Minnesota Deep Bench predictions

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Skepticism and Animal Feed
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Minnesota Deep Bench predictions

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Preliminary Rosters Now Available, but do keep in mind that each team has the right to make one change on Saturday morning.
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Post by Mr. Kwalter »

Since Minnesota will inevitably include unconscionable amounts of geography in their set, I predict "Minnesota" will triumph over the Teitler-Koo eightsome that might otherwise be the favorite. If geography isn't enough to put them on top, hug girl will no doubt attack Jared Sagoff, thus completely debilitating the Chicago squad.
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Re: Minnesota Deep Bench predictions

Post by grapesmoker »

Bruce wrote:Preliminary Rosters Now Available, but do keep in mind that each team has the right to make one change on Saturday morning.
I love the fact that you have to announce rosters beforehand... oh wait, no I don't.

Quizbowl is quizbowl, but I tend to lose interest in any format whose tournament structure I can't divine after 30 seconds of reading.
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Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

So, Chicago continued its newly-found tradition of choking in tournaments where it is the favorite by losing to Carleton in the last round. Carleton needed to beat both Chicago A (Teitler/Koo) and Chicago B (Arthur/Sagoff/Sun) to win the tournament. And they did just that.

I maintain that had Kannan Mahadevan been present at this tournament, the outcome would have been different. But he wasn't, so hats off to Carleton, and to any team who stayed at this tournament after the terrible Wisconsin packet was read.
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Post by Ray »

i basically just went to this tournament for the hug. also, marc chagall tossups
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Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Bruce wrote:so hats off to Carleton, and to any team who stayed at this tournament after the terrible Wisconsin packet was read.
I guess this might give people the wrong idea.

Overall, this was an extraordinarily well-run and well-edited tournament. This is an extremely complex format, one so complicated that even I, after having spent an entire day playing it, do not understand, and it went off without any problems. Teams being late from lunch caused more delays than any delays caused by the moderators or directors.

With the exception of the Wisconsin packet, most of the questions were very decent, with a few interpacket and intrapacket jumps in difficulty being the only problematic team. In editing, it was light-years ahead of, say, ECSO this summer or Berkeley WIT last year, which is impressive when you consider that most of the teams submitting packets were not programs known for experience in writing packets that conform to high quizbowl aesthetics, and even the packet for the supposedly good-writing Chicago team was about 50% sub-par questions written by the likes of myself and Jared.
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That "terrible Wisconsin packet"

Post by Ulugbek »

As one of the authors of the Wisconsin packet, I am interested to know what exactly qualifies our packet as horrible. I concede that there were several tossups that were of above average difficulty, but I think, as a whole, that we fulfilled the distribution that was asked of the tournament with a packet that consisted of fairly well-written questions. Any input on this is welcome.

As for the Deep Bench as a whole, the Carleton teams that I faced were the best in the first singles and first quads competitions, and they deservedly took home first place, Congratulations to Chicago as well for a strong second place finish.

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Re: That "terrible Wisconsin packet"

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Ulugbek wrote:As one of the authors of the Wisconsin packet, I am interested to know what exactly qualifies our packet as horrible. I concede that there were several tossups that were of above average difficulty, but I think, as a whole, that we fulfilled the distribution that was asked of the tournament with a packet that consisted of fairly well-written questions. Any input on this is welcome.
I would compare it to Toby Keith, actually.

The problem was not so much the difficulty of the questions, but the inaccessibility of the answers, which is a seperate issue. You can have the most well-written, pyramidal tossup in the world, but if the answer choice is faulty, it's still a terrible question.

There seemed to be a lot of tossups and bonuses in that packet about things which were simply incredibly obscure, most of them dealing with East Asia. These were things that would, imo, be considered inaccessible even at upper-level ACF tournaments.
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Post by Ulugbek »

Going through our packet, I can really only see three to four tossups that I believe could be truly labeled as obscure (Jakobson, Koopmans, NSC-68, and Grier). As far as East Asian subject matter, only one tossup and two bonuses dealt with that part of the world, if anything, the distribution was tilted towards South and Central Asia (and, even considering this, questions about Asia only encompassed 2 of 29 tossups and 5 of 28 bonuses-- I don't think that this is at all excessive). However, I see no real problem in having several questions regarding less asked about subject matter, especially when this occurs in bonus parts. I acknowledge that there were a number of bonus parts that exceeded the diffculty that may have expected, but I also think that every bonus had at least one part that most teams should have converted, which I think is par for the course, as in the rounds in which I played there were many packets that had widely varying levels of difficulty throughout.
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Post by Strongside »

I thought the tournament was good but could have had some improvements.

The logistics of the tournament were good and it was a complex tournament to run and it was a bit confusing with the having to play in a round and then read the same round and the quads matches were confusing with the printing problems and the switching but it turned out fine.

It didn't help that my teammates arrived late to the tournament and came back late from the lunch break but the tournament stayed on schedule well.

The packet editing was sub-par but it is quite difficult to do a good job of editing a quiz bowl tournament, especially when some teams didn't meet the question requirement. I didn't notice anything weird about Wisconsin's quad packets other than that they were more difficult than the other packets.

