To throw my hat into the ring... I attended the Los Angeles leg of the tournament last spring, playing on Plymouth-Canton Educational Park. This is my only experience with Beall's tournaments. How was it? Possibly the worst tournament I've ever been to as far as the actual running of the tournament and questions are concerned. Everything that the previous poster mentioned is true. There are a few more things I'd like to add, though. 1. About question plagiarism - Beall does not just rip off questions from Stanford Packet Archive. One of my teammates noticed that some of the questions he asked actually came from a "Jeopardy!" desk calendar that he had seen once. Also, some other questions were actually taken off of the "Jeopardy!" TV show. Most prolific question writer? Probably, but only because he steals from every single source he can get his hands on. 2. Image. This man obviously has some delusions of grandeur. There is only one venue for the games. It is a cardboard background that is an unreasonable facsimile of a game show set. Each team sits in a little booth that resembles a Jeopardy! panel complete with a dry erase board to write your name on with marker. The scoreboard is electronic and controlled by Beall's cronies over at the "judge's panel". The entire thing overall is corny. Beall has his own theme music that he comes out to at the beginning of each game. He then introduces himself and his cronies (before EVERY match...this is about 10-15 times a day). Then we have to go through the tedious introductions of each member of each time, even if said teams have already played each other before. Correct answers are denoted by a ringing bell, wrong answers by a strange buzzing noise, and the end of the round by a crony blowing on a train whistle. It's all very kitschy and lame. 3. Moderation. Beall is a terrible moderator, and is biased, as mentioned before. For example, one team answered "earmuffs" when the correct answer was "earplugs" (bad enough that the answer to a question was actually earplugs). He also gave a question to a kid who answered "Bryce" when the answer was Bryce Canyon. However, when there was a question speaking of 17th century French mathematician/philosophers, I got an early buzz and said Pascal and Descartes, but it was deemed incorrect because they weren't in that order on the answer sheet. Also, Ben (Heller) rang in early on a question asking to "sing the first line of Julia Ward Howe's..." gave the correct line, but got "buzzed" because he didn't SING it. This was the game we lost in, BTW. The guy from Manheim Township buzzed in and sang the line and got it right. The eventual gap in our point totals was about 25 I believe. 4. Question quality. Unacceptable. Execrable. The Jeopardy! calendar questions were probably the best out of the bunch. There were actually questions where Beall reads off various ingredients from a product, and the correct answer is that product (e.g. "carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color...BZZ...'coca-cola'"). The worst of all, however, were his gimmicky audio clues, which would have been alright if there weren't so many of them, and they weren't so ridiculous. There was actually a question that read "Name this common household appliance" and then an audio clip of that appliance (a blender) was run. Thank GOD I wasn't in that game, or I may have thrown something. 5. Judges. His "crack team of professionals" consisted of a Russian immigrant, a country music DJ from Kentucky, and his own son (I think...his name was Scott Beall). I kid you not. I think that's all for now... Matt Lafer, Plymouth Salem High School Quiz Bowl
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