Re: Ken from Utah, the 18-time Jeopardy champion......

grapesmoker <*no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com*> · Thu, 01 Jul 2004 23:44:24 -0000

--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, thefool75 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote:
> I agree with most of what you said -- but the Hamlet example also 
> illustrates a basic problem: trust me, beginning with Kyd and the 
ur-
> Hamlet or even Saxo Grammaticus will not prevent it from being a 
> buzzer race.  In a room of 8 people, someone (if not several 
people) 
> is going to know that clue.

If in a room of 8 people, one of them knows it off that clue, that 
sounds just fine. If two people are going for it, that's not a buzzer 
race, either.

> Maybe in an all Div II match you can get 
> away with it but the problem with most questions at that level (and 
> I'm the guy who wrote a George Washington tossup for ACF Nats) 

In an all DII match, I think most people wouldn't know it off that 
clue, unless they happen to have just taken a class on Shakespeare or 
something. And that George Washington tossup was fine, so what's the 
problem?

> that given a couple good teams you just won't find stuff that's 
> obscure enough for lead-in clues (or what's obscure is so obscure 
> that no one will know it and we'll just continuously have buzzer 
> races on the middle clue).

But this isn't right! You played at Nationals, and I'm sure you 
recognized most of the answers; were there really that many buzzer 
races? In my experience, there were not. By this logic good teams 
should be answering every question on everything they've heard of 
right off the bat, but that just doesn't happen, though it does 
happen often.

> Given a tournament with pyramidally 
> written questions where every answer is known at the end by almost 
> everone in the room, more experienced players will always win.  
>Given 
> a sufficiently obscure answer space, less experienced but well-read 
> players have a shot.

I have a real problem with this reasoning. Pyramidally structured 
questions will ideally give the advantage to someone who has actually 
studied the material in some depth. Therefore, it doesn't matter 
whether or not you have a lot of experience if you know what the 
answer to the question is. In fact, I've frequently found that 
experience can actually be a hindrance (to me) because the answer 
seems so ridiculously obvious that I begin doubting myself, thereby 
allowing the other team time to pick up the question. An obscure 
answer space won't necessarily be an advantage to less-experienced 
players; this would be the case only if the opposite team had lots of 
quizbowl experience but was not terribly well-read, which does 
happen. However, you're not going to get many points off the top 
teams this way because their players are experienced *and* well read.

> If all the answers are "easy", experience with 
> game play, buzzers, question format, etc. will win.  Given 
sufficient 
> obscurity, knowledge could beat out game experience.  I'm not 
> advocating for more obscurity here (though personally I'm all for 
it -
> - but then I'd actually like to have opponents to play 
against....), 
> I'm pointing out that your premise is flawed.  Easier questions do 
> not give inexperienced players more of a shot -- exactly the 
> opposite.

I have no numbers to back it up but my personal experience has been 
that easier questions benefit players who have a more limited 
knowledge-space. It's what in the Berkeley lexicon we call 
the "burden of knowledge." If you're aware of several possibilities 
from the start and you're trying to make up your mind, while the 
other team knows of only one option and the one they know is the 
right one, you can get beaten quite frequently because you're 
thinking too hard about the question. Basically, as difficulty 
increases, so does the gap between good and not-so-good teams because 
the not-so-good teams simply lack the knowledge of answers to choose 
from.

> Let's take 4 really well-read, smart people who have never 
> played qb before and put them against the average qb team on NAQT 
SCT 
> questions -- they'll lose about 600-10.  Now let's take the same 
> match and put it on Kleist questions...I can think of four people I 
> know right now who have never played qb but who would have a shot 
in 
> that circumstance...

It seems here to me that you're actually agreeing with my contention: 
that easier questions favor teams with more limited breadth of 
knowledge. I guess what confuses me is that first you claim that 
pyramidal questions favor teams with experience rather than teams 
with knowledge, but then you go on and say that your hypothetical 
knowledgeable team might win on Kleist questions, which questions are 
actually very pyramidal. True, Kleist is a tough tourney, but an 
experienced team would still have heard of many of the answers, and 
if the questions weren't pyramidal, they could just exploit their 
experience. So my claim is that it is exactly the pyramidality of the 
tossups that will favor the more knowledgeable team.

Jerry