A Plea, Re: Beltway Bandits

Stat74 · Mon, 25 Feb 2002 06:38:18 -0800

The short of it:

- Please don't ask for
questions you aren't going to use
- Please tell us
difficulty is going up, so we stay home
- The statistical
tiebreaker Gods exact revenge on me for complaining about
them

The long of it:

I am disappointed that I
bothered to go. It was nothing like some previous years
I've been there.

My disapointment started with
my round 2 bye. They announced me as the coauthor of
the packet, but in reality they used *3* of my fifty
questions. I thought about it, and realized that there could
have been up to 21 submitted packets, but only 7 were
needed for the round-robin. Question quality issues
aside (and I'm sure there were some), that is an
*entire tournament's* worth of questions on the cutting
room floor!

I think my mistake was not
realizing what the editors wanted and writing a packet of
reasonably gettable questions. One of the two tossups of
mine they used was the Ben Curtis question (aka the
Dell Dude, made even more interesting by the presence
of NYU). This was arguably the hardest tossup in my
packet, and I suspected few teams would convert it. I
guess that's why they used it.

Yes, there were
talented teams there who did fine on the questions. But I
argue that for the bottom half the round-robin was not
fun. Consider this: a Delaware team that was 3rd (!)
at our 28-team TRASH regionals found its players all
in the bottom six teams.

ACF Trash? We had
it. "Name this character from a Russian novel". "Name
this Secretary of Commerce". "Name this novel we told
you about four rounds ago". "Name this Star Trek
character mentioned in round 2".

I think what has me
most upset is that I could have sent my questions to
Eric's tournament at Pitt and he might have actually
used them.

To cap the day off, my team was in a
3-way tie for 4th in our group. So *of course* we got
ranked sixth. I deserve it after complaining about
statistical tiebreakers. At this point I very nearly left
(and yes I would have been rude enough to take my
buzzers). But Brick was playing really well, so I decided
to stay and help him win the lower bracket, which we
did going undefeated among that group. Thanks Brick
for playing on our team, especially since one of my
players didn't materialize. (I heard that the playoff
packets were from Ann B. Davis and I did find those
rounds significantly improved in terms of editing, even
with similar difficulty).

After so many fun
weekends of previous Beltways and Capitol Punishments, I'm
sorry to say I didn't have fun and was glad to be home
by 9.

-Bill