I was sitting in the room waiting for the Century of Tunes final when I realized that I needed sleep. As such, I have no clue who the winners are. Since my brain isn't fried yet, I did decide to offer some comments. 1) Questions - I still like packet submission tournaments better, as these give people a larger variety of strengths and weaknesses to work from. The standard example I use here is Georgetown, which probably couldn't have written a large number acceptable science questions on its own for an academic tourney - the Mason team seems to have a few favorite categories that skew the entire tournament. OTOH, the distribution was standardized (there weren't huge variations in distribution and difficulty), and people didn't have to write questions. 2. Proofreading - I saw a few errors in the packets I was reading - some I could skip over, some I could not. If you have time, it's always best to have people playtest packets - most of the errors I saw can be caught just by reading (I've written many papers with errors that I would have noticed if I had let someone else examine them - you tend to skip over words in your own works). 3. Stealing and sinking - Took a round or two to get used to it, but I sort of like it; there's a new element of strategy to it that makes the game more fun. Don't put it in every tournament, but it's a new wrinkle that's sort of interesting. 4. Attittude - I've tended to harp on this at previous tournaments, and I will say that, at least in my room, I was pleasantly surprised since it was so GREAT - people maintained a good attitude when I made mistakes, everyone was quite nice and friendly and people seemed to be interested in having fun (as opposed to winning at all costs). YMMV, but I had a blast.
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