Gottfried Keller Results

Old college threads.
Locked
User avatar
Skepticism and Animal Feed
Auron
Posts: 3238
Joined: Sat Oct 30, 2004 11:47 pm
Location: Arlington, VA

Gottfried Keller Results

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Statistics are available here:
http://bowl.uchicago.edu/results/Keller ... dings.html

Congratulations to all who distinguished themselves today. I trust that a tournament official will briefly arrive to make a more formal announcement.
Bruce
Harvard '10 / UChicago '07 / Roycemore School '04
ACF Member emeritus
My guide to using Wikipedia as a question source
User avatar
Birdofredum Sawin
Rikku
Posts: 400
Joined: Tue Nov 09, 2004 11:25 pm
Location: Mountain View

Post by Birdofredum Sawin »

Thanks to "Bruce" for posting the results. Because of the bracketed play, the actual final standings are as follows:

Your Gottfried Keller champion: The Devil Wears Pravda
2nd place: Week on Hack
3rd place: Quo Vadimus
4th place: Banner of the Upright Seven
5th place: Three Righteous Combmakers
6th place: The Lost Smile

And the consolation bracket:

7th place: The Virgin and the Devil
8th place: Dorothea's Flower Basket
9th place: Mind of Mencius
10th place: Mirror, the Cat
11th place: The People of Seldwyla
12th place: A Village Romeo and Juliet

Thanks to everyone who came out to play the tournament, and special thanks to Adam Kemezis, Seth Teitler, Selene Koo, and Jerry Vinokurov for helping out. If anyone wants to purchase the questions, email me at adyaphe at gmail dot com; it's $10 for the 10 packet set. Also, I think all the mirrors should be done by now, so feel free to post criticism, commentary, what have you.

Andrew
User avatar
fizzball
Wakka
Posts: 170
Joined: Tue Mar 21, 2006 4:51 pm
Location: Evanston, IL

Post by fizzball »

Andrew & Zeke, thanks very much for putting this together, and thanks to all for coming out.

The questions were fine overall. The set did some things that should be done more often, but also some very annoying things, and I'm trying very hard not to let that irritation excessively color what was in truth a positive experience. More later, when I have access to the post I was late to work composing.
User avatar
Mike Bentley
Sin
Posts: 6461
Joined: Fri Mar 31, 2006 11:03 pm
Location: Bellevue, WA
Contact:

Post by Mike Bentley »

Thanks to Andrew and Zeke for writing 10 entire packets by themselves. The tournament was very well editted. However, I did have some complaints about the questions in the tournament.

I understand that this tournament was writing about what Andrew and Zeke like, but I don't really see how the 1 meta question per packet and things like 1/1 Hip Hop were enjoyable for almost anyone but the writers.

Overall, this felt like much more of a "TRASH Canon" tournament than a popular culture tournament. The distribution seemed very heavily weighted to the big TRASH categories of Sports, TV, Music, and Movies (it seemed like between 16 and 18 of the 20 of the tossups / bonsues fell within these categories), leaving very little room for the small subcategories that I usually enjoy the most in a trash tournament. The exclusive use of the 10/10/10 bonus format also, for me at least, took some of the fun out of the tournament.
User avatar
grapesmoker
Sin
Posts: 6345
Joined: Sat Oct 25, 2003 5:23 pm
Location: NYC
Contact:

Post by grapesmoker »

ikillkenny wrote:I understand that this tournament was writing about what Andrew and Zeke like, but I don't really see how the 1 meta question per packet and things like 1/1 Hip Hop were enjoyable for almost anyone but the writers.
I was reading for this tournament and the meta questions were enjoyable for me. They made me laugh and I stand behind any attempt to integrate meta-quizbowl questions into the trash canon, especially if it means more questions on Matt Weiner's head.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
User avatar
Mike Bentley
Sin
Posts: 6461
Joined: Fri Mar 31, 2006 11:03 pm
Location: Bellevue, WA
Contact:

Post by Mike Bentley »

grapesmoker wrote:
ikillkenny wrote:I understand that this tournament was writing about what Andrew and Zeke like, but I don't really see how the 1 meta question per packet and things like 1/1 Hip Hop were enjoyable for almost anyone but the writers.
I was reading for this tournament and the meta questions were enjoyable for me. They made me laugh and I stand behind any attempt to integrate meta-quizbowl questions into the trash canon, especially if it means more questions on Matt Weiner's head.
While the Weiner quesiton was funny, crap like the 1996 Georgia Tech team tossup just perplexes me and reinforces the idea that a lot of trash is written for the geezer crowd. Close matches being decided on 'power tossups' and twice on Lee Henry just seem ridiculous to me.
User avatar
Skepticism and Animal Feed
Auron
Posts: 3238
Joined: Sat Oct 30, 2004 11:47 pm
Location: Arlington, VA

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

ikillkenny wrote: I don't really see how the 1 meta question per packet and things like 1/1 Hip Hop were enjoyable for almost anyone but the writers.
By this you mean to say that 1/1 Hip Hop was way too little, right?
Bruce
Harvard '10 / UChicago '07 / Roycemore School '04
ACF Member emeritus
My guide to using Wikipedia as a question source
User avatar
Matt Weiner
Sin
Posts: 8145
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2003 8:34 pm
Location: Richmond, VA

Post by Matt Weiner »

I guess meta is a controversial thing, although I will note that all should have known what they were getting into. As for the rap stuff, that's a terrible category for me but I can't complain; it's obvious that a lot of people, including a lot of people in quizbowl, are rap fans and I was seeing those questions converted by one team or another just about all the time in the matches I was playing. Also, the 10-10-10 bonus format is simply the most fair way to ask a bonus, as more elaborate discussions of the point regarding academic events have demonstrated.

