ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Old college threads.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by gtechnerd »

Just to clarify some of my statements which I think stirred up a few people...
I do think that the COTKU questions were good, for extremely good players/teams. Clearly FSU, South Florida and others did OK on the question set, and I think Charlie did a good job of running the tournament as always. I also have played on a competitive team before, back in high school, and I know how much you can improve by spending every weekend studying, writing up 50+ page lists of plot summaries, and devoting massive blocks of time to quizbowl.
But I also think that there needs to be a place for players who just want to enjoy a good tournament, and don't want to have to make quizbowl a high priority, and I think that is something that quizbowl is losing, the casual player who takes a few notes, writes a packet every once in a while, but doesn't care to learn Inuit mythology, Turkish literature, or obscure experiments verifying existing EM theories.
I certainly don't mean to downplay the accomplishments of EFT and ACF with their Fall and Winter tournaments, which I expect will be as high quality and as accessible as always, but in the Southeast I have noticed a slight trend to more difficult tournaments, particularly at UTC, but also elsewhere. Moon Pie last year had a median bonus conversion arround 10 points, compared to the 17 points they had at Sword Bowl. UGA moved from an NAQT Div II tournament to a much more difficult Div I style tournament the last two years, and it has had an effect. I haven't seen Emory as often as two years ago, Agnes Scott's team never got off the ground due, in large part, to the huge knowledge base that the players just couldn't assimilate in practice, and I haven't noticed Oakwood in a while. I've also noticed players on Tech's team who leave due to practices being too difficult, and even good players may go to one tournament, and decide they have better ways to spend their time because they just don't want to have to rebuild their entire quizbowl knowledge base to adapt to college.
In short, we are becoming so difficult and competitive that we lose some of the opportunity to just have fun answering questions, bringing up our favorite anecdotes (died in a bar figh... BUZZ! Marlowe) and play quizbowl. I know that its good to have strongly competitive tournaments with very serious questions as regional and national level tournaments, but it seems that many of the easy tournaments that don't necessarily have immaculate questions like EFT get blasted on this forum, even though they are really an opportunity for teams that aren't at the Vandy-Georgia-FSU level to compete and have fun at. Being stomped on questions that you recognize the answers to beats getting stomped on questions where you don't even recognize the questions in the field you are getting your degree in.
Anyway, I'm graduating and the Berry Southeastern is likely going to be my last time behind a buzzer, so I just wanted to chip in my two cents, feel free to flame away.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

I won't flame you for two reasons: first, it's clear that we disagree about what makes for good quizbowl, and not for your lack of exposure to good quizbowl; second, I think it's fine if people play what they want to play--what's not fine is if they're being prevented from deciding what they want to play by a big, evil organization or a massive monopoly on quizbowl. You've played Falls and EFT and novice tournaments, you prefer anecdotes, fine. You're different from a lot of people. That's fine.

What I say, then, is that you (or people who agree with you) should write the kinds of tournaments you'd want to play, and then you solve your own problem. Maybe they have anecdotes in the tossups, no science, and 2/2 puns. Whatever. As long as it doesn't prevent people from playing what we evangelize as good quizbowl, I have no reason to hate you for doing that. If it takes over, diverts substantial time and money from clubs--as often happens with trash tournaments--then I am no longer so tolerant. And I really worry that that's exactly what will happen.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

everyday847 wrote:What I say, then, is that you (or people who agree with you) should write the kinds of tournaments you'd want to play, and then you solve your own problem. Maybe they have anecdotes in the tossups, no science, and 2/2 puns. Whatever. As long as it doesn't prevent people from playing what we evangelize as good quizbowl, I have no reason to hate you for doing that.
Yeah because separate but equal worked so well the first time.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by grapesmoker »

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:
everyday847 wrote:What I say, then, is that you (or people who agree with you) should write the kinds of tournaments you'd want to play, and then you solve your own problem. Maybe they have anecdotes in the tossups, no science, and 2/2 puns. Whatever. As long as it doesn't prevent people from playing what we evangelize as good quizbowl, I have no reason to hate you for doing that.
Yeah because separate but equal worked so well the first time.
Yeah, the problem is that terrible quizbowl actually takes away manpower and resources from good quizbowl, so having bad tournaments that exist separately from the larger circuit is no solution. I'll have more to say about this later, perhaps in a new thread.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

That's why I go on to say that I kind of suspect that it'll end up preventing the rest of us from playing what we think of as good quizbowl, Eric. I just wanted to explicate my thought process beyond the level of "I HATE EVERYTHING THAT IS DIFFERENT" because it's subtler than that. It's not just that I think a form of quizbowl similar to what he advocates is unpleasant--in that case, I could avoid it myself. It's that teams in the southeast wouldn't have any choice but to play that form of quizbowl (if not for the progress that's being made now).

