I've never really seen the "question difficulty" in ACF tournaments - for instance, I didn't think that this year's Nationals (my first) was any more inaccessable than the ICT (1998 and 99) and the scores put up by teams in the southeast at Regionals and Sectionals have traditionally been comparable. I think the fact that individual questions in ACF are longer increases the amount of unfamiliarity, maybe creating the perception of difficulty. NAQT and ACF are equally likely to have a tossup on, say, the relatively obscure but definitely gettable poet Anacreon (1998 NAQT Nats I think). However, NAQT runs it out in two lines and a room that doesn't know the answer has to "shake it off" and go on to the next tossup, because easy clues are coming up soon. In ACF, if a room doesn't know, they'll have to sit through another longer series of clues that they probably don't know - even if they do know the answer, say, halfway through the tossup. I'm not criticizing the style - in fact, I much prefer it - but the ACF tossup style definitely emphasizes information known by fewer people in addition to (not instead of) more recognizeable information, and that might account for its perception of being difficult. /\/\att Schneller, Vandy '01
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