Some of the packets had more questions than others and there were formatting errors especially in Iowa State's quad packet. It would have been better if the question writers/editors would have given other acceptable answers and would have been more clear on which answers were right and which were wrong. For example one tossup answer omitted the apostrophe s in A Doll's House. Most moderators were lenient which was beneficial when there was ambiguity.

I can't remember which packet it was but did anyone else notice the IMO obscure Austrian politics bonus next to the IMO obscure Egyptian politics bonus?

Overall it was an enjoyable and and well run tournament and I hope it is held again.
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Post by Strongside »

Did anyone else notice the Marc Chagall question said he was born after the revolution? He was born in 1887 so assuming they are talking about the Russian Revolution that question had an error.
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Post by Ulugbek »

bjb87 wrote:Did anyone else notice the Marc Chagall question said he was born after the revolution? He was born in 1887 so assuming they are talking about the Russian Revolution that question had an error.
Born in present-day (*) Belarus, after the revolution, he served as art director of the Moscow Jewish State Theater. Known for fantastic portrayals of shetlt life, for 10 points, name this painter of “I and the Villageâ€
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Post by Captain Sinico »

The grammar in the question is incorrect (it's not actually saying anything about anything; one can guess as to what it means and, hearing that read, one will guess wrong nearly all the time.) For some reason, people write like that and I wish they'd stop it. You're ostensibly smart enough to play quizbowl; it should follow that you can use modifier clauses correctly. (The grammar in) this question, for example, could be fixed entirely by nothing more complicated than the following:
Born in present-day (*) Belarus, he served as art director of the Moscow Jewish State Theater after the revolution. Known for fantastic portrayals of shetlt life, for 10 points, name this painter of “I and the Villageâ€
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Post by Ulugbek »

The asterisk is indeed a power mark, which may appear out of place, but there are one to two sentences preceding these final two. Your reformulation does disambiguate the 'after the revolution' clause, but removing the comma after the word revolution accomplishes the same task, albeit not as effectively.
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Post by Matt Weiner »

Ulugbek wrote:The asterisk is indeed a power mark, which may appear out of place, but there are one to two sentences preceding these final two. Your reformulation does disambiguate the 'after the revolution' clause, but removing the comma after the word revolution accomplishes the same task, albeit not as effectively.
It certainly doesn't make it gramatically clear in writing, and when you are hearing it being read at the usual moderator speed, all bets are off. It is reasonable--perhaps even likely--that a player will interpret that sequence of words as "this person was born after the revolution"* no matter where the commas are.

*also, there have been many revolutions, so let's stop using the phrase "THE revolution" in quizbowl questions and spell out "the Bolshevik revolution" or whichever one you are actually trying to talk about
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Post by Captain Sinico »

Ulugbek wrote:...removing the comma after the word revolution accomplishes the same task...
Not so much.

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Post by MikeWormdog »

[quote]Born in present-day (*) Belarus, after the revolution, he served as art director of the Moscow Jewish State Theater. Known for fantastic portrayals of shetlt life, for 10 points, name this painter of “I and the Villageâ€
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Post by Matt Weiner »

MikeWormdog wrote:Also, if you don't want to make the nationality or time period of the question's subject incredibly obvious just yet for the sake of pyramidality, then you might not want to specify which revolution.
You can say "a revolution in his country," in that case. The last thing you want is to lead players into trying to psychoanalyze the question writer and guess which revolution he might consider "THE revolution" (because, if you do this on purpose, it's bad question writing, and if you write a sloppy question that inadvertently rewards or encourages such behavior, it's still bad question writing).
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Post by Captain Sinico »

MikeWormdog wrote:...despite claims to the contrary, the question as written, while confusing in its language, isn't "grammatically incorrect."
I "disagree." The clause "Born in present-day Belarus" is a dangling modifier in the question as written and that's still wrong as far as I know (did they change the rules on me again?)

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Post by grapesmoker »

ImmaculateDeception wrote:
MikeWormdog wrote:...despite claims to the contrary, the question as written, while confusing in its language, isn't "grammatically incorrect."
I "disagree." The clause "Born in present-day Belarus" is a dangling modifier in the question as written and that's still wrong as far as I know (did they change the rules on me again?)

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I'm pretty sure it's not a dangling modifier because the subject of the sentence ("he" in this case) is explicitly stated following the participle clause.
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Post by grapesmoker »

Bruce wrote:well-edited tournament...

With the exception of the Wisconsin packet, most of the questions were very decent, with a few interpacket and intrapacket jumps in difficulty being the only problematic team. In editing, it was light-years ahead of, say, ECSO this summer or Berkeley WIT last year, which is impressive when you consider that most of the teams submitting packets were not programs known for experience in writing packets that conform to high quizbowl aesthetics, and even the packet for the supposedly good-writing Chicago team was about 50% sub-par questions written by the likes of myself and Jared.
Ok, I just looked at the packet set from this tournament, and it just plain sucks. I have no idea what "standards" are being used to "judge" its quality, but even compared to the craptacularity of ECSO last summer, I would still take that set over this one.

I'm not even going to go through and critique every damn question in this set. It's quite obviously pretty bad and wouldn't really pass muster at any decent tournament.
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