Re: Truest Competition Format

walter_shandy · Mon, 27 Nov 2000 00:52:03 -0800

Tournaments are fair for determining what they
determine, and unfair for determining what other tournaments
determine, at least as compared to those other tournaments.
While a half-trash/half-academic tournament, if
properly run, would no doubt be a very good determinant of
who possessed the greatest "balance" between trash
and academic play, that doesn't necessarily make it a
"truer" format. It would simply mean it was based on
different things. 

As for "rewarding teams who work
at the game" (paraphrase of somebody or other's
comments), I don't know quite what is meant, but I beleive I
might find myself opposed to it. Let's take a
<i>reductio ad absurdum</i> approach to the idea: what
tournament set-up would best reward such teams? A tournament
in which the "canon," as it were, was declared ahead
of time and possessed no relevance to anything any
of the participants might actually know other than
by deliberately "working at the game". If I had my
choice, the "truest" (and I say this fully aware of the
hazards of using that word) competition would be between
players who had not "studied" for QB at all, who had come
by their knowledge "honestly", so to speak. I don't
pretend to believe that everyone would support that, and
even if it were to be adopted as an unwritten policy,
someone would break it. People will continue to memorize
lists, and to win tournaments as a result; there's no
way to stop it short of removing all information
which could be gained from lists, "Benet's", etc. from
questions, which is obviously a ridiculous solution. But we
don't need to encourage such people, and though it's
not necessarily a bad practice, I'm not even very
comfortable with the idea of rewarding players who learn
"actual" knowledge solely for QB purposes. Sure, continued
play will expose people to subjects they were not
previously familiar with, as will life in general. But
there's a point when the casual picking up of information
blurs into the unfair seeking of unearned and
superficial "knowledge", and at some point it intersects with
the genuine desire to learn, and also with... well, I
don't know how to express what I'm trying to say, which
is a sign either that what I'm trying to say is a
nebulous concept hard to express in words, or that it's
absolute nonsense, or that it's 4 AM and I'm not thinking
straight... or a little of all three, maybe... so I'll shut
up now.