This guide will teach you how to reserve rooms for Berkeley tournaments. Reserving rooms at Berkeley tournaments is generally a pretty simple procedure. (You might even say too simple, since its simplicity often causes TDs to put it off until just before the tournament, occasionally with disastrous results.) In general, there are plenty of rooms on campus. There are two exceptions, times when you should never schedule a tournament:
To schedule a room, go to the Registrar room reservation page, read and understand it, and then fill out the online request form. Don't worry about the small details like the exact number of people attending; all you need is a reasonably accurate estimate. Print out the completed form and take it to the scheduling office in 123 Sproul (careful! they're closed from 12:00 pm-1:00 pm; see the page for full times), where you can request rooms.
What rooms should you request?
Typically we like to play in Barrows; there isn't much demand for rooms there, it's conveniently located, and it has a lot of seminar rooms.
Before going to the office in Sproul to reserve rooms, you should determine which rooms in Barrows you want. The best rooms are the "seminar-style" rooms (these are the ones with the long table in the center). These are much better for playing quizbowl, since the buzzers fall off of desks, but will stay put when they are placed on tables.
You can check out the details of all rooms in Barrows here; I also have a map of Barrows which may be useful. The seminar-style rooms are 102, 115, 129, 180, 186, 190, and 192. (Note: I'm not sure if you can actually reserve 129 -- I don't think we've ever used it for a tournament -- but it's listed on the web page.) 140 is a large room but it does have a central table, so it's also better for quizbowl than the average room with desks.
If you can't get all of the rooms you want, or need more rooms than the ones listed above, just pick some of the other nearby rooms (174, 175, 185, etc.). Be careful -- while it is convenient to have all of the rooms nearby, this can sometimes also be a drawback when teams noisily mill in the hallway while rounds are still going on.
Make sure to get one more room than the number of game rooms you need, to serve as a spare in case one of the rooms is locked or otherwise unusable, or teams want to scrimmage during their off rounds. In addition to the spare room, you should also get a large room for the opening and closing meetings. Depending on how many people you have, this can be an ordinary lecture room like 185, a larger lecture room like 118 or 170, or even the really big lecture halls like 110. Beware: the large rooms, unlike the small seminar rooms, tend to have higher demand, so you may not be able to get them if you reserve at the last minute. In this case you will probably get stuck with one of the rooms in the basement, which is not ideal.
As for time, you can reserve the rooms from 8am to 10pm. You might as well reserve them for the whole day, since you never know when you'll need the extra time (and it's not like anyone is likely to benefit if you end the reservation at 8pm rather than 10 anyway).
When you go into Sproul to reserve rooms, tell them which rooms you want (you can say "seminar-style rooms in Barrows", or if you have a list to hand them, that's even better). Note that the seminar-style rooms, since they only seat 14-16, often won't show up in the first search that they do (typically they'll look for larger rooms first), so you might have to ask them to lower the threshold in order to get the rooms you want to show up. Be patient; the process takes a little while.
Don't forget to bring the room reservation form you get to the tournament. Hopefully you won't need it, but occasionally you will run into snags and have to call someone.