What happened here?

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grapesmoker
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What happened here?

Post by grapesmoker »

I normally don't spend a lot of time perusing stats for tournaments that I didn't attend, so this slipped my attention when it was posted. Nevertheless I'd like to direct your attention to the Toby Keith results.

I don't think I've ever seen a tournament with such abysmally low scores. I mean, the top team didn't even clear 100 PPG and no one had bonus conversion in the double digits. Could someone please explain to me what was in those packets (or send me a copy)? I mean, when a team converts 13(!) points per game throughout the tournament, there's something dreadfully wrong going on.
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Post by yoda4554 »

That's actually not the weirdest thing about those stats. Apparently, the bonuses were not broken down, point-wise, into multiples of 5, leading to games scores such as 96. Thus, either the packets were written by people unfamiliar with qb convention (were all the bonuses worth 30 points?), or something went weird with the stats. Either case would obviously cause weird scores independent of the content of the questions.
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Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

yoda4554 wrote:That's actually not the weirdest thing about those stats. Apparently, the bonuses were not broken down, point-wise, into multiples of 5, leading to games scores such as 96. Thus, either the packets were written by people unfamiliar with qb convention (were all the bonuses worth 30 points?), or something went weird with the stats. Either case would obviously cause weird scores independent of the content of the questions.
It could be Trash's use of an occasional 1-point bonus part. Usually part of a 40-30-20-10-1 bonus.
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Post by Rothlover »

yoda4554 wrote:That's actually not the weirdest thing about those stats. Apparently, the bonuses were not broken down, point-wise, into multiples of 5, leading to games scores such as 96. Thus, either the packets were written by people unfamiliar with qb convention (were all the bonuses worth 30 points?), or something went weird with the stats. Either case would obviously cause weird scores independent of the content of the questions.
Insanely low scores are always the weirdest thing about sets, when such a situation arises.
Dan Passner Brandeis '06 JTS/Columbia '11-'12 Ben Gurion University of the Negev/Columbia '12?
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Mr. Kwalter
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Post by Mr. Kwalter »

Actually, for some reason the packet authors saw fit to include five-part bonuses that were "for six points each." Funn.
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Post by setht »

Through an esoteric process I like to call simple division, I have determined that the packets averaged 16 tossups, so we should scale all those abysmally low scores up by a factor of 5/4, resulting in a bunch of abysmally low scores. Important point, no?

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Post by DVader »

As the captain of the third place team in the tourament (2.5 Men) and the fourth highest scorer (Kareem-Abdul Murdock), I hope to shine some light on what happened. The format of the tournament rounds was 2 periods of 8 10-point tossups with 30 point bonuses plus powers, negs, and supernegs. The first 8 questions were academic and the last 8 trash, and I believe all the questions were written by Jeremy Hixson. The difficulty of the questions could be considered a step above ACF regionals, and most of the questions were quite obscure. It was the lowest scoring tournament I'd ever played in my life. It wasn't that the teams were bad since most of the top teams played in Route 66 the day before (NAQT IS-60 questions) and posted very high scores. The subject matter of most of the questions was just so obscure that most of them went unanswered. The odd scores were because of the 6 point bonus parts.
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Post by kobe_sandler »

As a competitor in the tournament, let me explain some things about Toby Keith. The format is ACF-TRASH hybrid: in a match, the first 8 questions are ACF with ACF bonuses, and the last 8 questions are TRASH with TRASH bonuses. In place of "laming" a bonus, we used a twist called "Christmas Gifts." At any time before the moderator prompts the captain for an answer, the captain can request that a question be "gift wrapped," and the moderator reads the next bonus for the team. At any point in the future when the opposing team gets an easy bonus, your team can call "Christmas Gift" and bestow the wrapped bonus upon the other team. Regifting is allowed (if the opposing team had not wrapped anything yet, when given a gift, they can "re-wrap" the question to give to your team in the future). Each team gets to wrap one gift per round. In addition to this, there were "super-negs" to punish vultures (if a team has already negged, and the other team buzzes early with an incorrect response, that player was penalized with -10 points). The questions were all written by students on the OU team (not sure how many people wrote questions). These questions, IMHO, were insanely difficult (I am, however, a freshman). My goal for the tournament after the first two games was to finish in the black in points (I accomplished this :) Many of the questions seemed to be designed to lead to a commonly known answer, but as I quickly discovered after the first two games (two attempts for two negs), these questions were not typical NAQT style like I had played the day before. Indeed, the neg master of the tournament was a freshman who was a star in high school quiz bowl, who thought he new the answer much more often then he actually did. The combination of the twisted rules and the lack of many accessible questions led to the unusually low scores.
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Post by AKKOLADE »

kobe_sandler wrote:In place of "laming" a bonus, we used a twist called "Christmas Gifts." At any time before the moderator prompts the captain for an answer, the captain can request that a question be "gift wrapped," and the moderator reads the next bonus for the team. At any point in the future when the opposing team gets an easy bonus, your team can call "Christmas Gift" and bestow the wrapped bonus upon the other team. Regifting is allowed (if the opposing team had not wrapped anything yet, when given a gift, they can "re-wrap" the question to give to your team in the future). Each team gets to wrap one gift per round. In addition to this, there were "super-negs" to punish vultures (if a team has already negged, and the other team buzzes early with an incorrect response, that player was penalized with -10 points).
Those are... interesting, to say the least.
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Post by grapesmoker »

DVader wrote:As the captain of the third place team in the tourament (2.5 Men) and the fourth highest scorer (Kareem-Abdul Murdock), I hope to shine some light on what happened. The format of the tournament rounds was 2 periods of 8 10-point tossups with 30 point bonuses plus powers, negs, and supernegs. The first 8 questions were academic and the last 8 trash, and I believe all the questions were written by Jeremy Hixson. The difficulty of the questions could be considered a step above ACF regionals, and most of the questions were quite obscure. It was the lowest scoring tournament I'd ever played in my life. It wasn't that the teams were bad since most of the top teams played in Route 66 the day before (NAQT IS-60 questions) and posted very high scores. The subject matter of most of the questions was just so obscure that most of them went unanswered. The odd scores were because of the 6 point bonus parts.
That was one thing that confused me, since I also looked at the Route 66 scores, and it totally didn't look to me like a bunch of terrible teams; Route 66 seemed to follow roughly the distribution I would expect from a normal tournament. I knew about the half-and-half format of Toby Keith, but I didn't think that would necessarily result in low scores.

