Georgia 2007-2008

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Post by AlphaQuizBowler »

About the County tournament-
Congratulations to Chattahoochee on going undefeated to win. Thanks, Mr. Roundtree, for your compliments. We've been working hard this season. We lost to Centennial by ten points, so as Mr. Roundtree said, it was definitely a close tournament. I won't be attending the State tournament, so Alpharetta will be without its full A Team, but the other players are great and could still "surprise some people".
The questions were bad. Some examples:
These three women had snakes for hair...Not Gorgons, but Furies
Not accepting or even prompting on Chapman for Johnny Appleseed.
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Post by Ben_Dodson »

elrountree wrote:We have played Brookwood, Walton, Norcross, Grayson, Alpharetta, Centennial, Roswell, and other 5A schools this year. Those teams have the ability to bite you if you are not on top of your game.
I would throw Central in there as well. Although not as strong as they were last year, Central has one guy (patrick?) who can really get on point when needed. At cedar shoals a few weekends ago, the match really wasn't decided until the last 5 questions, of which we luckily swept 4 of the 5. They also beat us at Berry by around 2 TU, although admittedly I was so tired at that point I was having trouble concentrating. I didn't even realize we were behind until the last two toss ups but by then it was too late.

on another note, Norcross also loses 2 top players to all-state orchestra and another to chinese school on March 1st. Our a team should still be good though. it's going to be the seniors team that was at Walton/Vandy basically.
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Post by Rountree »

Yes, Central Gwinnett would be in that group as well. I believe we have only played them once this year (at UGA?) and we won a pretty good game. Those 7 teams that I mentioned (plus Central) will most likely comprise the top 8 in some order at State 3 weeks from now. As I said earlier, I am looking forward to a very competitive and fun State tournament this year.
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Post by AdamL »

Well at least the Furies did have snakes for hair, so it wasn't factually incorrect. But it was definitely a hose. Not prompting on Chapman is annoying, and it probably wouldn't have been a problem if the readers were more experienced. But that said...

These questions were actually better than they have been in the past... (note: DEFINITELY still terrible, but better than before) I'm not sure if they were always QU, but I remember such gems from previous years as:

Tossup: "How do you serve clams?"
Tossup: "What is a donnybrook?"
Tossup: "Why do birds fly in a V-shape?"

and my personal favorite:
"If you were standing on the surface of Venus, what would the Earth look like?" (Our player: "um... a big, blue... ball." Correct answer: "the brightest object in the sky")

Edit: I forgot about at least one more:
"What are the two largest islands south of Cape Cod?"
Our answer: "umm... Borneo and New Guinea?"
Correct answer: Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.
We didn't win the protest.

Wish I was kidding about those... they've become the stuff of legend around our team (particularly the memory of a former teammate spending a full minute talking about aerodynamics and "slipstreams" when trying to answer why birds fly in a V-shape, only to have the reader cut him off with "okay okay, it's correct")

Additionally, they used to have a bunch of questions like "Identify the gerund in the following sentence... [sentence]" and you buzz as soon as you hear a word ending in -ing (it was NEVER not the gerund)... I think I remember one, possibly two grammar-related tossups this year, but it was certainly less than before. This year I thought the questions had a surprising amount of quizbowl-type knowledge, but they were at such a disappointing level of writing quality that it kind of got overshadowed... One of the best examples I have was a tossup on Goya that started out basically saying "He was an artist from Spain active in the late 18th century..." (did not give any specifics whatsoever) and then went on saying "blah blah blah, Caprichos", at which point I buzzed... but, unless I'm missing somebody here, it was pretty much going to be Goya anyway, so I should've just gone with it. Problem is, some of the time, on a hypothetical tossup, it would NOT be Goya, and the question would totally turn, and then we'd be kicking ourselves for not waiting.

It'd be amazing if they could just buy NAQT or something... (I mean, they're spending money to get QU anyway, right?) it'd lend a bit of legitimacy to the win. As it is, it feels pretty dirty winning this tournament. And 10 tossups per match is... yeah. Unfortunately, this is the only way I know of to qualify for High-Q, so.... guess we gotta continue to attend. Plus we miss a day of school, that's always nice.

[/end rant about crappy tourney]

It doesn't look like Centennial is signed up for the UGA tourney, which sucks. Would've been nice to play them on some legit questions at least once before State. After seeing them play, though (even on those questions), I agree that they could be a sleeper team. Alpharetta has been getting better too (and to answer your question, Ben, I'm pretty sure you're referring to AlphaQuizBowler), but I'm not sure about Central Gwinnett. I only saw them play at Berry, and they did get a couple of tossups against us, but it was more of a "unexpectedly easy tossup coupled with us not really focusing" situation than a "they owned that question". Then again, as Mr. Rountree said... if you aren't focusing, that kind of thing tends to happen, and any of these teams could beat you.
Last edited by AdamL on Tue Feb 19, 2008 4:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Ben_Dodson »

AdamL wrote:
Tossup: "How do you serve clams?"
Tossup: "What is a donnybrook?"
Tossup: "Why do birds fly in a V-shape?"
Hmm...How/Why questions. Great for literary analysis. Horrible for quizbowl.