I found the excessive reliance on lyrics and albums for the music a little tedious, and would have liked to see some more creativity in tossups along the lines of what's being going on lately on the academic side of things. For example, common link tossups on something mentioned in several songs, instead of another tossup on one song. Also, I would have enjoyed a little more video games and comic books at the expense of some of the mainstream categories, but whatever.
User avatar
QuizbowlPostmodernist
Wakka
Posts: 115
Joined: Wed Aug 13, 2003 12:22 am

Post by QuizbowlPostmodernist »

Matt Weiner wrote:I found the excessive reliance on lyrics and albums for the music a little tedious, and would have liked to see some more creativity in tossups along the lines of what's being going on lately on the academic side of things.
It can't possibly have been worse than Capital Punishment....2 I think it was.... which was written/edited by Shawn Pickrell and crew. I believe that 50% of the music questions were name the artist and the other 50% were all lyrics-based from the same Brazilian website. (The sports questions were also apparently all written from the same sports almanac, leading Mike Burger to actually complain that there was too much hockey.)
User avatar
Birdofredum Sawin
Rikku
Posts: 400
Joined: Tue Nov 09, 2004 11:25 pm
Location: Mountain View

Post by Birdofredum Sawin »

ikillkenny wrote: Overall, this felt like much more of a "TRASH Canon" tournament than a popular culture tournament. The distribution seemed very heavily weighted to the big TRASH categories of Sports, TV, Music, and Movies (it seemed like between 16 and 18 of the 20 of the tossups / bonsues fell within these categories), leaving very little room for the small subcategories that I usually enjoy the most in a trash tournament. The exclusive use of the 10/10/10 bonus format also, for me at least, took some of the fun out of the tournament.
While the Keller distribution is proprietary information, you are welcome to attempt to reverse-engineer it from the answers provided at the tournament.

Andrew
User avatar
fizzball
Wakka
Posts: 170
Joined: Tue Mar 21, 2006 4:51 pm
Location: Evanston, IL

Post by fizzball »

Our team name was "The Devil READS Pravda." By the end of the day, our correction followed by Andrew's "whatever" was slightly more amusing than the actual name. Guess we needn't have bothered sending in a team name, since one was chosen for us anyway. :roll:


Movies - The movie questions were solid throughout. They set out to do things a little differently and succeeded. I'd gladly play on a movie theme tournament by these guys.

Music - Perhaps overskewed toward the one era of hip-hop/R&B I know things about. On the other hand, the questions did neat things with quality jazz and world music; things which are underrepresented in most trash, where it's all Kenny G and Enya. The music Qs did contain the only error I noticed in the set; the Kylie Minogue/Nick Cave duet is "Where the Wild *Roses* Grow." The question called them wild flowers.

Sports - I didn't give full attention to the sports questions, given who my teammates were, but too many seemed to be "Transaction Bowl": "An Xth-round draft in Z out of Y, he played at A, B, and C, before being traded to D."

TV - Way underrepresented. I believe Mike counted 2.5 per set, where movies and sports had 4-ish per set. What was there seemed fine.

Power placements: Overall, powers seemed placed too late. "Culture Club" after Hay, Moss, & Craig should not have been for power. Likewise "Nebraska" after Bob Devaney. And especially, if a clue ("formerly the St. Patricks") induces a buzzer race, then the answer ("Maple Leafs") should not be awarded power.

Would have been nice: to see some visual bonuses. This has been an area of increasing coolness in trash in recent years. Clearly Andrew and Zeke know a bunch of stuff, and I'd be interested in what they'd come up with.

