Feats of quizbowl willpower

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Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by theMoMA »

I had a long post typed up about two inspiring feats of quizbowl willpower (see the latest definitive player list for an explication of that term) that I have witnessed, but unfortunately, something happened and it is now lost in computerized ether. Most distressingly, what was likely the only Doug Glanville/Joseph Glanvill joke ever penned sank with the ship.

An abridged version will have to suffice:

At ACF Nationals 2010, after we lost to Maryland, the only way we could have won that tournament was to go undefeated in four straight games against Jerry, Mike, Seth, and Andrew. I certainly can't think of four more exciting opponents to play with everything on the line, but they're probably not the four people you want staring across the table from you in four subsequent must-win matches.

Even though we had that nightmare slate of opponents, all of us seemed to have that drive, focus, and singularity of purpose that define any team's will to win. And all of us stepped up in pretty huge ways with so much on the line. Rob had two of his best games of the tournament to lift us over Illinois and Brown and Gautam was picking up crucial buzzes left and right. But what I really remember was the determination that Brendan showed, in the face of all those Hardy poems and Jewish divorce documents in the final, to keep fighting. That resolve was a reminder that we belonged in that game, and more importantly, that we could win. We didn't, obviously, but this is certainly the first anecdote that "quizbowl willpower" calls up for me.

Anyone else have a good feat of quizbowl willpower to share?
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Cheynem »

Here's mine:

At ICT 2010, my team (Minnesota B) began the prelims in what I perceived to be kind of a tough bracket--Brown, Toronto, Yale, Dartmouth, Missouri, UCLA, Arizona State. I thought that meant we would be relegated to the third bracket for sure at the least. However, despite losses to Brown and Toronto, we began the day by beating Yale, we beat Missouri, UCLA, and ASU, but also took a loss to Dartmouth. That put us in some odd tiebreaker situation where we had to play Dartmouth on a half packet. I played well in that tiebreaker round but it was one of those games where you really can't in retrospect figure out why you were buzzing in a lot of cases. I reflex buzzed upon hearing Tangier and said "Paul Bowles" and that was right. I was buzzing in to neg with "An American Tragedy" when I heard the name "Nick the Greek" and hastily corrected on the fly to the correct answer of "The Postman Always Rings Twice." The game-winning buzz was on a completely frauded buzzer race I won on "gluons." After the battle of King's Mountain went dead to end the game, we moved on to the second bracket, and flush from the momentum, proceeded to beat the tar out of Michigan in an upset magnified by the fact we then lost all of our games including an embarrassing shellacking at the hands of Chicago B. But that tournament is arguably the highlight of my non-A team playing career.

The other ones come from the most recent ACF Nats. As most people who played it can attest, this could be a rather frustrating tournament at times. We took a number of frustrating losses over the day and in the superplayoffs, we had suffered some debilitating losses to Brown and Michigan, but we were helped by the fact that no other team was escaping unscathed as well. We persisted, beating Chicago, Harvard, Yale, and then it basically became "Minnesota vs. Illinois, winner has a route to the finals." I believe each of my teammates (and myself) had decent buzzes that round. The two willpower examples that stick in my mind are: 1. An early tossup was on La Reforma, a term that at the time I was unfamiliar with. It went to the end and Sorice guessed "Mexican Progressive Period." I then decided "Mexican Reform" sounded right and it was accepted. 2. Rob put the game away with a buzz on "Question Concerning Technology." I got the impression that several people (at least I was) kind of new it was that Heidegger essay about technology but weren't sure what the official title was. Rob had the guts and strength to buzz in and go for it and get it right.

Another anecdote comes from that Nats. On our bye, I watched State College play Maryland. It was a very close game and went to the end. The final question was a difficult bio thing that I do not recall the specific answer to. Monica negged it with something close. It gets to the end. Chris Ray, needing the question to win, buzzes on it and then just grits the answerline out--I mean, he was like figuring it out one syllable at a time, and got it. I apologize for vocally cheering, but it was pretty awe-inspiring and to me is the quizbowl equivalent of breaking a 90-yard kick return under pressure or something.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

I played quizbowl for three years in college. During that time, I never wrote anything other than my share of a full packet - 7/7 here, 6/6 there, 5/5, etc. depending on the number of teammates. My senior year, I volunteered to do a crazy thing: edit the history for Chicago Open. This meant writing about ten times as many questions as my previous largest writing assignment.

