Dave Goodman asks: << Has anyone ever done a study of how the "Lame" rule gets used at TRASH/trash events. As it was intially conceived, was the lame rule designed so that people could avoid questions they didn't care about or just to dodge a 0-bonus?>> Both, I think; naturally, in most cases if you don't care about something you're less likely to have point-gettin' knowledge of it. Is Fred Bush or someone from that particular Swarthmore era around to elaborate? Fred was partial to a SF-heavy strain of trash, and I wonder if his teammates insisted on the lame as a check on this. A nifty check on the lame-as-bagel-avoidance is the "save,"where just after team A lames, team B can snap it up and have it read when B next earns a bonus. Here, lame usage requires knowledge of your opponent's strengths as well as your own. <<I'd be curious to see stats, if someone could track the useage of the 'lame' this year. Granted the data would be skewed because you only get one lame, but i'd be interested.>> This would be interesting. But I don't know if the stat would mean anything without comparison to the overall tournament bonus conversion per question, and I doubt many hosts are up to that task. TRASH regionals hosts aren't required to use laming; it, and other play and scoring innovations/quirks/annoyances are optional, pending approval from TRASH (I don't think anything's been rejected yet). Trashmasters has done an excellent job of tracking some obscure stats (earliest buzz, least-answered question), but I don't think Charlie's incorporated Laming into his event. Another interesting stat would be lame-effectivity, tracking conversion after the lame. The worst lame-burn I can remember was at this year's Burns: a Harry Potter bonus was followed by a bonus on the 4-H motto. Ouch! -Greg
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