Underground packet trade
The underground packet trade (also known as the underground packet railroad) was a purported agreement between several prominent quizbowl players and/or clubs that allowed those players and clubs to freely obtain packets that had not been made freely available to the public. It is no longer in common use.
History
In the modern era, the packet set for almost every (non-NAQT) tournament is uploaded to the archive and available for free after it becomes cleared for discussion. However, this was not always the case - for many years, only a small subset of questions made it to one of the public archives like the Stanford Archive. The remainder of the sets were only available to teams which participated in the tournament they were produced for by attending or writing freelance packets, or had to be purchased.[1]
This information asymmetry allowed teams to develop a competitive advantage by gaining and access to a wider pool of questions - at one point Zeke Berdichevsky described how Michigan had an extensive private archive in the early 2000s that they hid from other clubs in order to gain an edge on other clubs by practicing on packets with "good clues". The "underground packet trade" was a semi-mythical system where participating teams would exchange packets from their internal archives (usually with the implicit understanding of future reciprocation) to one or more contacts, upon which the packets would quickly be distributed to all other members.
Modern usage
The system as described is effectively gone and thus the term is rarely used - however the notion of "teams in the loop trading packets on the down low" has persisted, especially for NAQT packets (which have always cost money to access).[2] This prompted a 2017 incident in which Ike Jose attempted to use their position as an NAQT writer and editor of 2017 Chicago Open to demand that Eric Mukherjee pay for a copy of the questions that Ike purported that Eric received illicitly.[3] This sparked a large amount of interpersonal drama, as well as a discussion about the value of purchasing old questions and the difficulties of using paper packets.
More mundane versions of the practice remain for the few sets which remain unavailable to the public like Proteinbowl.
References
- ↑ Re: The Barbarism of Monetization by Birdofredum Sawin » Tue May 02, 2017 3:13 pm
- ↑ Re: The Barbarism of Monetization by Aaron's Rod » Mon Apr 17, 2017 3:38 pm
- ↑ The Barbarism of Monetization by Sima Guang Hater » Sun Apr 16, 2017 11:22 am