For what it's worth, I will toss in my two cents on the power placement issue. (I really have no qualifications to do so with any kind of authority, but I did edit the tournament that Jason mentioned.) I don't think that the existence of power marks should lead one to change the nature of lead-in clues. Rather, you should continue to write tossups in the usual pyramidal style, instead of trying to make all the leadin clues non-academic or (necessarily) something you yourself didn't know about the subject before you researched the question. You should just write the tossup and put the hardest clue first--and "hardest" means "least likely to be known by an average team at the tournament in question." It really is important to leave time for somebody to react to the clue and then buzz. It's really frustrating to buzz on the first clue, give the right answer, and miss the power because somebody decided to place the mark before the verbal filler immediately following that clue. Example: "Early in his career he painted works such as [X] and [Y]. (*) Then he studied under [Z]..." The power mark should really go between "under" and "[Z]," unless [Y] is a sufficently well-known clue that it shouldn't still be in the 15 zone; if that is the case, rewrite the question to put a few more words between [X] and [Y]. The idea is that the power tossup is supposed to reward deep knowledge, not speed, which is also one more reason why you don't want to put an easy clue in the power zone. It's really, really frustrating to lose a buzzer race and then have the added insult of the opponent getting 15 on a clue which you also knew. One other, almost unrelated note--while I do really like power tossups as they are implemented by NAQT (I don't share the objections that other people seem to have about power placement in NAQT sets), I also don't think that they are appropriate for all tournaments. The tossups really should be all well-written or the power is meaningless. (A *lot* of tournaments I have attended have a non-trivial number of questions with no clues hard enough to be first clues. This is fine if you are trying to run a pretty easy/accessible tournament. But you shouldn't use power tossups in such a case.) I haven't ever played at a TRASH tournament, so I don't know exactly how they play out, but it seems that with an idiosyncratic and less "canonical" questionspace, just getting the tossup should be reward enough for your deep knowledge. Joon
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