> The more I think about the recent discussion on this forum, the more > I realize it's just a bunch of crap. As I've stated before, > the idea > that questions are too hard and the idea of the "arms race" > in > question writing is false. The proliferation of novice tournaments > easily defies this, as does last year's turn towards accessible > questions in all formats and invitationals. I definitely agree with this paragraph. It's true that the ACF regionals last spring (Maryland held the ones that we attended...right before Philadelphia Experiment) was the hardest tournament anyone on Pitt's team had ever encountered. For all of us except of course Matt Weiner, the last six rounds were like one of those nightmares where you're trying to catch something that's twirling around you and all you can do is drag your dead limbs. Even the trash was questions like "name these exotic sausages, given ingredients" and a tossup on the Mothman that started out by mentioning appearances of a similar creature in Eastern European mythology, and after the last round the people running the tournament seemed to be confused and irritated by the specter of players returning to the auditorium asking who won. So, none of us have any interest in attending Maryland's "modified ACF" tournament next weekend...it'll be interesting to hear how the questions at that one are, because Maryland is to question difficulty as Enver Hoxha was to communism, and it's possible that that was a peak of difficulty from which we'll now be descending. Still, even though we're not attending this major tournament, we've got three tournaments in two months that we can bring our A team to and expect to have a good time -- Cornell three weekends ago, CWRU two weekends from now, and Swarthmore two weekends after that. Also we had five people with a total of four QB tournaments in their past go to Delaware last weekend and not be intimidated by anyone except the two two-person teams who laid the smack down despite knowing nothing at all about science or math. And on November 9th we'll be at our second TRASH tournament of the year, including one at which there were no old people. If all the tournaments were like ACF regionals or Michigan's and Maryland's invitationals, there'd be a problem with frustration in quiz bowl. But there's a lot of other tournaments.
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