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.

2023 ACF Fall

2023 ACF Fall

2023 ACF Fall will be held on October 14, 2023.

Editors

2023 ACF Fall is head-edited by Sean Farrell. The subject breakdown by editor is:

Editor	Subjects
Eric Chang	Visual Fine Arts, Other Fine Arts
Jeffrey Fung	Chemistry, European Literature
Shourjo Ganguli	American, British, and World Literature
Alexandra Hardwick	European History
Kevin Jiang	Other Science, Social Science, Current Events
Evan Knox	American History, Pop Culture
Lalit Maharjan	Other History
Richard Niu	Auditory Fine Arts
Quynh Phung	World History, Religion, Philosophy
Munir Siddiqui	Biology, Mythology, Geography

Rules

This tournament will follow ACF’s official gameplay rules. Rules specifically pertaining to online tournaments are in blue.

Registration

Fill out the central 2023 ACF Fall registration form with all relevant information here. The field for each site can be found here. Confirmed tournament sites are also listed below under Hosting.

If possible, teams should register for the site that is geographically closest to them and/or is in the region they would normally attend. After the field cap for their site is reached, teams will be placed on a waitlist or potentially assigned to another site. Please register by October 9th, 2023.

Fees

Team entry fee or discount
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.

The minimum fee is $0 per team.

The “new to quizbowl” discount is for schools that did not send a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (not counting exclusively novice tournaments) since September 2022, 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, cash, or PayPal.

See below for packet submission discounts.

Packet submission

As for the past few editions of ACF Fall, 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.

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, especially for Fall, but it’s useful to know the contributors for both credit and logistical reasons.

Below is the submission schedule for ACF Fall. All deadlines are at 11:59 p.m. PT. In addition to these, 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. Each team may submit a maximum of one half-packet.

Submission deadline	Packet discount
August 20, 2023	−$50
August 27, 2023	−$40
September 3, 2023	−$30
September 10, 2023	−$20
September 17, 2023	−$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 answer lines. These 5 model tossups from the 2020 edition of ACF Fall reflect the difficulty and style to aim for. When finished, submit your half-packet by emailing it to fall@acf-quizbowl.com.

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 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.

Distribution

ACF Fall uses the standard ACF distribution.

Eligibility

To make this tournament more accessible to new teams and players, ACF is enforcing eligibility guidelines for ACF Fall. Players are not eligible to compete at 2023 ACF Fall if, at any point, they met any of the following exclusion criteria:

Scored more than 60 PPG in the prelims of a college mirror of ACF Fall
Were the top scorer (highest overall PPG) on a team that finished in the top 15% of the field, rounded up, at ACF Fall
Scored more than 60 PP20TUH in the prelims of HSNCT or 60 PPG in the prelims of PACE NSC
Were the top scorer (highest overall PPG) on a team that finished in the top 30 at HSNCT or top 10 at PACE NSC
Finished in the top 12 in IPNCT
Scored more than 20 PPG in the prelims of ACF Nationals

The eligibility restrictions do not apply to high-school-only mirrors.

Players are responsible for determining their own eligibility. If you have questions, email eligibility@acf-quizbowl.com. Failure to abide by these eligibility guidelines may result in disqualification from ACF Fall and/or future ACF tournaments.

Hosting

If you are interested in hosting a mirror of ACF Fall, fill out this form by Friday, August 18th. If you have any questions about hosting, email ACF’s Site Coordinator at hosting@acf-quizbowl.com. Hosts must abide by ACF’s Hosting Guidelines.

Sites

Mirrors will by default be regional. ACF reserves the right to move teams and staffers between sites. ACF intends to mirror 2023 ACF Fall in the following regions:

Region	Site
Northeast	Yale
Upstate New York	Cornell
Upper Mid-Atlantic	Rutgers
Lower Mid-Atlantic	UNC Chapel Hill
Southeast	Georgia
Florida	Florida
Great Lakes	Ohio State
Midwest	UIUC
North	Minnesota
South Central	Oklahoma
Northwest	Washington
Northern California	Berkeley
Southern California	Claremont Colleges
Eastern Canada	Ottawa
United Kingdom	Cambridge
Overflow/Online	Iowa
High-school-only, online	Nationwide, California

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 2023 ACF Fall, email hosting@acf-quizbowl.com and CC fall@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.

Past tournaments

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

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

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