Of course, people in college are convinced that they can do anything. So I actually backed out of my CO editing commitment at the last possible moment and set upon a more ambitious goal: writing an entire history side event. I was now committed to writing TWENTY times as many questions as I had before. I remember sometime in April of 2007 going to the basement of my college dorm room, writing a tossup on the Battle of Varna, patting myself on the back and saying "great start", and then going off to enjoy the rest of my senior year. For months, that was the only tossup of Guns of August that existed. It sat there in my gmail account while I finished my BA thesis, took my finals, enjoyed my last few weeks with college friends, graduated, and slept 12+ hours a day during the lazy months of summer.

Late July rolled around and there was still one tossup in the entire tournament. The tournament was now less than two weeks away. I realized I had a choice: I could cancel the side event and be an object of scorn and mockery in the quizbowl community, or I could go balls to the wall and write an entire tournament in under two weeks.

I chose the latter. I spent 10 hours a day writing questions. Some days, I never even got out of bed: I wrote on my laptop in my pajamas. The questions weren’t perfect, but they got done and they got done on time. I even had time to think up witty WWI-related names for every team.

Over the next few years, I produced an additional six side event tournaments, all of them much higher quality and all of them delivered on time. I’ve found that I write questions much more quickly than other writers, and I think it’s because of that one time I forced myself to out of sheer willpower.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

Bruce, that reminds me of the time Andrew and I edited 90% of Deep Bench 2007 (our first tournament) over a two-and-a-half day marathon stretch of insanity. Highlights included receiving a packet (50/25, remember, because Deep Bench has singles rounds!) of absolute crap, including an immortal tossup on "moonquakes", from Wisconsin two days before the tournament.

Reading Andrew's earlier post about our 2010 ACF Nats exploits reminds me that after our games against Illinois and Brown, my powers were apparently drained to the point that I could do little more than get confused and neg on a tossup on the Limbourg brothers against Chicago. Andrew, on the other hand, had his best game of the tournament, racking up six tossups and savvily using his smartphone to help us win a protest, which up until that point had been stalled by Zeke Berdichevsky's insistence that "de" could not be translated as "from" (I think).
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by theMoMA »

Ukonvasara wrote:Bruce, that reminds me of the time Andrew and I edited 90% of Deep Bench 2007 (our first tournament) over a two-and-a-half day marathon stretch of insanity.
Highlights from this endeavor include writing a tossup on the Battle of Fort Necessity in two minutes, greenlighting a tossup on the Quantum Zeno effect because why not, and (my favorite) when my sister came to campus to visit the day before the tournament and was shocked (in way with which I can only imagine photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration are familiar) with the horrors to which I had subjected myself.

But if we were to create a thread called "editing horror stories," I think that Deep Bench 2007 might not even make my personal top five.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by rylltraka »

Ukonvasara wrote: Andrew, on the other hand, had his best game of the tournament, racking up six tossups and savvily using his smartphone to help us win a protest, which up until that point had been stalled by Zeke Berdichevsky's insistence that "de" could not be translated as "from" (I think).
I really hope that "de" as "from" was accepted. Unless this is some sort of comical mistranslation, in which case I'd love to hear the story.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Susan »

At a quizbowl party, I once saw Christian Kammerer completely slaughter the saltines challenge by cramming all six into his mouth, bugging out his eyes, and just going for it. Greatest display of quizbowl willpower (or, indeed, willpower in any context) I've ever seen.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

rylltraka wrote:
Ukonvasara wrote: Andrew, on the other hand, had his best game of the tournament, racking up six tossups and savvily using his smartphone to help us win a protest, which up until that point had been stalled by Zeke Berdichevsky's insistence that "de" could not be translated as "from" (I think).
I really hope that "de" as "from" was accepted. Unless this is some sort of comical mistranslation, in which case I'd love to hear the story.
It was, eventually--it was a tossup on El caballero de Olmedo, at the end of which Brendan said "The Knight from Olmedo". Andrew just googled it and saw that it had been published under that title, mooting Zeke's bizarre argument ("dude, I'm from Argentina.").