And now, Metaquizbowl. Metaquizbowl is not an innovation. It was drummed out of trash some years ago along with "buzz in and lick the player to your right" and "FAQTP, buzz in and say 'Mad Cow Disease.'" Four people off the street should be able to come in, get the rules, and play. They might get schooled, but they should at least have an idea *why* something is being asked. Prior knowledge of the QB subculture should not be a performance barrier. No disrespect to Lee Harvey or Matt Weiner's Head, but there's no reason I should ever be asked about you. A game shouldn't come down to how closely a person reads this board or the Y! board or someone's blog. At best, these questions are cliquish and insular. At worst, they hurt the game by discouraging new participants.
Matt Weiner wrote:I guess meta is a controversial thing, although I will note that all should have known what they were getting into.
I suppose an argument could be made that CO weekend (can't speak for the mirrors) is for the circuit's veteran players, and my hypothetical newbie quartet is moot. Meta questions are one thing, and I can either hope they're a passing fad, or simply exclusive to this event and base future decisions on that. Extraneous, jokey meta content in otherwise non-meta questions is another thing, and is more unfortunate. I knew to expect some meta, but I didn't expect pseudofactual namedrops about QB players to be inserted into questions. This practice was not only wankish and juvenile, it actually subverts the notion that "ACF-style questions are longer because each part is worthwhile."
ikillkenny wrote:While the Weiner quesiton was funny, crap like the 1996 Georgia Tech team tossup just perplexes me and reinforces the idea that a lot of trash is written for the geezer crowd.
Yes, and this is especially unfortunate because the geezers are not the people you hear praising the meta. As for me, I got my fill back when it was all "name the school from terms from its lexicon," busting on Deb Fuller, and the ins and outs of the "Meow" wars.

If you *really* like these questions, the one place they belong is in theme packets. It's been a while since John Edwards (IIRC) wrote the first Quizbowl Allstar pack, and maybe a few more would get this crap out of everyone's system.
User avatar
Matt Weiner
Sin
Posts: 8145
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2003 8:34 pm
Location: Richmond, VA

Post by Matt Weiner »

Your argument that meta questions are a barrier to new players is self-evidently true and is why such questions are restricted to events like Chicago trash that are pretty clearly not designed to be taken too seriously. But I don't get the problem with joke clues that don't help or hurt anyone in getting the question. They're funny, and a few words here and there are far less of an influence on match length than chattering between questions. We hear all the time about how hypothetically Funn it is to have anecdotes about the time Jim Varney drove through Chattanooga or fifteen questions about Internet cartoons; why can't we have something that a lot of people in the field actually did find amusing?
Rothlover
Yuna
Posts: 815
Joined: Wed Feb 25, 2004 8:41 pm

Post by Rothlover »

I am quoting this from Robert Flaxman's site, since I believe his opinion is part of the discussion, and it is a public site. It is not out of any desire to extend a vendetta, it is, quite honestly, for the discussion, (as are the comments.) I have my own thoughts to add soon, but I just had an absurd flight back.

Sayeth: Bigflax

"'And they wonder why we don't play ACF'

We went to the Trash tournament that followed the ACF-style Chicago Open today. It was supposed to be like "Trash written like ACF questions," and if you ask me, it proved why there is generally so little overlap in the two communities and why this doesn't figure to change anytime soon.

First, the good:

* Things generally ran pretty quickly, although there was a sizable post-lunch delay while playoff brackets were worked out, I think because there were some computer issues.

* It's a good time playing with an Alma/Colby/Tyler team.

* The questions weren't too bad.

And the bad:

* The places where the questions were bad, however, they were pretty bad. It was more just that the overall style was problematic; you could see the places where the writers had limited knowledge. Pretty much every sports tossup went one of two ways:

"Drafted by team, he was traded to other team for some guys. Later he was traded to another team for some other guys. But you would know him mostly from this one team, and here's the really famous thing he did."

or:

"In year, this player had these stats. Later he had these stats. Drafted out of college, he had these stats in his rookie year, and then later he was traded, after which he had these stats."

Just very cookie-cutter, and not indicative of knowing anything about sports beyond how to access baseball-reference.com. In fact, a lot of questions in general seemed to go like this; just a ton of dull listing, and unless you happen to know some guy's batting average in a given year or the eighth track on a band's fifth album, or an actor's bit part from a mid-90s film you've barely heard of, you're going to be doing a lot of sitting until the giveaway rolls around. Is this really how ACF works normally? Why bother having eight-line tossups when the first six are so obscure that they might as well not be there? Bonuses had a similar problem; on a number of occasions we took 20 because the first part of the bonus was so vague that you could barely figure out what was going on, like "This guy played a man in a film. For ten points, name him." Then once you found out who it was, you could actually get the next two parts based on real knowledge. But overall I wasn't terribly impressed by the structure, especially considering that a large part of the reason that tournaments like this exist seems to be that ACF disdains the structure of Trash. I'll grant that Trash sometimes has awkward pyramidality, but even some questions today had certain clues come in too early, and some of the powers ran on forever, well past the point where it seemed like it was still impressive for someone to have gotten it.

* Meta-referential bullshit. I'm sure they had their reasons, whatever they may have been, but I don't think meta questions belong anywhere in any format. Maybe a not-that-helpful clue in a regular question that mentions someone offhand, okay, just for color. No more than once a round or so, though. Here, though, not only were there four or five of those in every round, but there were also various questions like "Name these hsquizbowl.org posters based on profile information" and two tossups to which the answer was Lee Henry, including the very last question of the last round, costing us a chance to tie the game (particularly since I thought it might be Henry but assumed, clearly incorrectly, that they wouldn't repeat an answer). I know this is just one tournament and not necessarily affiliated with anything, but it seems from my vague recollections of message board discussion that a lot of the ACF-related tournaments feature stuff like this, which is conspicuously absent from NAQT and TRASH. I don't understand the point of the circle-jerking, especially if these guys claim to want to be more inclusive. Attend one of these tournaments and it just seems like you're missing a big joke that half the players are in on and half couldn't care less about. It really should just be excised completely.

