Well, I played on the WC mirror of Penn Bowl at Stanford, so mileage may vary. While I thought that there were some problems with the distribution, I thought that the worse problem was with repeats. I realize that it is difficult to keep track of a large number of packets during the editing process, but the number of repeats really was more than usual (Gog and Magog, Georgia, St. Kitts). The question quality was also hit and miss. There were some problems with evenness of bonuses. We went from questions where Stern-Gerlach was the only gettable part of a bonus to touch-your-butt HS physics questions (and this was a team where everyone had taken or was taking quantum). And there were titles without the original untranslated version ("In der Strafkolonie" for example). There were also a good deal of hoses; the Danzig Trilogy question encouraged people to buzz in after recognizing the events (or characters) from a single book without making in clear a collection was wanted. I felt there was a similar confusion on the Glass Menagerie / Wingfield tossup. I don't have the questions in front of me, so perhaps there was some clue that they weren't looking for the titles of individual works, but questions that deviate from standard forms should make it clear what is wanted. Frankly, I think that Cardinal Classic suffered from using the Penn Bowl questions. Last year, the questions were superb and well balanced. The requirements were also unclear, and our questions about the requirements went unanswered; we ended up writing a packet that went unused. This is a poor introduction to quiz bowl for the players new to the game (2/3 of the people who went from Tech). They expended effort without reaping the reward of hearing their packet read. I also think that the trend of hosts not providing food in the morning is a bad trend. The past two tournaments we went to had no breakfast; if we are paying over two hundred dollars for a tournament and have to stand around while we wait for the rooms to get ready, I think that bagels, donuts, and juice is not too much to expect. We were also stuck in the same room all day; over half of our games were with the same moderator. While Joe is a fine moderator, I think it is unfair to have teams seeing the same person all day. Especially when there were eight rooms in play ... That said, I did enjoy the tournament; the other teams were very gracious (even if that perhaps was not the sentiment expressed by the folks back in the East), and there were some really great games. An overall positive experience, and any complaints I have are prompted more by the unmitigated quality of past Cardinal Classics than problems with this incarnation. I'm sure that sectionals in another two weeks will be a fun experience and correct many of the problems we had this time around. Thanks, Jordan jbg -at- caltech.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:47 AM EST EST