EDIT: yeah, this part:
everyday847 wrote:And I really worry that that's exactly what will happen.
should probably be made really emphasized or in giant font or something.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

it seems that many of the easy tournaments that don't necessarily have immaculate questions like EFT get blasted on this forum,
Are you high? Everyone came on this board and praised the EFT overall as a very good low-level tournament!
You've played Falls and EFT and novice tournaments, you prefer anecdotes, fine. You're different from a lot of people. That's fine.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:
it seems that many of the easy tournaments that don't necessarily have immaculate questions like EFT get blasted on this forum,
Are you high? Everyone came on this board and praised the EFT overall as a very good low-level tournament!
No, he's saying that EFT was immaculate, but other easy tournaments that aren't necessarily as well-written get blasted. Which is true, only because all tournaments deserve to be held to the same standard of quality regardless of the difficulty level.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Gautam »

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:
it seems that many of the easy tournaments that don't necessarily have immaculate questions like EFT get blasted on this forum,
Are you high? Everyone came on this board and praised the EFT overall as a very good low-level tournament!
I think he's saying that tournaments which are not EFT/ACF Fall mirrors are criticized on this forum (for whatever reason.)

To be honest, I think the assessment that Mr. Steinhice's tournaments have gotten a loooooooooooooooooooot harder over the last couple of years may be true, but I don't see the point of whatever discussion we're trying to have. He mirrored FICHTE as the DI tournament for Moon Pie, and I think the circuit was well aware that FICHTE was going to be a hard tournament. If it does drop your monocle, well, then I must welcome you to quizbowl, where tournaments mostly live up to advertised difficult levels! Of course, MO exceeded those standards and we probably should have communicated, but we will be sure to do that in the future. Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is this: If you are expecting a history to repeat itself every year when it clearly is not (i.e COTKU and Moon Pie become mirrors of harder tournaments compared to the past bajillion years when they weren't), you should be surprised.

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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

You've played Falls and EFT and novice tournaments, you prefer anecdotes, fine. You're different from a lot of people. That's fine.
As the Colombian white supremacist Loveline caller once said, "No not alright."
I'll repeat this assertion, because I believe it. If he can hold these beliefs without damaging the ability of others to play what we think is good quizbowl, then this is perfectly fine. There is nothing inherently wrong with someone believing that farting contests are good quizbowl as long as they remain their private, wacky thoughts. Diverting resources from teams that want to play good quizbowl is, however, bad; damaging the advance of good quizbowl is bad. But having weird views about quizbowl does no harm in and of itself.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Oh I see about the EFT thing. Still doesnt change my second point (also, like, there were plenty of low-level tournaments that were taken from the range of "acceptable" to "immaculate" last year, like Illinois Novice and Minnesota Undergrad). Instead of complaining about hard sets being played, why don't you channel that energy into trying to convince more southeastern schools to host mirrors of those novice events, and mirrors of regular season events like Terrapin, Penn Bowl, T-Party, and the like, along with attending ACF Winter and Regionals. Also, like, best I can tell there were a some of the tournaments that would fit the niche you are calling for that Georgia Tech didn't attend last year that did happen to be mirrored in the South (like Regionals at Vandy and Titanomachy at Alabama), along with FEUERBACH already at South Carolina this year. Thus, I find it very hard to take your criticisms of difficulty seriously if you aren't going to attend the events that are more accessible near you.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Charlie, he's also critiquing the sets qualitatively. He likes tossups with anecdotes in them, like, he enjoys Marlowe tossups going on bar fight clues.

If he thinks that that stuff is good, then there's nothing that novice/regular events being mirrored will do for him. Which is why I merely consider that he has views that the rest of us don't share, and that's fine as long as they don't have real effects that damage quizbowl.
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Re: RESULTS: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by ericblair »

Your Genial Quizmaster wrote:the top ten scorers (including open players) also took home books as prizes.
Oh great! I was number eight! When do I get my book? =D
Your Genial Quizmaster wrote:Carey Cantrell of Tennessee A was Rookie of the Year.
I see one other rookie on the individual stat section that outscored Carey Cantrell of Tennessee A; that would be Ryan Thompson of Georgetown College. He is a freshman this year who just came up from Russell High School. Credit due where credit deserved.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by cvdwightw »

Hey, we can all objectively agree that (1) the Minnesota Open was an awesome tournament and (2) teams in the Southeast don't have the knowledge to play at that level yet. If it is Taylor who's posting that stuff, he did show up to ACF Nationals one year - he's played on hard questions before, been the "trooper" type, and apparently he doesn't like that. Fine.

Here's the thing, though: teams in the Southeast have been complaining about the "good quizbowl" tournaments as "too difficult" or whatever since at least 2005, probably earlier. And, you know, everyone else was able to tolerate the widely varying quality of the UTC tournaments (from "Whoa, this isn't bad" to "If you are not at the tournament yet turn around and go home") because it was still quizbowl and people were at least trying to put on a tournament.

