As I said, I have a few criticisms, and I will try to keep them as constructive as possible: 1. Recycling of subject matter. The ACF Fall set had very few true repeats, but numerous instances of the same subject coming up more than once. In theory, this is not a bad thing, if it happens occasionally and something comes up twice. When something appears four times in the same tournament, however, then I feel there is a problem. For example, did we really need four separate questions devoted at least in part to Edgar Allan Poe? By the end, it seemed some bonus parts were devoted to Poe's 11th or 12th most famous works, which did not seem apprpriate for the ACF Fall tournament. I also think that Poe should not come up four times, when I could not remember either Hemingway or Faulkner coming up once. IMHO these two authors are at least as important to American lit as Poe, and should have been featured as question subjects at least once each. 2. Difficulty of bonuses. Overall, they produced a decent PPB average. Too many times, though, it seemed that bonuses consisted of three parts: easy, easy, and ass-rape. I would like to see the PPB variance among teams with winning records; I bet it wasn't much. IMHO, the three bonus parts should vary in difficulty from easy to medium to difficult, but I don't think these bonuses separated knowledge among the good teams very well. Two art bonuses immediately come to mind: there is no way that either Anton Mengs or the Nazarene painters should ever come up at an ACF Fall tournament... whereas the other parts of those bonuses were pretty gettable, even for freshmen. 3. Necessity for Kelly to include five of his own packets in the set of 14. I may be wrong, but didn't Kelly receive at least 20 packets? Having a tournament with five packets by one writer plays into that writer's biases; this is true of any solo writer/editor, and not just Kelly. If someone is familiar with Kelly's writing style and preference for subject matter, he/she is bound to do better. Also, I have to wonder why many schools had to go to the trouble of submitting packets, if only eight were used (if you count Seth Kendall's as a sixth). I think it would have been better if Kelly had combined submitted packets from two or even three schools in order to form one solid packet; as far as I could remember, only the Berkeley/Vernon Davenport packet featured such a conglomeration. Finally, with all those submitted packets, I would think that more than 14 could have been created. Case had to run a one-game final, despite the fact that Matt Weiner held a one-game lead and a two-game sweep over Michigan, because they had only one packet left. 4. Odd pyramid structure (at times) within toss-ups. Some form of pyramid structure was certainly evident in just about every question, and many toss-ups featured a perfectly fine pyramid. Some, however, seemed to be missing "middle" clues, creating a lot of speed checks. I think this was due in part to the recycling of subject matter, so vital third- and fourth-most gettable works had to be taken out. This, I believe, caused pyramids that went from obscure to easy quite quickly. I remember the Ben Jonson toss-up, which made no mention of "Every Man in His Humour" nor "The Isle of Dogs," IIRC. There was also at least one case where pyramid structure was completely thrown out the window -- on the Polk toss-up, "speaker of the House" and "Tennessee" were mentioned in the first ten words, naturally creating a buzzer race. (strangely, this was in our packet, but I definitely did not write that one). 5. General grammatical and factual errors. AFAIK, Michelangelo's _David_ was rendered in marble, not bronze. Donatello, however, sculpted a bronze _David_. One of my opponents said Donatello, and was called wrong. I know the year was correct for Michelangelo, but that error should have been caught. Much more amusing was the lead- in stating that Grant defeated two straight writers, Horatio Alger and Horace Greeley, in Presidential elections. Grant defeated Horatio Seymour in 1868, not the Ragged Dick-Man. Other items included calling Octavio Paz a South American writer, calling the Tariff of Abominations a 20th century tariff, and eliminating a part of a taxonomy bonus, leaving only 20 points possible. It may be nit- picking, but these errors had no place in the set. Finally, I heard at least two moderators say that the questions were edited poorly, so I may speculate that there were a number of typos -- at the very least, perhaps some more pronunciation guides could have been included, as the less experienced moderators stumbled frequently with difficult words. In closing, I may be holding Kelly and ACF in general to an impossibly high and unfair standard. I wasn't the only person at Case, though, that shared at least some of these viewpoints. I guess I expected an outstanding, solid-gold question set, and heard only a good one instead, which disappointed me. -Adam Fine
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