The Deep Bench Tournament Format

The "Deep Bench" tournament format was something dreamed up by Carleton coach Eric Hillemann and modified in collaboration with Minnesota coach Dave Dorman. The first Deep Bench tournament was hosted jointly by Minnesota and Carleton in the fall of 1995, and there have been annual tournaments in the upper Midwest ever since either at Minnesota or the University of Chicago.

Here, in a nutshell, is how it works...

Each year nine schools are invited to enter the tournament. (The first year we did this we invited eight, but now we prefer nine.) Each team should consist of eight players. (Some Deep Benches have limited the number of grad students allowed to two.) Each team assigns their eight players to roles as follows: 1st and 2nd singles players, 1st, 2nd and 3rd doubles teams, and 1st and 2nd foursomes, or "quads." Every player goes onto a quad, and also plays either singles or doubles, but not both. For each of the seven classifications an eight match round-robin is held; i.e., all the 1st singles players play one another; all the 2nd singles players play one another, and so forth. (Thus every individual player participates, in a nine-school field, in 16 matches.) Each victory within any classification earns the team points as follows: 5 pts. per victory by #1 singles, #1 doubles, or #1 quads; 4 pts. per victory by #2 singles, #2 doubles, or #2 quads, and 3 pts. per victory by #3 doubles. Whichever team accumulates the most total points in this fashion is declared the tournament champion.

At the Deep Bench we have usually played quads matches as traditionally styled untimed matches of 24 tossups apiece, plus associated bonuses. Singles and doubles matches consist only of 24 tossups--no bonuses. Tiebreakers have been sudden-death - single question or next score change.

Teams may, if they wish, use more than eight players by having persons on quads teams who did not play singles or doubles.

Logistics

The typical Deep Bench tournament has required each team of eight players to submit a total of 80 original tossups and 25 original bonus questions in advance of the tournament. These questions are divided into two sets of 25 tossups, well-balanced according to standard (host-specified) quizbowl subject distributions, and one full packet of 30 tossups and 25 bonuses, also well-balanced. The usual entrance fee has been $100 per eight person team; $140 if an acceptable batch of questions has not been submitted by our deadline.

Our schedule for nine teams calls for 27 total rounds of competition. Rounds 1-18 are the singles and doubles, played simultaneously in ten rooms (four singles, and six doubles), and scheduled only 15 minutes apart. (Our experience is that this works fine with matches of only 24 tossups, no bonuses.) Rounds 19-27, the traditional quads matches, require only eight rooms, and are scheduled 30 minutes apart. Obviously, the teams whose questions are being read in a given round have byes. This schedule allows us to complete a two-day tournament in an acceptable time frame: rounds 1-12 on Friday night from 6:30 to about 9:30 pm, and rounds 13-27 on Saturday from 9 am until about 4pm, with an hour break for lunch. (We go into so much specificity here because it is an unusual format, and others wanting to stage a Deep Bench-style tournament elsewhere may be curious about our scheduling.)

This page last updated 18 October 2002