* This one shitty question. I just have to get this out of my system and I'll be done. There was a question in the final round that started about like so: "One thorn in his side is Jolyon Wagg, who has a habit of descending with his unruly family on Marlinspike Hall." I buzz in and say, "Captain Haddock." Neg. The answer ends up being Tintin.

Now, Tintin is not incorrect there, and of course later clues led exclusively to him. But how can you have a lead-in that not only doesn't distinguish between two main characters in a work but also points better to one when the answer ends up being the other? Wagg is always much more Haddock's nemesis in the Tintin oeuvre, particularly in - IIRC - The Calculus Affair, when Wagg and his family descend on Marlinspike when Tintin and Haddock have left the country chasing the kidnapped Professor Calculus. Marlinspike is really Haddock's mansion, after all; Tintin ends up moving in there, but Haddock really owns it.

You might argue that I just overthought this one. I would argue that it's shitty to write a question about something that punishes someone for having deeper knowledge. Can you name 100 characters from the Tintin books? Yes? Then fuck you. Can you only name Tintin? Congratulations, have these ten points. And, as noted, I would point out that Haddock was, at that point in the question, not only a perfectly acceptable answer but also a BETTER answer, and that at a tournament where there were entire bonuses on genres of music that eight people listen to, Captain Haddock doesn't seem like he should be too obscure an answer to come up.

That question virtually ended up deciding the last game (since the other team picked it up, of course, and we only lost by 40), so it annoys me much more than it would have otherwise, but ultimately I considered protesting and then decided not to because I simply didn't care enough.

And that's the ultimate lesson that I took out of today's tournament. For the first time in a long time, I didn't keep score (except the one round where I kept official score for the reader), and I didn't write down my tossups for the first time since freshman year of college. And this is the only post you're getting, rather than some big rundown. It's not that I don't still enjoy playing quiz bowl on occasion... it's just that I'm rapidly growing out of it. Alma feels the same way, and if either of us is still playing within three years, I think I'd be pretty surprised.

I think you should have protested, if only to prove a point.

Though dragged down significantly by the metaQB nonsense, overall they were fine. In particular, I'd play on a movie theme event written by those guys any day.
Greg | Homepage | 07.31.06 - 2:32 pm | #

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I think they played fine, but the more I went back and thought about the overall style, the more it seemed to me that far too many of the questions were basically written as lists of things so initially obscure that no one in their right mind would know them for multiple lines. What's that testing, other than your ability to listen to six lines of poorly-written tossup without passing out? That's what happens when you have a mere two guys writing a tournament - any part of the distribution they don't know gets faked, and not necessarily well.

That said, the fakery wasn't so terrible that I was fuming all day; it took the ridiculousness of that last game to get me to it. So at least there was that. I guess.
Flax | Homepage | 07.31.06 - 5:47 pm | #

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Actually, if you look at the statistics, 25% of all correct tossup answers were powers, which seems to indicate that the opening clues were not so useless as you imply. You probably should have protested the Haddock/Tintin buzz; while it's true that there's no way Haddock would be the answer, you still had a right to get the question based on knowledge, and I imagine the TDs would have upheld your efforts. Complaining after the fact without giving them the chance to rectify it when they could have seems a little unfair.

end of comments in post.
Dan Passner Brandeis '06 JTS/Columbia '11-'12 Ben Gurion University of the Negev/Columbia '12?
User avatar
Birdofredum Sawin
Rikku
Posts: 400
Joined: Tue Nov 09, 2004 11:25 pm
Location: Mountain View

Post by Birdofredum Sawin »

Hey, before this discussion spirals out of control I wanted to say a few things. First of all, thanks to everyone for coming out and playing our little tournament. Just in case it wasn't clear, the Keller (like the Richler before it) is intended to be something of a lark. Subash and I introduced it as an amusing postscript to the Chicago Open. So we toss in made-up clues that we find entertaining, or write occasional tossups on things like "Matt Weiner's head." If you enjoyed them, or didn't enjoy them but found enough other things to like in the set, great. If you hated the whole thing with a fiery passion, well it's just one goofy tournament. It's not an official ACF tournament. It's just something that might amuse people who are already going to be around for the Chicago Open, or who really like the trash. In particular, it's something that one would only know about if one read the forums, which is why the "meta QB" questions didn't seem so terribly unreasonable to us.

Andrew
yoda4554
Rikku
Posts: 254
Joined: Thu Aug 11, 2005 8:17 pm

Post by yoda4554 »

I enjoyed the tournament overall, in that there were lots of questions on things I'm interested in and that I felt good about getting questions right on subjects I knew things about. I liked the emphasis on good whole albums,

Then again, I don't know enough about sports to know if the format alluded to by Flax (which is accurate to my memory) was useful. The only one I might comment on is the Willis Reed tossup, which was of a slightly different format and did have pretty useful early clues. I've only played two TRASH tournaments, and I remember thinking the same about the format of their sports (excepting, of course, that those questions were shorter).