The issue is twofold: first, that several teams in the South continue to have this idea that questions should be gettable in the first line or they're too hard, regardless of the actual answer. As antiquated a view as this is, the problem is not the "questions should be gettable in the first line" - most "casual" players don't have the attention span for more than two sentences - the problem is that there is no apparent sense of difficulty. I find it amazing that these people (or at least the stereotype of these people) think that an eight line tossup on Abraham Lincoln is too hard, while a three line tossup on an obscure Civil War battle is easy. Yes, this is the standard argument everyone makes when people from the South complain that "Tournament X was too hard". Yes, there is empirical evidence that the difficulty of the "garden-variety-bad" version of the UTC tournament ranges from high school to post-nationals, so don't play the "this is the same thing you guys always say" card. A corollary to this is the lack of understanding about what constitutes a clue. Sure, "killed in a bar fight" is a trivial clue, but it's a clue nonetheless, as people can actually buzz off it. Three lines of vague description lifted directly from an art history textbook is not a clue. Personal anecdotes are not clues. Hitting Ctrl-C Ctrl-P does not necessarily mean that whatever you just copied out of Wikipedia is a clue.

Second, it seems that no one is stepping up to actually write this stuff. I'm pretty sure Charlie is prominent enough in that circuit that he doesn't care if the tournaments get blasted, as long as people show up and have a good time and are encouraged to come back for other, better tournaments like ACF Fall/Regionals. But in order to run these kind of "casual player" tournaments which resemble quizbowl in that there are 10 point tossups and 30 point bonuses, someone has to actually write the questions. Let's face it, the South may not be ready for "open" difficulty tournaments, and maybe everyone in the South wants to play Taylorbowl and buzz five words into a tossup on Marlowe, I don't know. But it seems like no one is willing to even write those questions - more and more you see Charlie asking for freelance submissions because too many teams have signed up and not enough packets have come in. There are deeper issues here, and I think it's that the people who are lambasting not-good quizbowl are the people writing questions and the people complaining about good quizbowl are the people not writing questions. If you want to go play "quizbowl" with three-line questions that competent players can get in ten words or less, a trash clue every other tossup, and a 1/1 Civil War distribution, no one is stopping you - there are plenty of weekends out there that have no tournaments, and you certainly wouldn't be "hurting" the circuit if you ran one, say, last weekend. The reason that you can't do this is that no one is writing those questions, because the only people who are writing questions anymore are the people who are at least trying to write good questions.
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Re: RESULTS: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by AndyShootsAndyScores »

ericblair wrote:
Your Genial Quizmaster wrote:Carey Cantrell of Tennessee A was Rookie of the Year.
I see one other rookie on the individual stat section that outscored Carey Cantrell of Tennessee A; that would be Ryan Thompson of Georgetown College. He is a freshman this year who just came up from Russell High School. Credit due where credit deserved.
I think he may be saying that this is Carey's first year playing quizbowl (maybe?). If it was just "highest scoring freshman," I believe Adam would've won Rookie of the Year.
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Re: RESULTS: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by ericblair »

AndyShootsAndyScores wrote:
ericblair wrote:
Your Genial Quizmaster wrote:Carey Cantrell of Tennessee A was Rookie of the Year.
I see one other rookie on the individual stat section that outscored Carey Cantrell of Tennessee A; that would be Ryan Thompson of Georgetown College. He is a freshman this year who just came up from Russell High School. Credit due where credit deserved.
I think he may be saying that this is Carey's first year playing quizbowl (maybe?). If it was just "highest scoring freshman," I believe Adam would've won Rookie of the Year.
Word. Yes, credit to that kid then for being the highest scoring freshman. I'm glad you cleared that up for me.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Matt Weiner »

gtechnerd wrote:I do think that the COTKU questions were good, for extremely good players/teams. Clearly FSU, South Florida and others did OK on the question set, and I think Charlie did a good job of running the tournament as always. I also have played on a competitive team before, back in high school, and I know how much you can improve by spending every weekend studying, writing up 50+ page lists of plot summaries, and devoting massive blocks of time to quizbowl.
But I also think that there needs to be a place for players who just want to enjoy a good tournament
OK, here's the point: That place is "every other tournament." Generalizing that "all quizbowl is getting harder" from your sample size of one is idiotic. Yes, the MO was very hard; too hard to run in the circumstances it did at UTC, in fact. I'm not sure who decided it was a good idea to mirror it at UTC in the first place; whether that was Minnesota or UTC, whoever it was had a fairly poor idea and Minnesota, in my opinion, definitely should have declined doing it if it was Steinhice who brought the idea to them. But, MO is one tournament. There are people, notably not including you, who bust their assess for weeks on end to produce tournaments such as EFT, ACF Fall, ACF Regionals, MUT, Illinois Novice, and Penn Bowl, just to name SIX accessible tournaments that ran in 2007-2008 which either did not exist, were much harder, or were of terrible quality two years previous to that. Quizbowl is not getting harder; every good editor in quizbowl is working hard to make good tournaments easier. Even if your false premise that quizbowl were getting harder were true, your conclusion is both tautological and infuriatingly reliant on a ten-year-old nonesense trope. "Grad students and good freshmen" are the only ones who can play good quizbowl? So what, you've proven that "the only people who are good at quizbowl are grad students who are good at quizbowl, and also non-grad students who are good at quizbowl"? Give the man a goddamn Nobel Prize.

