Chicago Lit Singles Discussion

[SnookerUSF]

Hello,

As a note to begin the discussion, if you would like the questions that were not included in the packets proper which includes 18 extra tossups and 17 tossups in the Packet of Death, please e-mail me: aragab at mail dot usf dot edu.

I would like to thank everyone who patiently stayed around until 2am in the morning to listen to our questions, we worked hard on them and appreciate your conviviality in the matter. I hoped you enjoyed them and learned something in the process. Jonathan did an excellent job taking input from the other writers and balancing them judiciously with his own desires. Any failings in the rounds are not due to him. I would also like to thank Seth and Selene for organizing the pizza arrangements.

Regards,
Ahmad

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

I would like to join the bandwagon and say that this was a fucking brilliant set of questions. Even though I could only stay for 7 games (holy shit, it took till 2) I thought what I heard was great and I have 0 complaints.

[ValenciaQBowl]

Man, 2 a.m., and then having to get back to hotels and such: I'm impressed by the gumption shown by the folks who played the lit tournament.

Going off Eric's point in the Announcement section about some questions being too hard, well, as he implied, this is the tournament where that's generally okay. Jonathan's good editing suggestions kept it from being even harder, like turning toss-ups of mine from being on "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" and "The White Album" into toss-ups on Tutuola and Didion, respectively, among others.

I really, really enjoyed the process of writing and sharing ideas with the other writers. Some of the draft questions generated over a dozen comments, many of which went beyond points about qb stuff and into more interesting avenues of readership and analysis. So it was a bunch of fun.

I did tend to think that all of us at times were guilty of worrying the difficulty of lead-ins (and sometimes middle clues) too much. My co-writers surely tired of my contention that when writing, clues often seem easier than when one is hearing them in competition. Even though we were writing for what is traditionally the toughest field in the business, or maybe because of that, I still thought we were putting some power marks too early and/or making some things pretty hard to get till the last two lines. But again, CO weekend is one place where you might as well err on the side of too tough.

I saw how many powers individuals got in Ahmad's post in the other thread; is there a way to know how many questions total were powered (skipping overlaps, etc.)? And of course I'm interested to know what those who played thought.

[No Rules Westbrook]

Ok, well, I'll post as promised in the other thread. This was a really great set and should be seen as a shining example of how to write such an event. Power marks were reasonably placed, questions were dense and filled with substantive and interesting clues, answer selection was varied and interesting, and there were hardly any silly tossups or ones that became simple buzzer races. It would be tough for me to even invent something to complain about in this set, and as one of qb's leading complainers Eric mentions in the other thread, that should speak volumes.

[grapesmoker]

This was one of the best sets I've played in some time. I think Jonathan and the folks who helped him did a stellar job.

[theMoMA]

I don't want to sound like a broken record, but this set was awesome. It was perfectly balanced and I don't remember any egregiously transparent questions. For the most part, the power marks were hard but consistent, which is all that really matters. As fun as Chicago Open was, playing lit singles was by far the most purely enjoyable event for me last weekend.

[wd4gdz]

What was the distribution used in the packets?

[magin]

The ideal distribution was 5 American, 5 British, 5 European, and 5 World/Genre/Criticism/Miscellaneous; some packets deviated from that by one or two questions.

Generally, I also tried to include tossups on at least 3-4 poems, plays, and novels, and 5-6 authors per packet. Also, myself and the other authors ranked every tossup on a scale from 1-6 (with 1 being answerable by everybody and 6 requiring extremely deep knowledge); I tried to include four 1s, seven 2s, five 3s, three 4s, and one 5 in each packet.

[yoda4554]

I'm also glad people enjoyed the tournament, and want to cheer Jonathan's competence as a solid chief editor who I believe spent an ungodly amount of time doing last-minute editing over the past week.

For curiosity's sake, I was wondering what the people playing thought: of the lit. crit. tossups, which several of us were interested in gently easing a little into the standard distribution; were the unreasonably difficult tossup subjects, as I'm curious to know what generally dropped and what didn't; of what I believe (though I haven't numbers) was a greater focus on post-1900 lit. than is typical of a high-level ACFish tournament; of what I think was a greater number of easy-answers-with-hard-clues type of tossups than is typical at a high-level tournament.

[magin]

After generously counting any tossup that involved several 20th century clues as 20th century, there were 125 tossups about the 20th century and 135 tossups on pre-20th century stuff.

[grapesmoker]

For curiosity's sake, I was wondering what the people playing thought: of the lit. crit. tossups, which several of us were interested in gently easing a little into the standard distribution; were the unreasonably difficult tossup subjects, as I'm curious to know what generally dropped and what didn't; of what I believe (though I haven't numbers) was a greater focus on post-1900 lit. than is typical of a high-level ACFish tournament; of what I think was a greater number of easy-answers-with-hard-clues type of tossups than is typical at a high-level tournament.

I thought this was pretty cool and was glad to see literary criticism tossups.

[Captain Sinico]

This was my favorite tournament of the past two years; absolutely superb. Thank you.

MaS

PS: So many negs!