ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ

ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ’s website in general, and this online tournament guide in particular, specify a lot of “requirements” and “recommendations.” This page exists to clarify exactly what is meant by those terms.

Absolute Requirements

If you are using ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ questions, you will sign a Host Agreement covering a number of fundamental responsibilities. The requirements in that Agreement apply to both online and in-person tournaments. In particular, matches must not be recorded.

If you are using ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ questions, you and your moderators must take appropriate steps to maintain question security before, during, and after the tournament. The best way to ensure this is to have moderators access the questions through our website (as distinct from reading from printed copies, PDF documents, or encrypted Locklizard files).

You may seek exceptions to these requirements by writing to [email protected] well in advance, but exceptions are unlikely to be granted.

There may be other requirements you can’t avoid imposed by your school, your activities association, your sponsor, and/or other entities.

Requirements to be a Qualifier for National Championships

If you are using ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ questions and want your tournament to be a qualifier for the Middle School National Championship Tournament (MSNCT), Small School National Championship Tournament (SSNCT), and/or High School National Championship Tournament, then your tournament must meet the requirements for in-person qualifiers (including submitting results), and it must also require video streams of all players during gameplay.

Requirements from This Guide

This guide is written to allow a tournament director to say, “We are running a tournament in accordance with ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ’s online tournament guide.” Therefore, it states many requirements (i.e., participants may not use the Zoom web client) that participants must follow.

As a tournament director, you may override any parts of this guide other than the “Absolute Requirements” listed above. If you reference this guide in your tournament announcement or pre-tournament communication, you should be extremely clear about any ways in which your tournament differs from this guide’s recommendations.

To be clear, you can use ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ questions with other videoconferencing platforms besides Zoom, other buzzer-simulating tools besides BuzzIn.live, other scorekeeping paradigms besides our Google Sheets template, and any other rules you want. This guide is our attempt to clearly describe a way of running online tournaments that has been tested and shown to produce good results.

Recommendations from This Guide

This guide labels a number of policies as strongly recommended. In such cases, ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ has made a conscious decision to use elevated language because we believe those policies are likely to have a significant effect on the quality of the tournament.