(My Minnesota Open-winning team and its combined 0 hours of graduate school attendance also thank you for your insight. I am a currently unenrolled possessor of a BA, and my teammates were a junior at his second tournament ever, a freshman, and a high school student. Here is who is good at quizbowl: people of any age or type who choose to become good at quizbowl.)
and don't want to have to make quizbowl a high priority, and I think that is something that quizbowl is losing, the casual player who takes a few notes, writes a packet every once in a while, but doesn't care to learn Inuit mythology, Turkish literature, or obscure experiments verifying existing EM theories.
Haha yeah fuck those other parts of the world WOOOO AMERICA USA NUMBER ONE BOOT IN YOUR ASS! Only pointy-headed elitist liberals care about what goes on in different cultures.
I certainly don't mean to downplay the accomplishments of EFT and ACF with their Fall and Winter tournaments, which I expect will be as high quality and as accessible as always, but in the Southeast I have noticed a slight trend to more difficult tournaments, particularly at UTC, but also elsewhere. Moon Pie last year had a median bonus conversion arround 10 points, compared to the 17 points they had at Sword Bowl.
You know, I was not very tolerant of this bullshit from Harry Nelson last year (still waiting on what those mysterious "politically biased" questions in FICHTE were, btw--day 211 of you forgetting to open your e-mail client?) and I'm not going to hear it from you now. Moon Pie last year was going to be another packet-submission UTC tournament that likely would have looked a lot like any other, until the designated packet editor's brother died in an accident a few weeks ahead of the date, and he was unable to edit the tournament for obvious reasons. Charlie Steinhice asked to mirror my Fake ICT tournament (which was advertised as Division I ICT level from the start and in fact met that goal) in order to be able to provide a set of questions to the field instead of cancelling the event. In other words: the reason you had to play these questions is because somebody fucking died. Think about someone besides yourself and your meaningless PPG for a second before you start pontificating on the evil grad student conspiracy to prevent people who refuse to learn anything from winning more games.

Even aside from that, Sword Bowl is designated as a JV tournament. Why wouldn't a tournament for a general audience, such as a normal Moon Pie, be harder? Your comparison makes no sense.

And, for what it's worth, this was not the first Moon Pie even that I edited. I was one of the people involved in the super-easy Moon Pie 2005 which Seinhice and, if he is to be believed, his field, lambasted for having questions that were too long and a lot of other shit that has nothing to do with actual difficulty. I've provided Moon Pie sets at both extremes, and it seems that neither easy or hard questions are what you want; what you want is bad questions. You say as much below...
UGA moved from an NAQT Div II tournament to a much more difficult Div I style tournament the last two years, and it has had an effect.
UGA hosted a collegiate tournament on high school questions in 2006-2007, then they hosted an MLK/Terrapin mirror (aka, an actual collegiate tournament) in 2007-2008. Is that the difference between a "Division II tournament" and a "Division I tournament"? Can you not use a private language that we have to decode?
I haven't seen Emory as often as two years ago, Agnes Scott's team never got off the ground due, in large part, to the huge knowledge base that the players just couldn't assimilate in practice
Your evidence that this had anything to do with difficulty is what? Especially in the Southeast, where you can in fact play a full schedule of high school questions and Steinhice-edited material, at least until last year, I'm not inclined to take your word as to the reasons for the normal ebb and flow of participating teams.
and I haven't noticed Oakwood in a while
Oakwood is a Seventh-Day Adventist school that won't play on Saturdays. You very likely will see them at Sunday tournaments in the future. Why do I, a person in Virginia, know that, and you, a person in Oakwood's region, not? Is it because you're making things up to support your retarded point rather than making the slightest effort to get the actual facts?
I've also noticed players on Tech's team who leave due to practices being too difficult, and even good players may go to one tournament, and decide they have better ways to spend their time because they just don't want to have to rebuild their entire quizbowl knowledge base to adapt to college.
OK, let's change all of quizbowl and make it completely fake and worthless in order to appease a bunch of pussies who quit at the first opportunity. No wait, that's a terrible idea!
In short, we are becoming so difficult and competitive that we lose some of the opportunity to just have fun answering questions, bringing up our favorite anecdotes (died in a bar figh... BUZZ! Marlowe) and play quizbowl.
your are wrong
I know that its good to have strongly competitive tournaments with very serious questions as regional and national level tournaments, but it seems that many of the easy tournaments that don't necessarily have immaculate questions like EFT get blasted on this forum, even though they are really an opportunity for teams that aren't at the Vandy-Georgia-FSU level to compete and have fun at. Being stomped on questions that you recognize the answers to beats getting stomped on questions where you don't even recognize the questions in the field you are getting your degree in.
Bad tournaments will be criticized for being bad. Good tournaments with easy questions will continue to exist; in fact, more of them will continue to exist every year. Go play them. Stop demanding that tournaments be bad. Jesus Christ.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by 49-Mile Scenic Drive »

AndyShootsAndyScores wrote:
ericblair wrote:
Your Genial Quizmaster wrote:Carey Cantrell of Tennessee A was Rookie of the Year.
I see one other rookie on the individual stat section that outscored Carey Cantrell of Tennessee A; that would be Ryan Thompson of Georgetown College. He is a freshman this year who just came up from Russell High School. Credit due where credit deserved.
I think he may be saying that this is Carey's first year playing quizbowl (maybe?). If it was just "highest scoring freshman," I believe Adam would've won Rookie of the Year.
Didn't Carey play for Lincoln County back a couple years ago? Or might there be another Carey Cantrell?
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by ericblair »

Edit: Some stupid bullshit that I said and apologize for.

