ICT, etc

tgallows · Wed, 11 Apr 2001 08:25:13 -0700

Hello. Someone a few messages back decided to
address the good and the bad of the NAQT ICT, so I'd
rather follow that thread. I agree that WUSTL did a
great job of hosting -- with 60 teams, the necessity of
late room changes, and even the unexpected presence of
a film crew, things seemed to run pretty smoothly.
I don't recall having a bad moderator all day, and
things ran nearly on time from start to finish. My
compliments to Ken Mitchell and company.

The re-use of
questions in Div I and Div II was problematic. It never
caused a problem for us, but at least one of our
opponents claimed to have lost another match partly due to
the repeat of a Freud tossup, which the opponent had
heard about but they hadn't. The question had been used
in Div II on day 1, while it came up for Div I on
day 2. As someone mentioned, for reasons of question
security, if identical questions are going to be used in
Div I and Div II, it certainly seems like a good idea
to keep them in the same round.

One point
which I'm sure will be discussed is the repeated
matchups. For Florida Atlantic, the day 2 schedule was
somewhat ... lacking in variety. Overall, 7 of our 15
matches were against teams from our regional, and 5 of
the 9 matches from day 2, not to mention three
matches with Florida. (Doesn't help that I haven't played
a good match against them this year -- ugh.)
However, even though I'm bringing it up, I still think the
power matchups and ladder play are a good way to
organize the field. It did generate close matches for us,
and it was simply luck of the draw that Berry, UF,
FAU, and Kentucky (at least early in the day) would
all have similar rankings, and that we would face
Georgia and Duke on day 1. Hmm ... on second thought,
maybe it would have been nice if we didn't play EVERY
team from our regional (except the host
UTC).

Just to address the other assorted threads while I'm
here ... if a grand slam is at issue, then the analogy
of CBI with the French Open seems like a good one --
Agassi or Davenport could win it, but the strange
conditions also give Thomas Muster a great shot (or whoever
the current claycourt specialists are). Fortunately,
it sounds like CBI questions may have improved from
the crappy ones I played on in the mid-90s. (And we
in the south also have the benefit of an excellent
coordinator in Tom Michael.)

In terms of formats, I'm
partial to ACF, and I think logistics may have been a
problem for some teams who wished to attend ACF Nationals
this year. In my case, I expected ACF Regionals and
Nationals to be at their 'usual' dates, not a month
earlier, so I'd scheduled other things. Ann Arbor also
proved to be a little less accessible for us than
Chicago, Maryland, or St Louis. I expect ACF Nationals to
be back with a much larger field next year, and for
the questions to be less imposing for the mid-level
teams.

I don't care for (IMO) the overabundance of current
events in NAQT questions, but I'll address that by
writing questions for NAQT. And many congratulations to
Kevin Olmstead for the performance on WWTBAM -- it was
the Quincy Jones question that would have gotten me.

A couple of brief questions. What was the
prediction for how long it would take for the board to reach
message #5000? At this pace, it'll happen this week. And
is the qb-list in use at all? (I haven't gotten a
message from it in weeks.) Bye --

--Raj Dhuwalia