Newsletter 1.6 (short) Gaius Stern April 4 ACF West Coast Newsletter First a brief welcome to new subscribers. There are now too many of you for me to remember, so I apologize if I leave some of you out. I extend a welcome to subscribers from Arizona, ASU, Georgetown College, and MD. 39 TEAMS at ACF NATIONALS at U-TENN KNOXVILL This upcoming weekend, the University of Tenn will host ACF Nationals for the second time. Don Windham and Carol Guthrie are the tournament coordinators. This year will be the biggest ACF Nationals ever and it will feature teams from every region of the US. Of the Western teams that qualified this year, the top three finishers at ACF Regionals -- Berkeley, BYU A, and BYU B will all be there. From the Southwest region, the top three finishers Rice, Texas A&M, and Midwestern State (I hope I got the order right, apologies if I goofed) as well as ACF host Oklahoma will be there. According to the recent informal poll conducted by BGSU, all of the top 20 teams and most of the remaining 21-40 will be there. We wish good luck to all competitors. A special thanks is due in advance to Don and Carol and Jim Dendy and Ramesh Kanneppan for working so hard to ensure this tournament will be a success. PLEASE SET A SCHEDULE FOR NEXT YEAR This year, due to some bad planning, a few schools were unable to attend a tournament or two because they ran an IM on the same day as somone else's invitational. Additionally, this spring saw a flurry of 4 tournaments in five weeks while only Berkeley hosted a Fall tournament. Perhaps it would be wiser if we stretched the schedule out to keep the quizbowl "season" the same length of time, but with an even increment of time between several tournaments. Maybe we could schedule one or two a month rather than occupy most or all of February. Berkeley is likely to host a fall tournament near the first weekend of November but no date has yet been set. ACF Regionals are likely to be very close to the Ides of March. BYU and Stanford have both expressed interest in hosting a tournament in or near February. Perhaps one of these schools could shift to late January in order to even out the schedule slightly. Fresno has expressed some interest in a December event. If other schools are interested in hosting a tournement, additional tournaments on the circuit would be very welcome. Back east, many schools play every other weekend from October to April. It would be nice to see the West Coast circuit increase to every third or fourth week. FRESNO MOVES TOURNAMENT The Fresno tournament has been postponed until Fall 1995. Fresno regrets having to change plans, but do to a reservation error, this became necessary. A date has not yet been set down, but Peter Allen has suggested that a weekend in early December looks likely. EXTRA QUESTIONS AVAILABLE After running ACF Regionals, I have found that I have a few extra copies of rounds used here at CAL and could easily xerox more. If anyone would like a free set of the ACF questions, please e-mail me. It may be easier and far less expensive to just e-mail them to you, but if this can not be done, I will send them in US mail to anyone who wants them if you will cover the postage and xeroxing (I think it is $4.00 togethor). I encourage those who have not played ACF before to take a look at these questions. They were good and challenging at times, but NOT stumpers. I think this year's ACF Regionals refutes once and for all the charge that ACF is too hard. >From gaius@uclink2.berkeley.edu Thu Apr 10 02:42:26 1997 Date: Tue, 2 May 1995 14:46:52 -0700 (PDT) From: H Gaius C Stern To: quiz-bowl@csua.berkeley.edu Subject: Newsletter 1.7 long (fwd) Hello everyone, this is the penultimate newsletter fo the year sne tto a huge throng of other schools from Texas to here and a isolated few back East. Gaius