EDIT: I also realized I forgot to mention (as I'd intended to in my first post) Matt Weiner willing his team to victory at the first MO, pulling shit out of nowhere (Seven Macaw? Sure, why not?) to narrowly defeat a very tough Seth/Selene team. I'd talk more about his CO victories, but I don't think I've actually seen any of them.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

Ukonvasara wrote:
rylltraka wrote:
Ukonvasara wrote: Andrew, on the other hand, had his best game of the tournament, racking up six tossups and savvily using his smartphone to help us win a protest, which up until that point had been stalled by Zeke Berdichevsky's insistence that "de" could not be translated as "from" (I think).
I really hope that "de" as "from" was accepted. Unless this is some sort of comical mistranslation, in which case I'd love to hear the story.
It was, eventually--it was a tossup on El caballero de Olmedo, at the end of which Brendan said "The Knight from Olmedo". Andrew just googled it and saw that it had been published under that title, mooting Zeke's bizarre argument ("dude, I'm from Argentina.").

EDIT: I also realized I forgot to mention (as I'd intended to in my first post) Matt Weiner willing his team to victory at the first MO, pulling shit out of nowhere (Seven Macaw? Sure, why not?) to narrowly defeat a very tough Seth/Selene team. I'd talk more about his CO victories, but I don't think I've actually seen any of them.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

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Cernel Joson wrote:Rob Carson kept his eyes closed for the entirety of the CO 2009 Final.
Me too!
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

Cernel Joson wrote:
Ukonvasara wrote:
rylltraka wrote:
Ukonvasara wrote: Andrew, on the other hand, had his best game of the tournament, racking up six tossups and savvily using his smartphone to help us win a protest, which up until that point had been stalled by Zeke Berdichevsky's insistence that "de" could not be translated as "from" (I think).
I really hope that "de" as "from" was accepted. Unless this is some sort of comical mistranslation, in which case I'd love to hear the story.
It was, eventually--it was a tossup on El caballero de Olmedo, at the end of which Brendan said "The Knight from Olmedo". Andrew just googled it and saw that it had been published under that title, mooting Zeke's bizarre argument ("dude, I'm from Argentina.").

EDIT: I also realized I forgot to mention (as I'd intended to in my first post) Matt Weiner willing his team to victory at the first MO, pulling shit out of nowhere (Seven Macaw? Sure, why not?) to narrowly defeat a very tough Seth/Selene team. I'd talk more about his CO victories, but I don't think I've actually seen any of them.
Rob Carson kept his eyes closed for the entirety of the CO 2009 Final.
Much of that tournament is a blur to me now, apparently!
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Sun Devil Student »

Not to detract from the excellence of any of the feats recounted above, but I'm wondering, do you guys actually have the ability to remember things just by "willing"?

My personal experience seems to be that my "willpower" has no correlation with my performance in any given round - if I haven't been exposed to a given piece of information, no amount of willpower can make the information magically reappear in my head when I need it several months later during a game. For information I have been exposed to, memory is known to degrade by some kind of nonlinear function over time, and whether it's decayed beyond the threshold of recoverability by the time I play a game several months later seems to be entirely a matter of happenstance. Where does willpower come into the equation? Do you find, in your experience, that you can't remember something and then can "will" yourself to suddenly remember it?

I thought willpower meant always putting maximum effort regardless of the game circumstances, but even the best players trying their hardest sometimes get negs; is the difference between willpower and its opposite defined by whether the result was successful? That doesn't seem like the intended definition of the word as used in this context. Thus, I have to wonder whether for each example of willpower that won a game there must be many examples of equally strong willpower that failed to win (e.g. someone had the guts to buzz when they had to, but got a neg), and maybe some examples of winning a game without much willpower (e.g. the last tossup just happens to be something you read yesterday, and you're 100% sure before the other team has the slightest clue, thus you buzz confidently and win the game). Surely there are examples of all scenarios, but I don't know how frequently they happen.

One of my particularly mercurial ASU teammates once claimed to have a unique ability to win using "the power of the human spirit" and I was always skeptical that it would actually help us win anything, but now I wonder if it actually does. I'm hoping he plays this year so we can get some insight.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Rococo A Go Go »

I think quizbowl willpower is probably not the most direct explanation of what people are talking about, although the underlying concept is sound. What is being described is when a good player is having sharper reflexes and thinking more clearly than normal, a player being "in the zone" so to speak. When somebody hears a clue they are unsure about they may sit on it and wait to hear a clue they definitely know before buzzing in. But when we're talking about relatively evenly matched competition (especially among the best players and teams) then there are going to be plenty of people with the same amount of knowledge.

