ACF Fall is the premier easy tournament in college quizbowl. Designed as an introduction to college quizbowl for novices and players with limited high school quizbowl experience, over 200 teams compete on ACF Fall each year, making it the most widely-played set in the college calendar.

2020 ACF Fall

2020 ACF Fall

2020 ACF Fall was held on October 17, 2020.

Editors

2020 ACF Fall is head-edited by Ben Miller and edited by Drew Benner, Justin Duffy, Alex Hardwick, Arjun Nageswaran, Karthik Prasad, and Catherine Qian. Matthew Lehmann and other ACF members are offering oversight.

Online format

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ACF Fall will be held entirely online this year. ACF will coordinate with hosts to hold mirrors using Discord, and will work to create the most authentic and engaging quizbowl experience possible under these circumstances.

Registration

To register for 2020 ACF Fall, fill out the central 2020 ACF Fall registration form with all relevant information.

Field

The field for each site can be found here.

Fees

Base fee per team: $120
New to quizbowl discount: −$80
Shorthanded discount (1–2 players): −$60
Staffers: −$25 per staffer with functional laptop. Staffers must register with ACF in advance.

To reflect the new online format of Fall, ACF has lowered the price of the tournament. We hope this maximizes the accessibility of the event considering the diminished fundraising environment that many teams face.

The “new to quizbowl” discount is for schools that have not sent a team to any mainstream collegiate academic tournament (not counting exclusively novice tournaments) since September 2019, and which have no players who competed in non-novice collegiate tournaments during that same period.

Host sites will bill teams as soon as possible after the teams register. Teams should pay their host sites by whatever method is convenient for the hosts, who will in turn pay ACF by check, bank transfer, cash, or PayPal.

Packet submission

Unlike past iterations of the set, no teams are required to submit questions in order to play the tournament. However, ACF still needs high-quality, half-packet submissions from teams to complete the set.

Below is the submission schedule for ACF Fall. All deadlines are at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. The maximum packet discounts have increased since last year; furthermore, all submitting teams are eligible for an additional −$20 quality discount if their questions are particularly polished and usable, up to a maximum discount of −$60. Teams may submit a maximum of one half-packet.

August 23, 2020: −$50
August 30, 2020: −$40
September 6, 2020: −$30
September 13, 2020: −$20
September 20, 2020: −$10

If you would like to submit a half-packet, fill out this form. ACF will respond with a half-packet template specifying which categories you are assigned to write.

Each submission consists of 12 tossups and 12 bonuses. Before writing, please review ACF’s packet submission guidelines and stick to the format provided. Answers should generally emphasize playability over creativity – aim for creative and interesting clues with straightforward answerlines. These 5 model tossups reflect the difficulty and style to aim for. When finished, submit your half-packet by emailing it to fall@acf-quizbowl.com.

In another change from last year, your assigned half-packet will ask for questions from more specific categories within the distribution. For instance, instead of being assigned an “American Literature” tossup, you might be asked to write a question on a 20th-century American poem, or an Economics bonus instead of “Social Science/Philosophy.” This should reduce redundancy in submissions and maximize the number of submitted questions we can use, without being too constraining. The submission form offers space to indicate your writing interests in each category, which we will do our best to accommodate.

Hosts

Mirrors will by default be regional. One benefit of online tournaments, however, is that smaller sites can be condensed without creating transportation barriers. ACF reserves the right to move teams and staffers between sites. ACF intends to mirror 2020 ACF Fall in the following regions:

Region	Site
Northeast	Harvard
Upper Mid-Atlantic	NYU
Lower Mid-Atlantic	UNC
Northeast/Mid-Atlantic overflow	Stony Brook
Southeast	USC
Great Lakes	Chicago
Midwest	Illinois
North	Carleton
South Central	Rice
Mountain West and Northwest	Colorado
California	Berkeley
Eastern Canada	McGill
United Kingdom	UKQB
High-school-only	Ridgewood HS

High school teams and high-school-only mirrors

ACF is willing to provide the ACF Fall set for high-school-only tournaments. If you are interested in hosting a high-school-only mirror of 2020 ACF Fall, email hosting@acf-quizbowl.com. However, we do not plan to offer mixed mirrors that include high school and college teams.

If you have any questions, email fall@acf-quizbowl.com.