Having gotten a look at the questions now, I'm personally wierded out by the answer choices. About half the academic stuff, which is the only thing I can speak about with knowledge, seemed ok, the sort of thing you would find in standard mACF tournaments. Some of it, though, seemed excessively hard, to the point where I seriously doubt that if some of those things had come up at ACF Nationals that more than 2 or 3 people in that entire field would have answered it. As for the trash, I'm pretty terrible at it, but I usually recognize answers (by recognize I mean "it's that one guy I have heard of" type of thing); all I can say is that this tournament was full of things I didn't even know existed. Particularly outstanding was a tossup on the football club Red Star Belgrade (does anyone who is not a hardcore follower of European soccer even know about this team?).

I didn't post this because I want to vent some sort of righteous wrath on the Oklahoma team, but out of general curiousity and amazement at the stats. It's hard to write a tournament by yourself, and maybe this is an indicator that you should know your audience when you select your answers.
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Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

The superneg actually sounds like a worthwhile innovation.
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Post by Mr. Kwalter »

Personally, I don't really think stats from college players playing on high school questions evidence much of anything. However, as a member of the southwest circuit I can certainly say that the teams playing at Toby Keith are not of the calibur that those stats suggest. I have also seen the questions, and I think Jerry was too conservative in his description of the difficulty. A large portion of the academic tossups were of post-ACF nats difficulty. Recently, as an experiment, a number of the nation's top players played on those questions at once, and there were several tossups that weren't converted and many more that weren't converted until the end. I'd like to make it clear that I admire OU for their consistent dedication to packet writing, even if the end result is a set of inappropriate difficulty, and that the tossups, while often way too hard, were by and large pyramidal. Nonetheless, the stats are ridiculous because of the set, not the teams.
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Post by Rothlover »

Yeah, from what I've seen of the set, most of the tus are decently constructed, and would certainly be evidence of a good base in question-writing ability to build off of. However, there were a bunch of tus in the first few rounds that were neg-baitey, or that had a few too many vague clues. The overall problem I'd say with this set was the difficulty. Naming Individual Me First and the Gimme Gimme Albums for 6 points apiece is the sort of thing that would be an appropriate bonus for a mythical Manu-level trash tournament, the same goes for the fake kung fu and anime bonus in there (and these were balanced by the occasional gift bonus on the film career of David Bowie.) I would say that the tournament was largely misguided in its answer selection, but it is always laudable when a team goes to the effort to write a whole set. Hopefully, they will build off the set, and understand that anything critical is less an indictment than suggestions for the future, which could be fairly bright for them.

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Post by MLafer »

It's unfortunate that some people's first experiences with the mACF format (albeit hybrid) had to be this tournament. The academic tossups pretty much conformed to the stereotype that college quiz bowl is "impossible" and that only the best players out of high school should even bother attempting it, which is patently false. I was one of the players that Mr. Kwalter mentioned in his post, and I thought that some of the tossups and bonuses in this tournament rivaled in difficulty the ones at the hardest tournaments I have yet seen, ACF Nationals 2005 and the Manu Ginobili Open. And this was being played not on a field of super teams, but by college teams in the southwest, a relatively weak region.

I just wanted to clarify that this is NOT what mACF (or ACF -- some new players still don't know the difference) is generally like. Play ACF Fall. You will actually be able to answer many tossups, and possibly be allowed to receive 10 points (or even more!) on a bonus.

Maybe when I receive the packets I will try to constructively point out some things by example.
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Post by aspearl »

As I have been a member of the Oklahoma Academic Team for more than three years, the past two as treasurer, I feel I should offer what insight I have in regard to the many concerns that have been expressed over the Toby Keith Un-American Way Extravaganza (or TKUWE, for short)...

As previously stated on this thread, there is only one writer for Toby Keith- OAT's VP, Jeremy, who also happens to be the tournament's creator and coordinator. A handful of questions came from others, but he pretty much writes the entire tournament on his own. I will say right now, I certainly appreciate that he is dedicated enough to the team to pretty much create a tournament from scratch in order to generate funding for the team.

Several members of the team have expressed concern over the tournament being too intense, and I think that any future incarnations of TKUWE must be toned down a notch or two. While striving for a challenging packet set is commendable in one sense, driving away teams as a result is an undesirable outcome. It's obvious that this isn't merely one team complaining about a bad performance- several parties are concerned about the vast discrepancy in points (BTW, the IS packet used for Route 66 on Saturday did seem a bit on the easy side by NAQT standards, and I think the high scoring there reflects that to a degree).

I am not sure at this point whether there will be a TKUWE 4 in the spring, or how packet writing will be done if the tournament does happen, but if there is a tournament held we can hopefully make some changes that improve everyone's playing experience. I'm sure that we can make future tournaments more enjoyable without sacrificing academic integrity.

-Andrew S. Pearl, OAT

(BTW, if there are any specific questions out there, I can try my best to answer them)
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