Rather than games coming down to buzzer races on clues that more than one person knows, a "feat of quizbowl willpower" involves a player being "in the zone" to the point that they are focused enough and take just the right amount of risks to buzz on clues earlier in a question to out-match their opponents. It's not so much that they are using knowledge that they didn't originally have, but being more aggressive with what they do know and accurately judging both where there the question is going and what the other team's skill and knowledge level on a certain subject is.

EDIT: For an example, all of the players discussed in this thread could beat my team even if they were tripping on acid and listening to "Dark Side of the Moon" during the game. But when they are playing equal or better competition, it often takes a "feat of quizbowl willpower" to rise to the occasion and play well enough to lead their team to victory.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Gautam »

The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote:I think quizbowl willpower is probably not the most direct explanation of what people are talking about, although the underlying concept is sound. What is being described is when a good player is having sharper reflexes and thinking more clearly than normal, a player being "in the zone" so to speak. When somebody hears a clue they are unsure about they may sit on it and wait to hear a clue they definitely know before buzzing in. But when we're talking about relatively evenly matched competition (especially among the best players and teams) then there are going to be plenty of people with the same amount of knowledge.

Rather than games coming down to buzzer races on clues that more than one person knows, a "feat of quizbowl willpower" involves a player being "in the zone" to the point that they are focused enough and take just the right amount of risks to buzz on clues earlier in a question to out-match their opponents. It's not so much that they are using knowledge that they didn't originally have, but being more aggressive with what they do know and accurately judging both where there the question is going and what the other team's skill and knowledge level on a certain subject is.

EDIT: For an example, all of the players discussed in this thread could beat my team even if they were tripping on acid and listening to "Dark Side of the Moon" during the game. But when they are playing equal or better competition, it often takes a "feat of quizbowl willpower" to rise to the occasion and play well enough to lead their team to victory.
Hello, whoever you are, do you want us to perform intellectual garbage cleanup or what? First you say quizbowl willpower isn't really a thing, it's a good player being in the zone. Then you say that quizbowl willpower really is a thing, it's just a good player really being in the zone. Then it's all about have almost perfect insight into the mind of the editor, perfect information about what his opponents know, and making very calculated decisions and taking risks to buzz in on clues. Which one is it? Are you going to decide?

Then there's the fundamentally mistaken assumption that there's a pool of knowledge that everyone somehow has and that willpower enables players to transcend that common pool of knowledge... All of this is some mythical nonsense that has gone out of hand in the recent past, and is perpetuated by baloney statements like what you're making. Not every buzz a shrewd and focused quizbowler makes is an act of willpower. His/her knowledge base will help him with most of the questions; willpower will help him/her maybe get a tossup early or maybe pull a couple of bonus parts, but it's not a tool that somehow allows him/her to dictate the course of a game.

Code: Select all

Chicago Khawan	  W	645	115	9	8	0	inf	 17	430	25.29
Chicago Khawan     L	170	495	3	2	3	1.00	 5	120	24.00
Chicago Khawan	  W	325	315	4	6	3	1.33	10	220	22.00
These outcomes from 3 matches MN A played Chicago A at '09 Terrapin. I can definitively identify the packet used in the first and last of those games, but I can't recall which packet was used for the second one... Anyway your magical willpower model of winning would have Minnesota A being the stronger-willed team, making aggressive, risk-adjusted buzzes against almost equally matched opponents to win the first game. And yet, your model would have that the degrees of willpower are almost exactly reversed (Chicago went 6/8/1) in the second game. Knowing more things allowed the better team to win the first two of those games. There was some some sheer willpower that worked it's magic in the final game (I recall Rob pulling Ballet Mechanique being very clutch) but willpower alone wouldn't have led either team to victory in that tournament, though it may have contributed to the last outcome necessary for the winner's success.

