i liked the part where he/she said "italo spazo." that was funny. and it's a point well-taken: a lot of people, consciously or not, seem to use this forum to show off how much they know, and it can get kind of tiresome. sorry if i've been guilty of this recently--i try to avoid it except in direct response to somebody else's post.* on the other hand, i'm very tired of the argument that goes "there is no correct order of finish... blah blah we would just mail the trophies to the best on-paper teams." geez, nobody is trying to do this, okay? we're just working on a way to reward the teams that have *played the best at that tournament* in situations (e.g. harvard- vanderbilt) when the notion of "best" isn't clear because of a tie in the standings which can be resolved in several different ways. or sometimes, the notion of who played best actually is pretty clear, but still conflicts with what the tournament rankings are, and that gets people into a tizzy. to take another example, it seems indisputable that michigan A outplayed maryland at the ICT despite being ranked below them in the final standings (since they whomped everybody in the field except the #1 and #2 teams--who they had to play five times because they went undefeated against everybody else). a lot of people view that as a problem--not because michigan has a better reputation or more "ACF fundamentalists," but because they *played* better and were ranked lower anyway. also, i might point out that your urge to have people send tournament critiques in private... well, it's a nice idea (aside from jerry's point), but by and large people already do this. you just don't know about it because it's *private*. i'd say most--certainly not all, but enough--of the criticisms presented on this board actually lead to worthwhile discussions of what the best solutions to these problems are; and i'm sure that the many people who do send their opinions directly to the people who run tournaments also provide useful feedback that has an effect on how things get done in the future. finally: i won't try to argue that reading seven papers on a subject is more "legitimate" than seeing a reference to it on friends. but if you are going to write a tossup pyramidally, then the clues that are accessible to fewer people should come first, and i dare say that there are more regular friends viewers than people who have read seven papers on *anything* that comes up both in qb and friends. joon * - in response to erik: middleton doesn't come up at most tournaments because most players and teams don't know jack about elizabethan/jacobean theater beyond marlowe/shakespeare/jonson. at hard tournaments, you'll definitely hear that sort of thing come up; if that's your cup of tea, you should check out these hard tournaments. if you think it's "irrelevant bullshit," feel free to stay away from those.
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