ACF is pleased to announce that the second annual ACF Winter Tournament will be held on the 16th of January, 2010. (Link to the original announcement.)

Editors

Andrew Hart (University of Minnesota) will be the head editor for this tournament. He will be assisted by Rob Carson (University of Minnesota), Trevor Davis (Carnegie Mellon University), Dennis Jang (Brown University), and Eric Mukherjee (University of Pennsylvania).

Hosting

As of 3 Nov., 2009, the following schools have had their bids to host ACF Winter accepted:

West: Stanford University. Contact Brian Lindquist at blindqui@stanford.edu
North Midwest: University of Minnesota. Contact Gautam Kandlikar at gkandlikar@gmail.com
Midwest: University of Michigan. Contact Michael Hausinger at hausingerm@gmail.com
Eastern Canada: University of Waterloo. Contact Aaron dos Remedios at adosreme@math.uwaterloo.ca
South Plains: Houston area, hosted by Texas Quiz Bowl Alliance. Contact Eric Kwartler at ekwartler@gmail.com

The Editrs are still soliciting bids from the following regions:

Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho)
Lower Midwest (Missouri, southern Illinois)
New England (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut)
Mid-Atlantic (Virginia, Maryland, DC, North Carolina)
Florida
Southeast (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina)
Upper Southeast (Tennessee, Kentucky)
British Columbia

Packet Submission

As per the new ACF submission rules, any team with at least one person on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament prior to September 1, 2008 is required to submit a packet in order to participate in an ACF tournament in 2008-2009. This includes ACF Winter. Teams required to submit packets who do not by the final deadline (or a negotiated extension of the final deadline) will be dropped from the tournament. There will be no exceptions.

This year's submission schedule is as follows:

Packet submitted prior to or on:
November 22, 2009: -$50
December 6, 2009: -$25 (-$50 for teams not required to submit packets)
December 20, 2009: No penalty (-$25 for teams not required to submit packets; optional packets will not be accepted after this deadline)
December 27, 2009: +$25
January 3, 2010: +$50
After January 3, 2010: The editors may grant one or more 24-hour extensions at an additional penalty of $10 per day.

The head-editor has also posted an excellent guide for writing difficulty appropriate questions for ACF Winter. Please consult the guide so that you may get a better sense of the target difficulty of this event.

For additional discounts, please refer to this document.

Packet penalties

Teams will incur penalties for the following offenses: Formatting issues, plagiarism, and writing specific types of forbidden questions. Please see this document for more info.

Read this before writing or submitting your packet

Please refer to the ACF Packet Submission and Fee Information document for a more detailed explanation of submission and fee-related information.