AGazine, May 2013

AGLOA Tournament Manager Wins Public Service Award

Larry Liss was planning to attend the 50th anniversary of his graduation from the University of Chicago. But his friends and family engineered a surprise for him. He will also receive the university’s Public Service Award.

Here is the write-up on Larry in the university’s news release announcing all the winners at the 72nd Annual Alumni Awards Ceremony June 8.

R. Lawrence (Larry) Liss, AB’63, MAT’65, Public Service Award
Liss’ work with students has spanned more than four decades and impacted more than 100,000 students, grades 4-12. He helped translate his own experience as a student-athlete into the Academic Games Leagues of America (AGLOA), helping students become “thinking kids” by improving their academic and problem-solving skills, their logical thinking, and their lives. Now retired, Liss serves as the Director of the Palm Beach Academic Games League and on the AGLOA Board of directors.

2013 Outstanding Senior – Megan Mitchell (Forsyth County, GA)

From the nomination by Adrian Prather and Diana Wieberg:

Megan was a little bitty fifth grader when she began Academic Games. But little is sometimes mighty! On one of her first trips, she taught all her roommates to play poker! Amazingly, she was very good at it. Throughout her career in the Forsyth League of Academic Games (FLAG), she has always been an inspiration to her teammates, encouraging, organizing, and teaching them.

When she was in 9th grade, FLAG needed a player to skip Junior competition to complete the Senior team. Megan said, “Sure,” showing her tremendous courage to step outside the box and take a chance.

This year when the high school coach decided to expand his family, Megan attended all the practices for the Middle team, taught the math games, passed out study materials, coached, and judged all our tournaments. She helped collect all the data to determine our teams and assisted our other student coach with the high school practices and tournaments at the local yogurt shop.

Without Megan’s dedication and determination, our Middle/Junior/Senior teams would not be at Nationals. Megan definitely knows when to hold ‘em and knows when to fold. With Academic Games, she has never folded.

Down Memory Lane

Some coaches in the Michigan League of Academic Games have for decades had fun on the trip to Nationals by circulating a fictitious list of variations and special rules that will be played at the tournament.

Here are some of the “modifications” that fooled players before the 2010 Nationals.

Presidents

• Any player correctly guessing the president after the range is given, but before the first clue is read, will receive eight points instead of six.
• In the third round, only questions about Presidents #45-50 will be asked.
• Any team that uses any numbers in their team name will be given a ten point penalty at the beginning of each round.
• Any student who has trouble losing his glasses will be given an extra-large gazeteer for the first three rounds.
• Any player who has a sibling playing on another team or has the same last name as someone else at the tournament will have their score cut in half in round seven. If they score less than five points in that round before the penalty, he or she will be given a 10-point penalty instead of having their score cut in half.

Propaganda

• In Section A, the questions will be sung by a lounge singer from a local hotel.
• In Section F, a carbon-based resource may be used as a reference.
• Any student whose coach is a former player will be awarded 50 bonus points at the beginning of every round of Propaganda for being so patient every time the coach told a story about when he played. Furthermore, said coach will be banned from judging in the current events lightning round of World Events.
• No six letter collective nouns that start with the letter “M” will be used in any example during the four rounds.