I also suck at hip-hop, but as roughly a quarter of the current Billboard charts involve it in some respect, 1/1 of 4/4 music is perhaps not excessive. On the other hand, country (something else I suck at) is also a disgustingly large presence on the current charts, and I don't believe there was much of that at all.

I agree about the absence of TV, and I also missed the minor categories-- in addition to comics and video games, I wish there had been some Broadway, which I believe was only represented by a brief lead-in reference to the musical Nine.

Out of curiosity-- as music people get offended when stuff like lieder and opera are only represented by their text, are there people who want to hear more detailed discussions of guitar solos and beat samples in pop music tossups?

Regarding meta: may I ask what anyone finds funny about replacing the titles of James Brown songs with "Chris Romero," placing Seth Teitler into the plots of assorted things, or speculating on the pornographic preferences of Dan Passner? Or rather, granting that Will Turner building a mini-Playboy Mansion might provoke a smile, what does anyone find funny about the 50th of these in a day (which, sadly, is not exaggerated)? Much like any innocuous repeated action, it's easy to develop a dislike of them.

I'm not entirely against a little meta, particularly at this kind of a tournament. But I think, in addition to there being too much, there are better ways to do it. It strikes me that the way the meta questions were written had all the flaws that people like to complain about at other trash (or any generally bad set of) questions: instead of covering salient aspects of things interesting/important to the history and current state of quizbowl, most of them were trick questions and riddles with ambiguous clues (e.g., the second Lee Henry tossup, if memory serves), targeted at a certain clique of players--while that clique includes many people playing, it certainly isn't inclusive, and given that people on this board do encourage outsiders to come for this weekend because the tournaments are of high quality I didn't believe it was intended to be mostly limited to those players. While I understand that this board is a major part of the community, I don't see why a large majority of the meta questions had to come from things posted here. I would have liked to see a couple questions replaced by things like "He followed a 105-point performance in an upset of Chicago A with 6 straight negs in a loss to his school's D-Team in one 2005 tournament..." and so on.

And arguing that it doesn't matter that a category that appears in every round (is this an increase from the Richler set? I thought that only had four or five meta questions) is frivolous because the tournament isn't supposed to be taken seriously sounds silly to me-- aren't ACF people the ones who (rightly) point out that people playing a tournament should be assumed to take the competition seriously and that every question should be looked at as possibly deciding a game? I would have hated to have been playing Matt's team on the round with the "Matt Weiner's head" tossup, for instance; that kind of thing seems as bad as the NAC having a questions on Kellenberg when Kellenberg was playing. And IIRC, the Wesley Matthews's uncle clue for Diamonds Are Forever is recycled, in addition to being more meta.
User avatar
Matt Weiner
Sin
Posts: 8145
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2003 8:34 pm
Location: Richmond, VA

Post by Matt Weiner »

yoda4554 wrote:I would have hated to have been playing Matt's team on the round with the "Matt Weiner's head" tossup, for instance
Dave Rappaport of whatever team Dave Rappaport was on beat me to that question.
User avatar
alkrav112
Rikku
Posts: 269
Joined: Sun Dec 26, 2004 8:55 pm
Location: Ann Arbor, MI

Post by alkrav112 »

Amidst all this volcanic raving, I just wanted to give my thumbs up to this TRASH tournament. It was my first, and I really enjoyed it. I have to say, all the metaquizbowl (quizbology and such) was a bit much, although I ashamedly admit I knew my fair share of those questions. I can see where somebody unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the system (such as myself) would be clueless on such a bonus as the Harvest Bowl.

AND, even as a Detroit sports fan, it seemed as though Detroit sports were mildly overrepresented, as were college & professional male sports like football/basketball, while obscurer sports (golf, figure skating, women's sports, Olympic sports) were mildly underrepresented.

I also was surprised at the large amount of indie rock in general; who's to say that the grand trio of Rilo Kiley/Dashboard Confessional/The Violent Femmes is more worthy to ask than, say, Thom Yorke or Beyonce or Kanye West? The only tossups on current pop chart-toppers that I can recall are "Hips Don't Lie" and "The Pussycat Dolls," both of which are less than classic. Just saying. It's possible that I just felt indies were overrepresented because I have no real knowledge of them; feel free to tell me so (politely) with counterexamples.

All of that said, I loved the table tennis tossup. That is all.
mmb5
Lulu
Posts: 17
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2005 2:40 pm

Post by mmb5 »

Birdofredum Sawin wrote:
While the Keller distribution is proprietary information, you are welcome to attempt to reverse-engineer it from the answers provided at the tournament.