Seriously though man, you can't go to a tournament and finish near the bottom and then come on a message board and bash the whole shit. You have no right. You are obviously undeserving. These tournaments are designed to reward the best teams and your team just wasn't one of them. It's no one's fault but yours for not trying to learn more. If you think that quizbowl isn't that important now that you are in college, or maybe if you're upset at the change in difficulty (which makes perfect sense to me--High School difficulty < College difficulty), then perhaps you should just drop. Like some have already pointed out, it is a bad idea to change for a few people who want to play on the same ole shit when there are a slew of people that do want to get better and test their knowledge accordingly. How fair would it be to have a tournament full of questions with buzzer races at the beginning? Not very. Maybe you should see about joining the Kentucky Collegiate Quick Recall League [kcqrl.org]. I'm sure they would gladly accept you, although the questions in that league are sometimes the worst ever.

Sure, the material at COTKU was difficult, but most of it wasn't so terribly obscure. Dorr's Rebellion, Kalidasa, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and numerous others I have all seen answered by high school students. And don't whine about how people at GA Tech won't be on your team because they suck and, as Matt Weiner stated, are of a category known as "pussies." Just suck it up and TRY to do YOUR best by putting in some effort, which it appears that you are not doing.

Good luck with all that. And hope to see you at a future tournament.
Last edited by ericblair on Mon Oct 27, 2008 10:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by derogatorysphinx »

Amy from Georgia Tech here.
Maybe it's just the sensitive female in me, but I really wish everyone would stop being so inflammatory with sweeping generalizations.
Please don't insult an entire program because of one person's comments. It's not quite fair.
Thanks.


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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by AndyShootsAndyScores »

ericblair wrote:I have a feeling GA Tech aren't going to be going to as many tournaments from now. I hope that's not the case though because that's one less team I'm able to beat by myself.
Adam should be going to as many tournaments as he can, so they shouldn't die out that easily.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Adam Liem be straight ballin, muthafuckaz.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Sometimes I try to give a long-winded explanation of the context of my views about why having weird opinions is only bad if you actually harm other people with them, since it's your right to never have as great a quizbowl experience as the rest of us, but you can't take that away from other people, but that's really not worth it. Instead, I'll rephrase my beliefs by stealing someone else's words.
Matt Weiner wrote:
I've also noticed players on Tech's team who leave due to practices being too difficult, and even good players may go to one tournament, and decide they have better ways to spend their time because they just don't want to have to rebuild their entire quizbowl knowledge base to adapt to college.
OK, let's change all of quizbowl and make it completely fake and worthless in order to appease a bunch of pussies who quit at the first opportunity. No wait, that's a terrible idea!
Yeah, this.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Your Genial Quizmaster »

Mark wrote:
AndyShootsAndyScores wrote:
ericblair wrote:
Your Genial Quizmaster wrote:Carey Cantrell of Tennessee A was Rookie of the Year.
I see one other rookie on the individual stat section that outscored Carey Cantrell of Tennessee A; that would be Ryan Thompson of Georgetown College. He is a freshman this year who just came up from Russell High School. Credit due where credit deserved.
I think he may be saying that this is Carey's first year playing quizbowl (maybe?). If it was just "highest scoring freshman," I believe Adam would've won Rookie of the Year.
Didn't Carey play for Lincoln County back a couple years ago? Or might there be another Carey Cantrell?
He did indeed. And to answer the confusion, the term Rookie of the Year was used to denote the top-scoring player among those playing at their first ever collegiate tournament. It's possible that someone who scored ahead of Carey might also have been at their first tournament, but if so, it wasn't noted as such on the registration form. Feel free to correct that in this forum if it applies.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Matt Weiner »

ericblair wrote:I have a feeling GA Tech aren't going to be going to as many tournaments from now. I hope that's not the case though because that's one less team I'm able to beat by myself.
This is a horrible post. See, my post was pretty forceful, but it was directed at one person for some dumb things he said. You have falsely generalized him to the entire GT program, while also insulting their competitive abilities, which have no relevance to the validity of his/their opinions about things.

