ACF Winter is a medium-difficulty tournament (halfway between ACF Fall and ACF Regionals). It is meant for players with a variety of experiences: from players in their first semester of college quizbowl, to players who have been to ACF Nationals. ACF Winter was revived in 2020; the original iterations of ACF Winter were held in 2009 and 2010.

2024 ACF Winter

2024 ACF Winter

2024 ACF Winter will be held on November 16, 2024.

Editors

2024 ACF Winter is head-edited by Christopher Sims.

The subject breakdown by editor is:

Editor	Subjects
Anuttam Ramji	American Literature, Philosophy
Rachel Ezrielev	British Literature
Richard Niu	European Literature, Chemistry
Raymond Chen	World Literature, Biology
Vikshar Athreya	American History, Religion
Jonathan Tran	European History
Sky Li	World History, Other History, Mythology, Computer Science
Ben Chapman	Physics, Other Science (except Computer Science)
Eric Gunter	Auditory Fine Arts, Other Fine Arts (Auditory)
Henry Atkins	Visual Fine Arts, Other Fine Arts (Visual), Other Academic, Popular Culture
Joseph Chambers	Social Science
Chris Sims	Geography, Current Events

Hosting

If you are interested in hosting a mirror of ACF Winter, fill out this form before 11:59 p.m. PT on Saturday, September 14, 2024. Mirrors of this tournament may be held in-person or online. If you have any questions about hosting, please email ACF’s Site Coordinator at hosting@acf-quizbowl.com. Hosts must abide by ACF’s Hosting Guidelines.

Registration:

Teams will be able to register using a central ACF registration form once host sites have been chosen. This form will go live on September 25, 2024. Registration will close on November 6, 2024.

Distribution

ACF Winter uses the standard ACF distribution, which is the same distribution as ACF Regionals.

Fees

Team entry fee or discount
Base fee per team	$150
New to quizbowl discount	−$100
Shorthanded discount (1–2 players)	−$75
Travel discount	−$10 per 200 miles traveled one-way
Buzzers	−$10 per functional buzzer system
Staffers	−$15 per staffer with functional laptop. Staffers must register with ACF in advance.
Packet submission discounts/opt-out fee	As noted below

The new-to-quizbowl discount is for schools that have not sent a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (exclusively Novice tournaments do not count) since September 2022, and have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school.

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, cash, or PayPal.

See below for packet submission discounts.

The minimum fee is $0 per team.

Packet submission

Note: Please read this section carefully as packet submission guidelines have changed for 2024 ACF Winter. Any team with at least two people on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or high school student) prior to September 1st, 2023, is required to either (a) submit a half-packet, or (b) pay an opt-out fee. ACF is introducing an opt-out fee this year to reduce the number of late submissions received. High school teams attending a high school-only mirror are exempt from this requirement.

Please email winter@acf-quizbowl.com if you are unsure whether your team is required to submit a half-packet. A team that is not required to submit a packet may submit an optional half-packet by September 29, 2024 for a $50 discount.

*For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT SCT (Division I or Division II), NAQT ICT, and typical college-level academic invitationals count as regular collegiate academic tournaments. Pop culture or “hybrid” tournaments, HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT’s Collegiate Novice series sets do not.

Here is the submission schedule:

Submission deadline	Packet discount
August 25, 2024	-$50
September 1, 2024	-$40
September 8, 2024	-$30
September 15, 2024	-$20
September 22, 2024	-$10
September 29, 2024	-$0
October 7, 2024	+$10
October 14, 2024	+$20
October 21, 2024	+$30

The opt-out fee is $50. If a team does not submit a half-packet by October 21, 2024 and is required to submit per the criteria above, they must instead pay the opt-out fee; submissions will not be accepted following this date.

Packet distribution and authorship

If your team is going to submit a half-packet, whether required or not, email winter@acf-quizbowl.com to request a distribution. All finished packets must be sent to that email before 11:59 Pacific time on the day lis ted to meet the deadline. Please format the half-packet in .doc or .docx before sending it. The email subject line should list the name of the school, the team number (if applicable), and the words “half-packet.”

Your assigned half-packet may 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 20th-century American poetry, or an Economics bonus instead of “Social Science/Philosophy.”

If a team wishes to outsource part of its packet to a player not expected to play on that team (e.g., a student who has graduated), it must first receive approval from the head editors. Non-playing students are welcome and encouraged to help their newer club members write, but it’s useful to know the contributors for both credit and logistical reasons.

If multiple teams from one school are submitting packets, they should NOT be aware of each others’ questions. Any roster changes that entail an author for one packet playing for another (e.g., if a player on Team B moves to Team A) should be flagged to the TD and to winter@acf-quizbowl.com.

Tips and guidelines

Please make sure your questions are harder than questions in ACF Fall and easier than at ACF Regionals. 2019 EFT and 2020 ACF Winter are good difficulty targets. A majority of your tossup answers should conceivably be a tossup answer at ACF Fall.
Questions should be written in 10-pt Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Although you may submit longer questions, tossups will be capped at seven lines for the tournament. Each bonus part should be a maximum of three lines in length, with the majority being one or two lines long.
Tossup answerlines should generally emphasize playability over creativity; aim for creative and interesting clues with straightforward answerlines. Especially if you are submitting for one of the later deadlines, the frequency of topic clashes means that broad common-link questions are unlikely to be used.
When writing bonuses, aim for the easy parts to have 90% conversion, medium parts to have 50% conversion, and hard parts to have 10% conversion.

More information can be found in ACF’s packet submission guidelines.

Eligibility

For information on who is eligible to play ACF tournaments, see ACF’s official Eligibility Rules.

Mirrors

Mirrors will by default be regional. ACF reserves the right to move teams and staffers between sites. ACF intends to mirror 2024 ACF Winter in the following regions:

Region	Site
Northeast	Brandeis
Upper Mid-Atlantic	Lehigh
Upstate NY	University of Rochester
Lower Mid-Atlantic	University of Virginia
Southeast	Clemson
Florida	UCF
Great Lakes	The Ohio State University
Midwest	Northwestern
North	University of Minnesota
South Central	UT Austin
Pacific Northwest/Mountain West:	University of British Columbia
Northern California	UC Berkeley
Eastern Canada	University of Toronto
United Kingdom	Oxford University
Overflow (online)	TBD

Past tournaments

Sample questions from previous iterations of ACF Winter are on the Collegiate Quizbowl Packet Archive.

Announcements and information about previous iterations of ACF Winter are archived below:

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