Re: Calling My Bluff

Arsaces_I · Wed, 11 Apr 2001 07:30:46 -0700

"There's a serious difference between a
tournament being elitist and its attendees being elitist.
Say what you will about the major formats -- and much
has been said -- but the thing which separates NAQT
from ACF (for many of my teammates -- as said before,
I'll play damn near anything) is that ACF seems to be
disinterested in the enjoyment of all teams, choosing instead
to focus merely on the top few. The result? NAQT has
36 contenders for best team in the nation, while ACF
has 16. Such is their prerogative. Having not
attended a CBI National (sigh), I have no idea how they
handle things, so I will not comment further. Yet I do
know how things were apparently handled by the players
themselves."

Perhaps I misunderstand what is being said here; I am
going to respond to what *I think* is the point of
this, but if I have in some way misconstrued, then I
hope you will both accept my apologies in advance and
accept my invitation to clarify things.

What I
think this is saying is that:

a) ACF had fewer
attendants at its Nationals than NAQT because of elitism
(or, at least, the more exclusionary aspects of
elitism), though I didn't catch from whom this elitism is
manifest; is it the tournament or the teams, or maybe the
format?

I don't see how the charge can stick to the first.
The field at Nationals was not artificially closed,
to my knowledge; anyone who wanted to play at
Nationals were free to do so - provided they wrote packets
or paid the appropriate fees - no matter how they
played at other tournaments. 

As to the second:
it may well be that the teams that came to Nationals
consider themselves an exclusive club, an "elite" cadre (I
didn't get that hit off most of the people there, but
maybe I missed something), hence the smaller field. But
it seems to be as likely - if not more so- that the
field was smaller because fewer teams were able to make
it to Ann Arbor than Saint Louis; furthermore,
perhaps fewer teams enjoy ACF than NAQT. This doesn't
neccessarily emply elitism unless the format itself is somehow
inherently elitist. Which leads to the second point your
post seems to have made:

b) You seem to suggest
that ACF seems to be disinterested in the enjoyment of
all teams, choosing instead to focus merely on the
top few.

And this is certainly possible; I
don't know the people at the top of ACF all that well,
and it may be that all share the conviction that "If
they aren't Michigan or Virginia or <insert good
team here>, who cares what they think of the
questions". If they do feel this way, however, they have
never expressed that feeling publicly to all or
privately to me; and I do know that this wasn't the
sentiment of Jim Dendy, Don Windham, or Carol Guthrie, the
leaders of the former incarnation of ACF, whom I know a
bit better. Their view (which I suspect is inherited
by and common to the heads of the current
incarnation) was that ACF should be designed for the enjoyment
of all. It so happened that there were some teams
who were not going to like the questions no matter
how hard or easy, and that many of these tended to be
among the less successful, and it was true that their
complaints tended to be taken less seriously than those of
the more devoted, better teams. But in the view of
the heads of old-ACF, if only the "top teams" at a
tournament liked the questions and everyone else was
dissatisfied, they percieved that to be problematic, as much as
if only the "bottom teams" liked the questions and
everyone else complained.

It doesn't seem to me
that elitism obtains here; nor, I think it can safely
be asserted, am I one of the "top players" whose
judgement is obfuscated by elitism inherent in ACF, and
thus compelled to defend it. I may well not have a
handle on the situation, but from my perspective what
you have suggested does not apply. Or have I failed
to grasp your point?