southampton, the morning was an incredibly close-fought affair with no teams taking a clean sweep, but Sheffield B, Edinburgh A and Durhams A, B & C all boasting a 5-1 record going into the rebracket. To really hammer home how evenly matched these teams were, Oliver Rothnie of Durham E hit 56.67 PPG without taking a single game - many of these were absolute hair-width affairs.
The playoffs were a different story, with both brackets swept by Edinburgh A and B respectively, though with Edinburgh A only holding a game in hand over Durham B, we once again headed to an advantaged final. Representing Scottish supremacy were David Allen, Daniel Bloom, Siddhant Kumar and Lucy Henderson, while the County Palatine’s team consisted of Thomas Frith, Joe Ancel, James Vleck and Matteo Fronduti.
The two teams competed closely in the first few rounds, perhaps most noteworthy for having an absurd amount of 20s on bonuses, but at around the one-third mark Durham pulled ahead, never to look back. A final score of 165-375 took the tournament to one last game. The tables seemed to have turned early doors, with Edinburgh stretching to a lead of 80 points by TU7, but after two perfect sets of bonuses from Durham the scores were tied up in a blink. Edinburgh once again pulled ahead, with Durham keeping pace just enough to stay in the game right up to the 19th tossup. But a final two buzzes for Edinburgh A saw them triumph at the last with 300-235, preventing a repeat of the “Cambridging” in the southern mirror and enshrining them as the eternal champions of ACF Fall 2024 Northern Mirror.
Once again proving what a finely poised tournament this was, none of the northern site’s 50 PPG-ers came from the two finalist squads (though David Allen and Thomas Frith were certainly not far behind). Congratulations to Caspar Chatham and Oliver Rothnie of Durham, and the site’s only >60 PPG player, CT Tang of Sheffield. Your ACF Fall days are over just as soon as they began, but I look forward to seeing all of you at future tournaments.
Alas, we had no more packets, so there was no grand UK final; we have to presume both teams are equally magnanimous. Thank you to every single team who took part; I thoroughly enjoyed modding at the northern site and I hope your experiences playing were twice as invigorating as that.
That’s all for now. Coming up in the next few weeks, we have ACF Winter and British Novice, neither of which I’ll be playing - neither was I present at Penn Bowl or Trash in the Attic, so I’ll have to actually do research for those write-ups. Finally, to whoever left a blue water bottle at ACF Fall - I hear they’ve still got it in their drawer, even now.*
*They might not. I’m simply committing to the bit. You did see my team name at WaShBowl, right?