CO History

[Kyle]

So I sent the packets from the guerrilla history tournament to George Berry for posting, since Matt Cheyne et al say that the packets that did not get played are not being reserved for anything formal. It is unclear to me exactly which packets weren't played -- Davis/Hart and Hang appear to be the packets that correspond to the teams that did not have the byes, but Jeff Hoppes suggests that one of those packets was in fact played in the final rather than the packet that Chris and I wrote. I don't know. I have now heard from a couple others that some people want to play the remaining packet(s) at VCU Open, in which case you probably shouldn't open the packets once George puts them up if you are going to go to that tournament. Anyway, all in all, I thought people wrote some great packets. Chris mentioned to me as we were putting things together -- and I share the same sentiment -- that he wished he could have had the chance to play in the tournament. So I hope, issues of logistics aside, that people had a good time.

The way that our "semi-guerrilla" tournament happened in the end was that Chris put together the first half of the packets, then I did the second half. We chose which 21 questions from the 24 each team submitted to use in order to maintain some semblance of a distribution and to eliminate repeats. I also made some subtle changes to questions in order to avoid glaring repeats. For example, the Bentley/Carson packet had a tossup on Spain that ended by mentioning the War of Spanish Succession and the Treaty of Utrecht; I swapped in a clue about Bourbons and Habsburgs for the Treaty of Utrecht clue because there was a separate question on the Treaty of Utrecht in another packet. And I cleaned up a lot of grammar and made substantial revisions to a total of about five tossups that stood out to me as problematic. Other than that, what you played was entirely what people had submitted. Consequently, the packets represent an interesting window into how a lot of different people write history. I know that many people tried to do creative things with their tossups, which made for some cool questions and (I assume) some that were infuriating. So if you have comments about what infuriated you and/or what you liked and think people should do more of in more formal tournaments, then here is your thread to say so.

[theMoMA]

Thanks for the work you put into this event. I have to say that it far exceeded my expectations of a guerrilla tournament.

[Cheynem]

Yeah, thanks to everyone. This was a lot of fun and there were numerous terrific answers which should come up more often.

I apologize for folks who got squeezed in some manner by my decision to let various three person teams form. I decided that as a guerrilla type tournament, letting people play quizbowl was acceptable, but it led to some mismatched teams.

[grapesmoker]

This was great fun is all I have to say. I do retroactively plead translation on my answer of "Stone Ship" for "Marble Boat."

[Mike Bentley]

It was fun. There were some questionable answers and some distribution issues within packets, but that's to be expected from a tournament like this.

Also, let me indicate how non-shocked I am that this tournament did not finish at 11 PM.