ACF is pleased to announce that the inaugural ACF Winter tournament will take place on the weekend of January 17, 2009, taking the place of Michigan's MLK, which previously occupied this date. This is the official global announcement for the tournament with general details.

The head editor for this event will be Jerry Vinokurov; he will be assisted by Dennis Jang and Trygve Meade

The hosts for ACF Winter are as follows (contact in parentheses):

• Northeast: Yale (Mike Bilow)
• Southeast: University of Georgia (Chris Chiego)
• North: Carleton College (Eric Hilleman)
• Upper Midwest: University of Michigan (Andy Kravis)
• Lower Midwest: Missouri S&T (Matt Chadbourne)
• West: CalTech (Micah Manary)
• Mid-Atlantic: J.S. Reynolds Community College (Dan Goff)
• Northwest: University of Washington (Mike Bentley)

Packet Submission

All experienced teams are required to submit packets for ACF Winter. For details regarding who is required to submit a packet and what your packet should look like, please consult the official ACF Packet Submission Guidelines. There will be discounts and penalties for timely and untimely submissions; they are detailed in the guide and summarized below:

• Packet submitted by:
• Nov. 15: -$50
• Nov. 29: -$25 (-$50 for optional packets)
• Dec. 13: No penalty (-$25 for optional packets)
• Dec. 20: +$25
• Jan. 4: +$50

If you do not make special arrangements with the editors and do not submit a packet by Jan. 4, you will not be allowed to play. There will be no exceptions to this rule. Also, please take special note of the formatting rules for packet submission. Read this carefully: if your packet violates the formatting guidelines, it will be sent right back to you.

Difficulty

ACF Winter is intended as a regular-difficulty event. For comparison, please refer to Penn Bowl 2007 and 2008 as reasonable sets which you should seek to emulate. In case of doubt, err on the side of the easier rather than the harder question. While ACF Winter seeks to be generally more challenging than ACF Fall, it is not the place for that tossup on Independent People you've been dying to write. If you are unsure whether a particular answer choice is appropriate for this tournament, contact the editors and we'll let you know. In general, you should strive to adhere to the question writing practices outlined in the Guide linked to above as well as in this document.

Other Stuff

If you have any other questions about the tournament, please don't hesitate to get in touch with the editors and they will do their best to help you with whatever issues arise. This includes questions about question content, money, and so on. We look forward to producing another exciting set for you to play on.