Andrew
From what I got while scoring:

25% Music
25% Movies
20% Sports (equally divided among Baseball/Football/Basketball/Everything else)
20% Other
10% TV


The 10% TV bothered me somewhat since that is a strong point for me, and when most of the TV was whatever was on the WB or UPN recently (little if any pre-2000 stuff), that meant a lot of non-buzzes for me.

However, it's their tournament and they can have what they want (well, except for the in-jokes and the meta answers, it's just a waste of my time and stake should be driven through the meta-heart as quickly and as swiftly as possible before it jumps into non-trash tournaments). Writing one packet is hard enough, writing ten is applause worthy.


--Mike
User avatar
fizzball
Wakka
Posts: 170
Joined: Tue Mar 21, 2006 4:51 pm
Location: Evanston, IL

Post by fizzball »

Matt Weiner wrote:Your argument that meta questions are a barrier to new players is self-evidently true and is why such questions are restricted to events like Chicago trash that are pretty clearly not designed to be taken too seriously.
Birdofredum Sawin wrote: Just in case it wasn't clear, the Keller (like the Richler before it) is intended to be something of a lark. <snip> It's just something that might amuse people who are already going to be around for the Chicago Open, or who really like the trash. In particular, it's something that one would only know about if one read the forums, which is why the "meta QB" questions didn't seem so terribly unreasonable to us.
Okay, that's cool. This was not clear, actually. Given the high praise and advance hype I heard about this event (people offlist telling me last year's set was the best trash they'd ever played on and other tournaments would do well to emulate it; Passner's claim that it was "becoming one of the biggest trash events out there") I was led to believe it was in fact intended to be taken seriously. If it's intended to be as much of a goof as, say, the aggravating-yet-endearing FOGHAT, then so be it. It was getting positioned (by neither of you, I should add) as much more, however.
Matt Weiner wrote:But I don't get the problem with joke clues that don't help or hurt anyone in getting the question. They're funny, and a few words here and there are far less of an influence on match length than chattering between questions. We hear all the time about how hypothetically Funn it is to have anecdotes about the time Jim Varney drove through Chattanooga
If you're not in on the joke, they're red herrings. FWIW, I dislike the Chattanooga content as well. The Gerbils started writing loosely themed packets at Trashmasters to keep Charlie from adding all that.[/i]
Rothlover
Yuna
Posts: 815
Joined: Wed Feb 25, 2004 8:41 pm

Post by Rothlover »

I'll make this brief post just to get a word in on my thoughts before the thread becomes a creationist "giant sea monster."

I, personally, thought this set was superb, and I spoke to many other people who told me the same (some of those people being part of neither the ACF or TRASH circle-jerks.) I have played in like 25 trash TRASH mTRASH and mtrash events, and seen the sets of pretty much all trash events since '98, and, at the moment, I believe this to have been the best set yet in terms of balance, particularly in terms of bonus difficulty distribution and such.

I am not an inherent ACF fanboy, and this wasn't ACF TRASH for that matter anyway, it was Andrew/Zeke trash. I could care less what spirit references to me were made in by Andrew (though he can always tell me; I personally found them amusing). My only wish is for a clean, well-written set, and this is as close as I've seen effort come to achieving that in the pop-culture format. So, to finish this post, I tip Adam Kemezis' hat to the writers, and offer to toss them Ryan Westbrook's wooden nickle in saying they have more than earned its hobo-y goodness.
Dan Passner Brandeis '06 JTS/Columbia '11-'12 Ben Gurion University of the Negev/Columbia '12?
Rothlover
Yuna
Posts: 815
Joined: Wed Feb 25, 2004 8:41 pm

Post by Rothlover »

fizzball wrote:
Matt Weiner wrote:Your argument that meta questions are a barrier to new players is self-evidently true and is why such questions are restricted to events like Chicago trash that are pretty clearly not designed to be taken too seriously.
Birdofredum Sawin wrote: Just in case it wasn't clear, the Keller (like the Richler before it) is intended to be something of a lark. <snip> It's just something that might amuse people who are already going to be around for the Chicago Open, or who really like the trash. In particular, it's something that one would only know about if one read the forums, which is why the "meta QB" questions didn't seem so terribly unreasonable to us.
Okay, that's cool. This was not clear, actually. Given the high praise and advance hype I heard about this event (people offlist telling me last year's set was the best trash they'd ever played on and other tournaments would do well to emulate it; Passner's claim that it was "becoming one of the biggest trash events out there") I was led to believe it was in fact intended to be taken seriously. If it's intended to be as much of a goof as, say, the aggravating-yet-endearing FOGHAT, then so be it. It was getting positioned (by neither of you, I should add) as much more, however.
[/i]
Greg, I stand by my initial post, and believe this year boasted an even stronger field. It was through the sheer power of your team (and I am more than willing to admit your dominance on this set, even though it might not ideally have played to your strengths, was thoroughly impressive), and not from any flaw in the set that the competition wasn't close.

