> i think "you don't understand the point of ACF" is rather strong > language here. while i agree with your statement in principle, i have > two quibbles. 1) italo svevo is still a ways from being tossup- > worthy, even at ACF nationals. more generally, some topics are just > too hard for tossups. dead tossups at untimed tournaments are a bad I chose Svevo for illustrative purposes... > thing. 2) it can be a little disconcerting as a player to have > extremely easy questions mixed in with an overall difficult set. > certainly at ACF this is less of a factor than in other formats, > since generally speaking you're waiting to hear a clue that you > actually know instead of going in on instinct most of the time, but > it's still true that if you train yourself to be disciplined because > the questions are hard, it can be really frustrating to suddenly have > a buzzer race in the middle of a question whose answer is shakespeare > or abraham lincoln or what have you. if the question is well-written there should not be a buzzer race in the middle...I remember an excellent Abraham Lincoln tossup from some regionals back proving that this can be done...IMHO anything that discourages guessing and rewards actual knowledge is a good thing (besides serving as neg-bait for me)... > i know someone will say something to the effect of "but just because > an answer is easy doesn't make the clues easy," but beyond a certain > point (and i think all of us who have played for a while have seen > this point reached and exceeded), harder clues about well-known > subjects tend to degenerate into pointless or uninteresting minutiae. > certainly you could write an interesting tossup on a lover's > complaint or henry VI part I, but if you wrote one whose answer was > actually just william shakespeare, you'd have to start with something > even more obscure than the well-known-but-trivial-in-the-bad-sense- of- > the-word clues about his gravestone inscription and second-best bed. I disagree with this...good writing and willingness to do some research (i.e. if you're willing to spend half an hour to write a good tossup) can allow for quality tossups on virtually anything...I'll post a Shakespeare tossup I wrote for Mad City last summer in here tomorrow---dissect it...I'm curious...
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