Andy Watkins
| Andy Watkins | |
| |
| Noted subjects | Science |
| Current college | Harvard (2008-) |
| Past colleges | None |
| High school | Shady Side (2003-2007) |
| Stats | HDWhite • NAQT |
"Crazy" Andy Watkins is a quizbowl player for Harvard. He is much beloved by quizbowl for writing seventy million questions over the past twelve months. He also has a reputation for posting, occasionally incomprehensibly, a lot 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 victory at the 2010 ICT.
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
In addition, Andy helped finish the chemistry for Lederberg based on answers already selected (thus saving the tournament).
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
- 2010 ICT - 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)