Online Tournament Guide (Requirements)

NAQT’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 NAQT 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, games must not be recorded.

If you are using NAQT 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

For an online 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 in addition to the standard qualifier requirements for in-person tournaments, it must require all active players to be visible on camera at all times during gameplay, with at least one hand visible during all tossups and both hands visible during bonuses controlled by their team. Allowances may be made for minor and inconsequential non-compliance. The tournament must have reasonable enforcement mechanisms for this requirement.

Requirements from This Guide

This guide is written to allow a tournament director to say, “We are running a tournament in accordance with NAQT’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 NAQT 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, NAQT 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.