Looking at the field, the top bracket boasted a winning team that had four players who had previously proven themselves great on trash, who seemingly didn't skip a beat on this. A second place team of a person who eats turkey legs and gets powers, though he had to settle for the latter since he was all out of turkey legs; (said team also featured two players some people think know some trash, and chris can smash.) The third place team was a team that has placed in the top bracket at TRASHionals twice or thrice at this point (forgot which, not meaning to put them down.) Fourth place had two dudes who win some stuff. Fifth was a bunch of people who don't normally play trash (sorice excepted,) showing they know trash, and the bracket was rounded out by a similar team. This doesn't even go on to talk about a bottom bracket with Ken/Borg , Lorin Burte and his teammate, or Dorothea's Flower basket (I can peronally vouch for Roger Cheng's music prowess.)

It WAS about as stacked a field (for trash) as something that doesn't have -ionals at the end.
Dan Passner Brandeis '06 JTS/Columbia '11-'12 Ben Gurion University of the Negev/Columbia '12?
yoda4554
Rikku
Posts: 254
Joined: Thu Aug 11, 2005 8:17 pm

Post by yoda4554 »

I note looking back at my post that, as is easy to do, I ended up overemphasizing stuff I didn't like in a tournament that I did like quite a bit. This is probably because most of the questions were uniformly well-written in a variety of good structures and formats, such that none particularly stand out among the others. And 200/200 is a pretty impressive feat to be uniformly good on, regardless. Also, the tournament provided probably the single funniest thing I've seen in qb, with Colby's power neg from the Leprechaun IV clue of "In the Hood" followed immediately by Dan Klein's correctly powered "In Space."
User avatar
shlack
Lulu
Posts: 46
Joined: Fri Mar 19, 2004 10:45 am
Location: Ohio, U-S-A!

Post by shlack »

Since I negelected to thank them at the time, I just wanted to give kudos to Zeke and Andrew for what I thought was a great tournament set. Definitely worth the $20 spent, if only to answer questions about Newkleus, Iva Majoli, and Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz. Hopefully this will introduce more hip-hop into the canon. Congrats to Greg and Co. for an impressive win, as well.
wd4gdz
Tidus
Posts: 701
Joined: Mon Jan 19, 2004 5:40 pm
Location: Tallahassee

Post by wd4gdz »

I agree that this tournament was great. The meta-quizbowl was very well written, and I hope it sticks around. My only complaint is that sports/music/TV/movies should be equally represented, just as history/literature/science should be equally represented in academic tournaments.
User avatar
grapesmoker
Sin
Posts: 6345
Joined: Sat Oct 25, 2003 5:23 pm
Location: NYC
Contact:

Post by grapesmoker »

Although I don't play trash, I would like to see video games represented more than they are in generic trash distributions.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
code ape, loud voice, general nuissance
User avatar
Mike Bentley
Sin
Posts: 6461
Joined: Fri Mar 31, 2006 11:03 pm
Location: Bellevue, WA
Contact:

Post by Mike Bentley »

grapesmoker wrote:Although I don't play trash, I would like to see video games represented more than they are in generic trash distributions.
I agree. It seems like the standard TRASH distribution is stuck in the early '90s to a certain degree. The popularity of big categories such as Movies, TV, and Pop Music have all seen pretty tangible dips since then, while Video Games and Internet Pop Culture (and likely some other things I can't think of at the moment) have increased dramatically. However, not very many TRASH distributions that I've played in seem to reflect this change in popular tastes.

Naturally you can't go too overboard, as these more recent pop culture phenoms don't the back catalogue of the more established mediums. But if you're going to write a distribution asking for something like 1/1 TV or Movies from each of the past 4 decades, you might as well at least ask about videogames from the past 1 or 2 decades, as their popularity rivals the traditional TRASH staples in recent years, especially amongst the Quizbowl age crowd.
User avatar
btressler
Tidus
Posts: 612
Joined: Fri Mar 26, 2004 7:23 pm
Location: West Chester, PA
Contact:

Post by btressler »

Rothlover wrote:Pretty much every sports tossup went one of two ways:

"Drafted by team, he was traded to other team for some guys. Later he was traded to another team for some other guys. But you would know him mostly from this one team, and here's the really famous thing he did."

or:

"In year, this player had these stats. Later he had these stats. Drafted out of college, he had these stats in his rookie year, and then later he was traded, after which he had these stats."
Let me second the motion of "I wish there was more to sports tossups than this". I've felt the same about these questions for several years now. To combat the trend, I've written about breaking the backbaord in basketball, tennis tiebreakers, and the occasional stadium question. However,

1) I think it's the logical exstension of the removal of "biography bowl". Literature tossups are sounding more and more like "first he wrote this, then he wrote about character X, and you might have heard of work Y". Honestly, unless the athlete has been embroiled in some tabloid fodder or attempted to act, etc, these are the clues I think we're stuck with because it's what we know about them.

and 2) I've noticed that my kids can actually pick these off on the numbers. Since they know more about the athletes than I, I trust that the clues could be worthwhile.
Rothlover
Yuna
Posts: 815
Joined: Wed Feb 25, 2004 8:41 pm

Post by Rothlover »

Anyway, I spent the last couple of minutes crunching some numbers (thanks Windows calculator!), and I found the following.