Other people at GT have made their good opinions and promising futures as players known, and I do not share Eric's confusion of that one person's post with the entire team's mentality.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Your Genial Quizmaster »

I agree with Dwight on this point:
cvdwightw wrote:Second, it seems that no one is stepping up to actually write this stuff. I'm pretty sure Charlie is prominent enough in that circuit that he doesn't care if the tournaments get blasted, as long as people show up and have a good time and are encouraged to come back for other, better tournaments like ACF Fall/Regionals. But in order to run these kind of "casual player" tournaments which resemble quizbowl in that there are 10 point tossups and 30 point bonuses, someone has to actually write the questions.
Absolutely. One of the reasons I'm not editing college questions anymore is that I got tired of scraping for packets. There have been some notable exceptions, including Billy Beyer of Florida State, Eric Douglass of South Carolina, and --surprise! -- Taylor Kulp of Georgia Tech. But by and large, the supply of good questions submitted in a timely manner has shown a growth trend similar to my 401(k), or rather 201(k) now.

I'm willing to write a lot of questions myself -- and contrary to the impression a casual reader might get of our tournaments from this forum, the stuff I actually wrote myself has never been the stuff we got ripped for -- but between my job and the volume of questions I've had to write for our high school tournaments, I just don't have time to write that many college questions too. This is no country for old men.

A second issue, for me, is that the canon has expanded and deepened to the point that it's really hard to write stuff that hasn't already been written. I write a lot of questions using real live reference books, but you'd be surprised how many times I've written a question and later found that I wrote a very similar question eight or ten years ago, probably starting with the same source. After you've edited 26 college tournaments, 23 high school tournaments, and 4 summer masters' events, it all runs together.

I'll disagree with Dwight on this point, though:
cvdwightw wrote: There are deeper issues here, and I think it's that the people who are lambasting not-good quizbowl are the people writing questions and the people complaining about good quizbowl are the people not writing questions. If you want to go play "quizbowl" with three-line questions that competent players can get in ten words or less, a trash clue every other tossup, and a 1/1 Civil War distribution, no one is stopping you - there are plenty of weekends out there that have no tournaments, and you certainly wouldn't be "hurting" the circuit if you ran one, say, last weekend. The reason that you can't do this is that no one is writing those questions, because the only people who are writing questions anymore are the people who are at least trying to write good questions.
Actually, I've found the opposite to be true. In the last three years or so, teams who have no idea how to write a good question have been more likely to submit packets than teams that should know by now. I can think of several specific examples, entire rounds written by well-intentioned novices who have no idea what a pyramidal tossup is supposed to look like. I appreciated the effort, and I usually did the best I could to write full-length tossups around their giveaway clues and answers. But while the packet authors would often thank me for the editing work I did, the finished product would still get me ripped, or at best meet with silence on the boards. So I'm putting my time and effort into high school questions, where four-sentence pyramidal tossups are considered pretty challenging rather than too easy.

More thoughts shortly...
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Your Genial Quizmaster wrote:So I'm putting my time and effort into high school questions, where four-sentence pyramidal tossups are considered pretty challenging rather than too easy.
You are aware of the false dichotomy between length and difficulty, and on top of that the completely external issue of quality, right?
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by ericblair »

Matt Weiner wrote:This is a horrible post. See, my post was pretty forceful, but it was directed at one person for some dumb things he said. You have falsely generalized him to the entire GT program, while also insulting their competitive abilities, which have no relevance to the validity of his/their opinions about things.

Other people at GT have made their good opinions and promising futures as players known, and I do not share Eric's confusion of that one person's post with the entire team's mentality.
Yeah, you are right (thus the edit). I did assume he was talking on behalf of the whole team because there was a part in one of his previous posts that talked about people on his team just thinking questions are too hard and going to one tournament only never to be seen again. Another thing I assumed was that because he was the core (that is, the top scorer--if i remember correctly) of the Div 1 team and finds the general trend to be repulsive, that GA Tech would go away. Because many times when a good core player leaves, that means a hiatus for the program. But now that I look at the Div 2 results I do see that they have promise. Hopefully, someone that won't bitch so much. But yes, many apologies to GA Tech.

The comment about their abilities wasn't meant to be arrogant. It was sympathetic (or empathetic?) if anything, because, as you can see in the results, GA Tech and I were kind of in the same boat. In fact, they were a hair from beating me and my teammate. It's kind of like how black people can say "nigga" to one another, but white people can't. If that makes any sense. Probably not. I suppose what I should've said was "Damn, if they drop from the circuit then that is one less team that I can compete with because I, too, am not competitive in quizbowl." Sorry for all the shit, GA Tech.

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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

My lord!
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Dalton »

ericblair wrote:It's kind of like how black people can say "nigga" to one another, but white people can't.
You're too stupid to have a good time!
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Usually it's my fault that threads start to blow.

