"Unfortunately, since the powers that be decided to stop reserving DRL, no: Williams Hall is basically the only other building on campus with 30+ classrooms." I've seen versions of the above comment in numerous posts. I'm going to go one deeper and question the underlying assumption behind it - namely, that Penn Bowl should be as large as it is. I realize that earlier versions of Penn Bowl doubled as an unofficial circuit "national championship", and that such an event would draw people out of the woodwork. In a sense, it was the closest thing quizbowl had to a national conference - meet with old friends and hash out issues in the years when one UNIX newsgroup was it and email wasn't guaranteed. In this case, I can see a desire to expand the tournament - it's an event as well as a competition. The problem is that Penn Bowl is diminshed in this stature - NAQT and TRASHionals provide similarly large gatherings which are as geographically diverse (if not more so). Penn Bowl thus loses some stature as an event - and, I would argue, the unquestioned assumption that more teams = a better tournament. I've been involved in other events where a conscious decision was made to "scale back" because of a lack of staff, space, or other negatives that came with crowding. Penn is obviously free to run as large a tournament as they want (and many of the comments so far indicate that people liked it). However, if single-elim is retained solely because any other method is not logistically feasible, if difficult-to-navigate locales are chosen solely because they're the only option available, and if part of the reason that packet problems don't get caught is because checking 30 rooms before starting is well-nigh impossible, then it might be a good idea to ask whether quality needs to trump quantity and the number of teams should be made more manageable. Hayden
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