The Berkeley Physics Tournament.

An introduction

The newest entry on the physics shelf.

The Berkeley Physics Tournament is an inaugural-2026 team-based physics tournament hosted by UC Berkeley's Society of Physics Students. Teams of up to four students compete in three timed rounds: a Team Lab round (60 minutes of real experimental work with supplied materials and a reference sheet), a Team Free-Response round (75 minutes of long-form, multi-part problems), and a GUTS round (75 minutes of problems submitted in batches, with the team's collective score tracked live). The official schedule allots roughly 90-minute blocks per round; confirm this year's working times against the official source.

Because the tournament is in its first cycle, the field is small. For a school team looking to compete in a tournament-style physics contest without competing against decades of HMMT / PUPC veterans, BPT is a particularly favourable entry point in 2026.

The three rounds

Lab, FRQ, GUTS.

Round	Format
Team Lab	One lab, 60 minutes. Teams receive a set of materials and a reference sheet and design a procedure to find a constant or material property; graded on procedure, data, discussion, and error analysis. Lab solutions not published. Worth 20% of the team score.
Team FRQ	Nine multi-part questions over 75 minutes, spanning topics beyond standard high-school physics so teams split the work. Rubric-graded with partial credit. Problems and solutions both published. Worth 40%.
GUTS	Eight sets of three problems over 75 minutes; each set submitted before the next is retrieved, and the final set is estimation-based. Worth 40%.