Okay, granted, maybe this one is on me, too.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Matt Weiner »

hey eric blair

consider posting in newspeak from now on
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by The Time Keeper »

everyday847 wrote:Usually it's my fault that threads start to blow.
No reason you can't use this as an opportunity to make that stop being horribly true!
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by ericblair »

Dalton wrote:
ericblair wrote:It's kind of like how black people can say "nigga" to one another, but white people can't.
You're too stupid to have a good time!
That was intentionally made to be silly. But in a way, the analogy does make sense. Had it been someone that is ungodly at quizbowl saying that then it would've been different. But I think I made it clear that I didn't mean it that way.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Your Genial Quizmaster »

Don't faint, folks, but I agree with Matt on some key points here, plus he offers further food for thought:
Matt Weiner wrote:Yes, the MO was very hard; too hard to run in the circumstances it did at UTC, in fact. I'm not sure who decided it was a good idea to mirror it at UTC in the first place; whether that was Minnesota or UTC, whoever it was had a fairly poor idea and Minnesota, in my opinion, definitely should have declined doing it if it was Steinhice who brought the idea to them.
It was my idea, and I underestimated the level of difficulty. Had I known, I still would have held COTKU as a Minnesota Open mirror, but I would have advertised it differently. Or perhaps... well, I'll get to that later. Regardless, we genuinely appreciate Minnesota's hard work and their willingness to let us mirror.
Matt Weiner wrote:But, MO is one tournament. There are people, notably not including you, who bust their assess for weeks on end to produce tournaments such as EFT, ACF Fall, ACF Regionals, MUT, Illinois Novice, and Penn Bowl, just to name SIX accessible tournaments that ran in 2007-2008 which either did not exist, were much harder, or were of terrible quality two years previous to that. Quizbowl is not getting harder; every good editor in quizbowl is working hard to make good tournaments easier.
Agreed (except for the slam at Taylor. Cut him some slack -- he may not be writing entire tournaments, but he has pulled his weight as one of the most consistent packet producers in the Southeast for the past few years.) The increased volume in quality tournaments at easy-to-moderate difficulty is a positive development on all counts.
Moon Pie last year was going to be another packet-submission UTC tournament that likely would have looked a lot like any other, until the designated packet editor's brother died in an accident a few weeks ahead of the date, and he was unable to edit the tournament for obvious reasons. Charlie Steinhice asked to mirror my Fake ICT tournament (which was advertised as Division I ICT level from the start and in fact met that goal) in order to be able to provide a set of questions to the field instead of cancelling the event. In other words: the reason you had to play these questions is because somebody fucking died. Think about someone besides yourself and your meaningless PPG for a second before you start pontificating on the evil grad student conspiracy to prevent people who refuse to learn anything from winning more games.

Even aside from that, Sword Bowl is designated as a JV tournament. Why wouldn't a tournament for a general audience, such as a normal Moon Pie, be harder? Your comparison makes no sense.

And, for what it's worth, this was not the first Moon Pie even that I edited. I was one of the people involved in the super-easy Moon Pie 2005 which Seinhice and, if he is to be believed, his field, lambasted for having questions that were too long and a lot of other shit that has nothing to do with actual difficulty.
For the record, I thought at the time that the 2005 Moon Pie/J'Accuse/BLAST/(etc.) questions were too long, but at a fair level of difficulty for a late-season tournament, especially the tossups. I was in the minority, though -- the attendees, including some veterans, complained loudly about difficulty. Just for argument's sake, I went back and skimmed through the 2005 packets, and I don't think the complaints about difficulty were justified. As for the tossup length, I did word counts on five packets from the 2005 set. They averaged about 120 words a tossup. A similar check of the last Moon Pie I actually edited (2006) yielded an average of 97 words; five rounds from this year's Minnesota Open averaged 156 words per. My personal preference runs more toward 100 words, but 120 is probably closer to current college standards.

Before tragic events forced us to change plans, Moon Pie 2008 was intended to be closer to current tournament standards than past UTC tournaments. Seth Kendall is already working on Moon Pie 2009, with the same intent. Matt and Jerry were very gracious to allow us to mirror FICHTE; ditto Andrew, Rob and Gautam for MUT. In the process, we stumbled onto a formula that holds real promise for the future. FICHTE was well-received by the Division I players at Moon Pie (including me, I might add), while MUT got positive reviews from Division II. If we'd had a similar arrangement for COTKU, it would have worked better.

Based on the reaction from Moon Pie, for our September high school tournament, I experimented with modifying the sets slightly for varsity versus JV. In most cases, this meant writing four bonus parts, with the easiest one used in Division II (grades 7-10) and the hardest one used in Division I. I also customized instructions on acceptable answers, prompts, etc., to the division level. Based on comments from the readers -- who were the only ones who could really tell -- this seemed to work just fine.

Years ago, when Samer Ismail was editing Penn Bowl and I was editing Sword Bowl, we did something similar. Samer and I swapped raw material, which he edited up to the intended level for Penn Bowl while I adapted it to the junior bird level for Sword Bowl. This also gave us double the chances of catching errors, which helped both events.