My former teammates' feats have been mentioned quite a few times on this thread, and I want to clarify that I would, in fact, describe some of these achievements as acts of will power. Having played with them so many times, I think I have been able to discern whether it was pure knowledge or the mental fortitude that helped them pull bonus parts and tossups on various occasions. Willpower did help them get some of those questions (and helped us win a few games as well) but it doesn't fully explain the remarkable achievements the members of that team had. They know things. They know some things that many other people do, they know some things pretty well that other people don't, and they know some things down cold and they are almost untouchable in those areas.

I find grandiose claims such as those made by Nick to be ridiculous. It seems that there's some kind of need for people to concoct absurd narratives to explain the success of the best teams, when, in fact many of the games between these teams are decided by "who knows more things." This need is probably directly related to the prevalent phenomenon of quizbowlers claiming to know where each and every question is headed. When everybody sitting in the audience of the ICT final is twitching his thumb a few milliseconds after a finalist buzzes in, then quizbowlers are somehow forced to think that the knowledge-base is virtually similar among the best teams and somehow it's superhuman feats that propelled them to the final.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by salamanca »

This is an interesting topic for sure. I think that during my days the most amazing feats of QB willpower I'd ever seen were Andrew at ICT in 2001 and ACF Nats in 2010 and Subash at ACF Regs in 2002 (one of the more underrated performances of all time) and ICT in 2003.

That said, I'd just like to clarify Rob's comment on my initial refusal to accept Knight from Olmedo as an acceptable answer. My argument was not "dude, I'm from Argentina," it was dude, the two copies I have at home, including the one I wrote the TU from are both translated as The Knight of Olmedo and I'd never seen it any other way. Obviously, Andrew's quick thinking overcame my lapse into stupidity. Rob is correct that in my sleep deprived state I may have said something about growing up speaking Spanish, but that was not the reason I initially refused the answer.

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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

salamanca wrote:That said, I'd just like to clarify Rob's comment on my initial refusal to accept Knight from Olmedo as an acceptable answer. My argument was not "dude, I'm from Argentina," it was dude, the two copies I have at home, including the one I wrote the TU from are both translated as The Knight of Olmedo and I'd never seen it any other way. Obviously, Andrew's quick thinking overcame my lapse into stupidity. Rob is correct that in my sleep deprived state I may have said something about growing up speaking Spanish, but that was not the reason I initially refused the answer.
I'm sorry, I certainly didn't mean to imply that was the basis for your argument or anything! That was just the most entertaining line I remembered.
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Re: Feats of quizbowl willpower

Post by Rococo A Go Go »

gkandlikar wrote:Hello, whoever you are, do you want us to perform intellectual garbage cleanup or what? First you say quizbowl willpower isn't really a thing, it's a good player being in the zone. Then you say that quizbowl willpower really is a thing, it's just a good player really being in the zone. Then it's all about have almost perfect insight into the mind of the editor, perfect information about what his opponents know, and making very calculated decisions and taking risks to buzz in on clues. Which one is it? Are you going to decide?
I just saw this, and I think you may have interpreted my post a different way than I intended it. Whether or not the things I say are "intellectual garbage", they're also not important and are the equivalent of throwaway comments made during light conversation. I never wanted to get in a serious dicussion in this thread and I still don't, so forgive me if I don't discuss many of the other things said in this thread and specifically in your post, many of which are excellent points. I get the feeling that you think that I'm a bit of an idiot, which you're perfectly entitled to do, but to combat that I would like to attempt to explain my previous post a little bit.

First off, my opening point about "feats of quizbowl willpower" is not a questioning of the concept, it's simply meant to point out that the term itself is vague and can lead to confusion. I'm also going to point out two quotes from this thread that led to some of the things I said in the rest my previous post. The first explains what I meant by players being "in the zone." The second reflects the point that sometimes when good teams play each other, it's not just knowledge that determines the outcome of the game, but can also include other factors which may be encompassed by the broad term of "feats of quizbowl willpower."
theMoMA wrote:Even though we had that nightmare slate of opponents, all of us seemed to have that drive, focus, and singularity of purpose that define any team's will to win.
Cheynem wrote:I got the impression that several people (at least I was) kind of new it was that Heidegger essay about technology but weren't sure what the official title was. Rob had the guts and strength to buzz in and go for it and get it right.
That's where my thought process came from when I wrote my previous post in this thread. I may have been entirely wrong, and if so, feel free to ignore it.
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