Cam

In the fall of 2001, Scripps College in California ran an ACF Fall tournament, which at that time was still in its infancy, having been conceived as an introduction to ACF by Raj Bhan. Following this tournament, several irregularities were brought to light by an anonymous poster named "qbcardinalsin" on the Yahoo! board. The poster brought up the fact that a particular player had done extraordinarily well at tournaments which were hosted by his own institution, but significantly less well at tournaments hosted by other schools. Moreover, the increased performance was not complemented by a corresponding increase in bonus conversion. The anonymous poster's name at first led people to believe that the culprit might have been Stanford, but Raj Bhan, at that time a Stanford grad student, quickly put that rumor to rest.

Eventually, the perpetrator, Cam from Harvey Mudd, posted a lengthy defense of himself. Cam claimed that ACF's "list questions" catered to his style of playing, which involved memorizing lists, despite the fact that a) his team's bonus conversion was roughly constant between those tournaments, and b) all the other tournaments were modified ACF style anyway. It was also reported that Cam did the vast majority of his scoring on tossups that were printed on the first page of the packet, as if he had quickly glanced over the rounds.

Following this fiasco, Harvey Mudd and Scripps essentially disappeared from the collegiate quizbowl scene.

Source posts from the Yahoo! messageboard:

• qbcardinalsin's original post
• Apologia pro vita Cam, part I
• and part II
• defense of Cam
• defense of Cam II