In the Southeast, but the circuit is about 40% varsity teams interested in more challenging questions, and about 60% newer teams and community colleges who aren't there yet. We could simply hold separate tournaments on separate weekends -- except that many schools field teams in both divisions and travel together, and even the jucos often share rides with nearby varsity teams. I don't know if other regions have similar situations. There are, as Matt notes, good tournaments that are suitable for both levels. But would other people be interested in partial stratification of packets at some events? This would allow us to turn up the heat for Division I without totally burning Div. II. I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts on the matter.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Your Genial Quizmaster wrote:There are, as Matt notes, good tournaments that are suitable for both levels. But would other people be interested in partial stratification of packets at some events? This would allow us to turn up the heat for Division I without totally burning Div. II. I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts on the matter.
This is notably what we're doing for the playoff packets of HI, and so I think it's not a bad idea; it's not as important as it might be in high school, but it's something to try.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by vandyhawk »

Charlie, I thought the arrangements for Moon Pie last year were pretty ideal. People knew what they were signing up for in DI for FICHTE, and that was a great event to get us ready for nationals events. FICHTE was too hard to be enjoyed by the DII crowd, though, so the choice of using MUT questions instead was fantastic. In terms of preferences for things like this in the future, I think the best thing would be to have everyone's favorite designation of a "regular difficulty" tournament that both DI and DII crowds can enjoy. If you want or there is demand to host a harder tournament, I'm somewhat torn on whether it's better to do something like the FICHTE / MUT split, or to use a modified form of questions for different divisions. With the way bonuses tend to go these days, the latter option may be a little tougher than it was several years back.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Captain Sinico »

gtechnerd wrote:...obscure experiments verifying existing EM theories.
By which I guess you mean my "not at all obscure experiments verifying gravitational theory general relativity?" This criticism is well wide of the mark in every way.

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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by grapesmoker »

Captain Scipio wrote:
gtechnerd wrote:...obscure experiments verifying existing EM theories.
By which I guess you mean my "not at all obscure experiments verifying gravitational theory general relativity?" This criticism is well wide of the mark in every way.

MaS
He might have been referring to the Trouton-Noble question. Still, it's pointless to complain about a question that is about one of the experiments crucial to providing evidence for special relativity.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Captain Sinico »

Fair enough.
Also, I'd like to defend Civil War questions... but perhaps that would be best served by another thread.

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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

grapesmoker wrote:He might have been referring to the Trouton-Noble question. Still, it's pointless to complain about a question that is about one of the experiments crucial to providing evidence for special relativity.
Yeah, hard tournaments are hard. I didn't know what was going on in that question since I don't pull things / I'm not very good, but that's no actual reason to complain. Hard science questions make good science players happy; someday, I'll be ecstatic that something hard is coming up because it allows my knowledge to shine. It would have been inappropriate at an easy tournament when the idea is more to let good science players shine by powering the fuck out of a tossup on "photosynthesis."
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by AKKOLADE »

ericblair wrote:User was banned for one month for this post because it contains a racial slur. Racist language from anyone, regardless of color, is not tolerated and will generally result in a permaban.
I am quoting this for emphasis. Under no circumstances should you ever, ever do this.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by SnookerUSF »

Thanks for doing this Fred,

Though I am sure it was not meant in earnestness, it is a dangerous thing to comment on even in jest or for analogy's sake. I wanted to say something, but far be it from me to be a backseat moderator.

To Charlie's query:
I agree with Matt wholeheartedly that the situation at last year's Moon Pie, i.e. different sets for Div I. and Div II, was as close to ideal (the tardiness of the packets aside) as is possible for the current state of the Southeastern Circuit. Though I do recognize the possible unlikelihood of finding two tournaments that are being created for approximately the same date that are of significantly different difficulty levels that could be mirrored in such a way, not to mention the possible additional cost to UTC in mirroring two tournaments (though no doubt deals can be worked out).

So as another possible solution, you could have the Div I. teams write Div II packets, and mirror a tournament for the Div I players. Theoretically, Div I. teams should have experience in writing packets; moreover, you wouldn't have to worry about packet integrity, all things being copacetic, since no Div I. player would be playing on any questions he or she wrote and thus you could pool all the questions you received from Div I. teams and construct a tournament set. Of course, this reintroduces all of the issues of previous tournaments about having enough questions, but I would argue (though I grant that this debatable as well) that it is easier to write/edit novice level questions. As I have typed the previous statement, I am already doubtful of the veracity of my argument, but I leave it out there.
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by Captain Sinico »

For the record, I did the actual banning.

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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by quizbowllee »

So... Is this MO set available yet? I'd love to take a look at it. Seeing as many, MANY of the Div. II players were alumni from my team, I've heard interesting stories about the difficulty. I'd like to see these for myself (and maybe subject my high school team to them in practice :twisted: ).
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by vandyhawk »

quizbowllee wrote:So... Is this MO set available yet? I'd love to take a look at it. Seeing as many, MANY of the Div. II players were alumni from my team, I've heard interesting stories about the difficulty. I'd like to see these for myself (and maybe subject my high school team to them in practice :twisted: ).
Link is in the main MO announcement/results thread.
Matt Keller
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AndyShootsAndyScores
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Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: COTKU at UT-Chattanooga 10/18/08

Post by AndyShootsAndyScores »

quizbowllee wrote:(and maybe subject my high school team to them in practice :twisted: ).
NO DONT
Andy Knowles
Brindlee Mountain, '08
University of Alabama, '12
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