There were 1200 total tus heard throughout all the rooms (unless there were instances of moderator error I don't know of.

1079 tus were converted, which is 1 shy of 90% conversion. I don't have the latest ABD or ABD mirror (the other fine trash tournament out there) stats handy (or 2 of the last three TRASHionals for that matter), but I'll be damned if a recent open tournament has seen that kind of conversion. That certainly speaks of accessible answers.

the average points per bonus was 15.12, so I'm certainly thinking this is in line with the idea that the bonuses were both well structured, and at least accessible enough to 10 most of the time (30's seemed like something one had to earn, other than the Springsteen and electric razor bonuses.)

18% of tus were powered or 3.6 per 20 tus. Doesn't NAQT shoot for like 1.5 powers per team per round? If so, this would seem to be in line with that, and despite the translucence of a few tus (The 4400 tu, the Oh tu,) those seemed to be the exceptions that proved the rule.)

As far as the point made about good trash players generally not being familiar with 5-6 tus in a given packet (as opposed to academic, where, gasp every decent player will be familiar with 90% of the answers) , I will say this. I do not believe myself to be anything more than a decent trash player, and my skills are certainly more niched (further, this set was lacking in a key area of mine, TV). Despite that, there were only 17 tu answers I was unfamiliar with. I really don't see room for wholesale qualms with this set or any results it may have produced, and this is coming from someone who was mentioned a bunch of times, and allegeldy has "asshole cred" if a rottentomatoes film critic is to be believed.
Dan Passner Brandeis '06 JTS/Columbia '11-'12 Ben Gurion University of the Negev/Columbia '12?
Phil Castagna
Lulu
Posts: 21
Joined: Fri Apr 21, 2006 2:07 pm

Trash answers

Post by Phil Castagna »

Being "unfamiliar" is different from being able to come up with the correct answer in a 5-second time frame. I am "familiar" with many bands, but being able to pull a correct answer on a band that doesn't have a big-time hit single is a tough endeavor, where lack of depth of knowledge can be exploited.

For instance, I know that Gilbert O'Sullivan recorded "Alone Again (Naturally), but if there were a question on him, a clue about a similar-sounding name to operetta composers or the single is the only things I'd be able to get the question.

However, there are many fairly new indie rock bands/singer songwriters of which I am familiar, hear their stuff on a regular basis, but may not be able to identify off a couple album names, place of origin, band member names, or at least be guessing on one of those clues, but may not pull the right answer. Maybe with me it showcases a lack of depth of knowledge, but I would think many trash players would say they'd be in a similar position. The lack of an Alone Again-type clue makes these questions tough to write in a pure pyramidal style, since there is no great "last clue", whereas any question on a top-40 style artist, past or present, always has a last clue.

Phil
WestBerkeleyFlats
Lulu
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Jul 29, 2006 9:27 pm

Naturally

Post by WestBerkeleyFlats »

Man, Gilbert O'Sullivan could write some peppy lyrics.

<i>Alone Again, Naturally
(Gilbert O'Sullivan)

In a little while from now,
If I'm not feeling any less sour.
I promised myself, to treat myself,
And visit a nearby tower ..........
And climbing to the top,
Would throw myself off,
In an effort to, make clear to whoever,
What it's like when your shattered .......
Left standing in a lurch,
In a church with people saying .....
My God, that's tough, she stood him up,
No point in us remaining .......
I may as well go home,
As I did on my own,
Alone again, naturally.</i>
STPickrell
Auron
Posts: 1350
Joined: Fri Nov 28, 2003 11:12 pm
Location: Vienna, VA
Contact:

Post by STPickrell »

QuizbowlPostmodernist wrote:
Matt Weiner wrote:I found the excessive reliance on lyrics and albums for the music a little tedious, and would have liked to see some more creativity in tossups along the lines of what's being going on lately on the academic side of things.
It can't possibly have been worse than Capital Punishment....2 I think it was.... which was written/edited by Shawn Pickrell and crew. I believe that 50% of the music questions were name the artist and the other 50% were all lyrics-based from the same Brazilian website. (The sports questions were also apparently all written from the same sports almanac, leading Mike Burger to actually complain that there was too much hockey.)
Yes, it was CP2. And yes, what is OK for one packet that I write is not OK for 15 packets.
User avatar
solonqb
Rikku
Posts: 461
Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2003 11:00 am
Location: Pasadena, CA
Contact:

Post by solonqb »

yoda4554 wrote: Also, the tournament provided probably the single funniest thing I've seen in qb, with Colby's power neg from the Leprechaun IV clue of "In the Hood" followed immediately by Dan Klein's correctly powered "In Space."
I am proud to report that a quizbowl newbie I brought along powered that on the Leprechaun clue, having seen the movie in question.
Noah Rahman
Welcome to Simbabwe, where the property is already owned and the houses built and you compete to burn and dispossess them. Compete with Robert Mugabe, Canaan Banana, Cecil Rhodes and Sir Godfrey Huggins to earn a place on the all-time EU travel ban list!
Locked