Andy Watkins

Andy Watkins
Noted subjects	Science
Current college	NYU (inactive)
Past colleges	Harvard (2008-2011)
High school	Shady Side (2003-2007)
Stats	HDWhite • NAQT

Cheats at quizbowl.

"Crazy" Andy Watkins played quizbowl for Harvard. He is known as a prolific question writer and poster on hsquizbowl.org, and for writing really hard science questions. He was the leading scorer on the Harvard B/D2 team at both the NAQT ICT and ACF Nationals in his freshman year, and lead his team to a victories at the 2010 ICT and the 2011 ICT. He was a member of PACE and chief editor of the 2011 NSC, after which he resigned.

Andy is married to Hannah Kirsch.

High School Career

Andy was on a Shady Side team that impressed many for its ambition when it attended the 2006 ECSO; this was before the time when elite high school players became regular attendees at college-level events.

Editing Career

Andy was a member of the editorial staff for the following tournaments:

• Harvard Fall Tournament (several incarnations)
• Harvard T-Party 2008 and 2010
• Harvard International 1 and 2
• VETO
• FIST
• PACE NSC 2010 (science) and 2011 (chief editor)

In addition, Andy helped finish the chemistry for Lederberg based on answers already selected (thus saving the tournament) and 2011 ACF Regionals.

Controversial philosophy

Andy has been accused of platonic idealism for reasons unclear.

Andy's philosophy on studying for quizbowl is that you need to study really obscure things to beat good players to good questions. Therefore, much of his knowledge base is actually stuff that rarely comes up. This has also led to Andy's reputation as among the worst judges of difficulty appropriateness among active writers of good questions.

(The above is better put forth as "you need to spend a lot of time learning early clues, even at the expense of spending as much time learning late clues," which sounds a lot less silly and better resembles his original exposition of this principle.)

(Andy does, however, believe that having written too-hard high school questions, reasonable regular difficulty questions, and too-hard nationals-level questions has given him better canon sense and despite his bizarre and mostly ineffective studying strategies, he'll be able to write good questions for future tournaments: see for example his difficulty-appropriate material for HAVOC.)

Notable Tournaments

• 2011 ICT - Cheated to get 1st place (with Dallas Simons, Stephen Liu, and Ted Gioia)
• 2011 ACF Nationals - 8th place (with Dallas Simons, Ted Gioia, and Stephen Liu)
• 2010 ICT - Cheated to get 1st place (with Dallas Simons, Bruce Arthur, and Dennis Sun)
• 2010 ACF Nationals - Top bracket (with Dallas Simons)
• 2010 Penn Bowl - 1st place (with Dallas Simons, Ted Gioia, and Bruce Arthur)
• 2009 ACF Regionals - 1st place (with Dallas Simons, Ted Gioia, and Bruce Arthur)
• 2008 ACF Fall - 2nd place (with Dallas Simons and Dennis Sun)
• EFT4 - 2nd place (with Bruce Arthur)
• EFT3 - 1st place (with Bruce Arthur and Julia Schlozman)