Zoom tournaments generally consist of one or more meetings. You’ll receive a link from the tournament director for the meeting. After joining the meeting, make sure you’ve set your name according to what the tournament director wants.
Before each round beings, the tournament director will assign you to a breakout room to play your match against one other team.
Sometimes you will be automatically assigned to a breakout room. In other cases, you should see a notification saying that a breakout room is available. When this happens, you’ll need to manually join the breakout room by looking in the bottom menu of your Zoom window. It may be hidden in the “…” section.
After joining a room, confirm that you can hear the moderator and that they can hear you. In general, you’ll want to have your camera on and your microphone muted. You can unmute when giving answers.
Most Zoom tournaments will use the meeting chat to handle buzzes. Make sure you have the chat window open. You can find this in the same bottom menu on the Zoom screen. On Windows, pressing Alt + H will also load the chat.
Important: Make sure that you are typing your chat messages to Everyone. If you don’t change any options, this will be the default.
Once the game begins, you’ll type “buzz” (and ideally also yell “buzz”) to buzz in on tossups. You must wait until the moderator recognizes you after typing buzz to give an answer. The buzz order you see on your screen is not necessarily the official order from the moderator’s screen.
You’ll say your tossup answers via voice and also use voice to collaborate with teammates on bonuses. For bonuses, you’ll want to say “our answer is” to confirm that you’ve directed an answer to the moderator. See the online rules section for more info.
Some tournaments may use a separate buzz-in system rather than the meeting chat to track buzzes. Consult with your tournament director for details.