Using SQBS

To facilitate loading results into our database, we strongly encourage tournament directors and statisticians who use Chris Sewell’s SQBS software to follow these suggestions.

Throughout these guidelines, we refer to “schools,” but the same guidelines generally apply for tournaments in which teams are not based on school affiliation.

General

• Use the most recent version of SQBS. If you have an older one, upgrade.
• Enable all the warnings that SQBS provides (that are applicable to your tournament), and fix any issues flagged by them.
• If your tournament has multiple divisions (such as a varsity and junior varsity division), such that teams in one division never play teams in the other division, use one SQBS file for each division.
• Use SQBS’s “Divisions” features for preliminary pools and playoff pools/brackets/tiers. We realize our website doesn’t yet support the display of pools, but including them in the file is a huge help to us when trying to understand results.
• Don’t use separate files for preliminary rounds and playoffs, or any other such purpose—put every game of the tournament in the same file, unless you have separate divisions as described above.
• Send us the SQBS data file, which is the single file (possibly with the extension .qzx, .dat, or .sqbs, or possibly with no extension at all, and probably with a blank-page-like icon) that you would open if you needed to make a correction. We’d much rather receive this file than the exported HTML reports.
• Spell and capitalize everything correctly. At least check for obvious mistakes like players named “Jhon SMith.”
• If you’re using NAQT’s registration system (which we strongly encourage!), use the feature to download a SQBS file that contains all the teams’ and players’ names already entered for you.

Teams

• Use NAQT’s “short names” for schools. These are the names that already appear on tournament result pages and represent our attempt to come up with convenient names that are unique within each school’s region. For instance, is “North” actually “Minneapolis North” or “North St. Paul”? We’ve decided that the former is “Minneapolis North” and the latter is “North St. Paul.” We don’t expect hosts to spend a lot of time crawling around our site looking for our exact terminology, but if you have a lot of the same teams as last year, please consider looking at NAQT’s results pages from previous tournaments and duplicating the identifiers that we’ve used.
• Even if you don’t pay attention to our exact team names, be careful about teams with similar names, especially from the same area. For instance, there are “St. Mark” and “St. Mark’s School of Texas” within 10 miles of each other (in Dallas and Plano, Texas), both active in quiz bowl.
• If a school/organization has multiple teams, label them with capital letters starting with ‘A’, where team A is notionally the best team, etc. This applies across divisions too: if Central has a team in the varsity division and a team in the junior varsity division of the same tournament, label them “Central A” and “Central B,” respectively.

Players

• Use players’ full, real names.
• If you include players’ grades, use this format: John Smith (12). That is, put the numeric grade in parentheses after the name and a space.

Games

• Enter every game, including preliminary games, tiebreakers, playoffs, finals games, and anything else.
• Enter the round number for each game.
• Enter the number of tossups heard for each game.
• Enter players’ games played (GP) in terms of the fraction of the game’s tossups for which a player was “in the game.” If a game consisted of 23 tossups, and the first half consisted of 11 tossups while the second half consisted of 12 tossups, then a player who played only the first half would have about 0.478 GP (which—undocumentedly—you can enter by typing 11/23 into the “GP” box), and a player who played only the second half would have about 0.522 GP (12/23).
• Overtime tossups count toward tossups heard (for both the game as a whole and for each player).
• Check bonus points: SQBS doesn’t have a warning for this, but in standard NAQT format, the number of bonus points will always be divisible by 10, and SQBS displays the calculated bonus point total automatically, so you should check that it is divisible by 10. If it’s not, that indicates a scorekeeping or data entry error that you should track down and resolve.
• Use the overtime-related features correctly: If a game goes into overtime, tick the “Overtime” checkbox in the lower right of the game entry screen, and in the two boxes next to that checkbox, enter the number of tossups that each team (left and right, respectively) answered correctly in overtime (including powers). Those boxes are used to calculate points per bonus correctly given that overtime tossups do not lead to bonuses. (If your tournament used overtime rules that differ from standard NAQT rules in this way, use the boxes accordingly—the key point is that they should contain the number of tossups that each team answered correctly but that did not lead to a bonus.)
• Give games meaningful ID numbers (which get entered in the box next to the round number). We suggest 01-01 for the first game in round 1, 01-02 for the second game in round 1, etc. That way, if you want to go directly to round 6, you can just enter 06-01 in the box to the right of the “Go To” button, then click that button, instead of having to click the “Previous” or “Next” buttons repeatedly.

If you have any questions about how to submit a perfect SQBS file, or how to use SQBS, please contact us at results@naqt.com.