Re: ACF Fall thoughts

Stephen Webb <*sdwebb91984_at_sdwebb91984.yahoo.invalid*> · Mon, 04 Nov 2002 18:22:09 -0000

I concur completely. I think the GT team would have done better but 
for an eight hour ride up there (accursed 75 north construction), but 
the questions were very good.

I have but two complaints (and they are indeed VERY minor)

(1) You had a repeat of the Donatello question, pretty much. One was 
a bonus, the other a tossup, but both had Donatello as an answer.

(2) Answers like 1812 Overture and Battle of Waterloo left teams with 
deep knowledge sitting on them because in ACF those aren't answers 
that come up just because of their ease. Almost like Shakespeare 
being an answer, if I wrote a tossup for Shakespeare teams would sit 
on it until the end for fear that I found a playwright similar to 
Shakespeare to lure them into negging, when actually the answer is 
indeed Shakespeare.

All in all though the tournament was very well editted, I must hand 
it to Kelly he's got skills and cajones that most editors can only 
dream of some day experiencing for only a brief brief moment. 
Congratulations to Kentucky, I must say that was the biggest blowout 
I've ever beenhanded in going on five years of play overall, very 
impressive and a good learning experience. The playoff brackets used 
at Midsouth I believe are a good paradigm for how to conduct playoffs 
for small fields as it allows all the teams to be accurately ranked. 
The individual stats were kinda iffy sometimes (we had a Shane in the 
stats on our team, and there isn't a Shane on our team) but those are 
minor. The tournament ran very timely, there was ample space to eat 
and (thankfully to me) in the time I spent in Knoxville I didn't 
hear "Rockytop" once. Now that I'm done editorializing with my petty 
inexperience I'm going to shut up now and let the wizards make 
comments on my comments.

Stephen

--- In quizbowl_at_y..., thefool75 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote:
> 1.  Kudos to Kelly.  Extraordinary editing job--if people can't see 
> the difference between the quality of the questions and those of a 
> normal invitational--I don't know what to say.  
> 
> 2.  Kudos to Raj and his crew for a well-run, efficient, fun 
> tournament at Florida.
> 
> 3.  As good as these questions were, it did illustrate why 
extremely 
> easy (in the sense of the answers) tossups can be a bad thing--if 
> most tournaments were at that level of accessibility.  It does lead 
> to an awful lot of biography (albeit extremely well-written 
> biography) and a lot less in the way of non-Western questions (all 
> your Asian history has to be dynasties or shogunates).  I'm not 
> saying that tournaments like this don't have a place, they do--I 
> think the ACF Fall tourney was a wonderful innovation--but 
increased 
> difficulty in some tournaments is necessary for canon diversity.
> 
> 4.  Another sign of the sheer quality of Kelly's editing--there 
were 
> at most a couple tossups with a stock QB leadin (the only one I can 
> remember off-hand--"Ann Singleton" for Ruth Benedict).  Not only is 
> this an extremely low number but it also rewards a QB neophyte with 
a 
> fair amount of knowledge...they are not disadvantaged for a failure 
> to know QB-standard clues and prevents this from becoming purely a 
> memory game.  I wish more question writers and editors would be 
> cognizant of this.
> 
> my 3 cents,
> nathan freeburg