I'm surprised to hear the County Tournament for Fulton is so horrible. Gwinnett has used NAQT for as long as I have been playing. However, after playing Hi-Q, those QU questions sound closer to what might be asked on the game show. For some reason, people don't like to watch academic team when it actually involves academics.
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Post by AlphaQuizBowler »

Any predictions for the upcoming UGA tournament? Most of the teams discussed as the top teams in the state are attending. Dorman's also bringing two varsity teams, so it should be interesting.
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Post by NoahMinkCHS »

I predict we will have multiple tossups about how to serve clams...

Only kidding, of course. We look forward to seeing everyone. It should be a very competitive tournament.
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Post by Gunnells »

From the eight teams mentioned, I think about half are the group of teams that should win state, and half teams that could win it.

I still consider Chattahoochee the favorite, followed by Brookwood and Walton. If they use the same weird preliminary format that undervalues the first half by excluding bonuses, there will probably be some weird seedings that could force those three to play before the semis.

Last season, we got a win against Grayson that we probably should have lost, and lost two matches we probably should have won largely due to the absence of first half bonuses.

As for the Tournament at the Arch, I predict the likely winner will not be a factor at the state championships.
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Post by Ben_Dodson »

for UGA... I predict

1. Dorman A
2. Dorman B
3. Brookwood
4. Walton

Assuming those teams are carrying their full a-teams.

Also Gunnells, we probably should have lost to Grayson and, coincidentally, we did lose to Grayson. We went 4-4 in the prelims for that tournament, losing all 4 on the last question. If State does that thing with the bonuses again, then I expect Norcross to be royally screwed again. Our bonus conversion has never been as good as some teams, and that format just hurts us way too much. Having a format in which a TU in the second half is worth three times as much as a TU in the first half, yet both TU are of the same length is nonsensical. You might as well randomly assign point values to all the questions and bonuses if you're going to do that.

For State....I predict...

1. Chattahoochee
2. Brookwood
3. Norcross
4. Walton
Last edited by Ben_Dodson on Tue Mar 04, 2008 5:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by AlphaQuizBowler »

So at State last year, the first half didn't have bonuses? Was there a reason why they did that?
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Post by Xerxes »

Ben_Dodson wrote:for UGA... I predict

1. Dorman A
2. Dorman B
3. Brookwood
4. Walton

Assuming those teams are carrying their full a-teams.

We (Walton) will not be carrying our full state team at UGA.
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Post by ragnarok2012 »

AlphaQuizBowler wrote:So at State last year, the first half didn't have bonuses? Was there a reason why they did that?
my wild guess is that Mr. Barry wanted to try to simulate a 4 quarters tournament instead of the reviled 20TU/Bonus. :smile:
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GATA state

Post by jburnsOHS »

The GATA BOARD OF DIRECTORS decided to change the tired old format of strict tossup/bonus a few years ago for the state varsity tournament, and we've played under this new format for at least a couple of years. Nothing wrong with variety. We're always open to suggestions. When WE (the BOARD) discuss such matters, we have to look at factors like availability of questions and time constraints for example.
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Post by Ben_Dodson »

ragnarok2012 wrote:
AlphaQuizBowler wrote:So at State last year, the first half didn't have bonuses? Was there a reason why they did that?
my wild guess is that Mr. Barry wanted to try to simulate a 4 quarters tournament instead of the reviled 20TU/Bonus. :smile:
The 20 TU/bonus rounds is superior to the 1/2 bonus rounds they use at State. Of course, I might be biased since our team did lose several rounds due to this format. However, I remember at least two rounds in which our team scored more toss-ups than the other team and 30'd most of the bonuses that we got (although most of the bonuses were fairly easy). Despite this, we still lost the match because the opposing team got 1-2 more toss-ups in the second half, thus essentially making Norcross the Al Gore of the tournament. I blame the system.
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Re: GATA state

Post by First Chairman »

jburnsOHS wrote:The GATA BOARD OF DIRECTORS decided to change the tired old format of strict tossup/bonus a few years ago for the state varsity tournament, and we've played under this new format for at least a couple of years. Nothing wrong with variety. We're always open to suggestions. When WE (the BOARD) discuss such matters, we have to look at factors like availability of questions and time constraints for example.
Would you like for me to move this topic over to theory?
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Post by ragnarok2012 »

Ben_Dodson wrote:
The 20 TU/bonus rounds is superior to the 1/2 bonus rounds they use at State. Of course, I might be biased since our team did lose several rounds due to this format. However, I remember at least two rounds in which our team scored more toss-ups than the other team and 30'd most of the bonuses that we got (although most of the bonuses were fairly easy). Despite this, we still lost the match because the opposing team got 1-2 more toss-ups in the second half, thus essentially making Norcross the Al Gore of the tournament. I blame the system.
What type of questions will be used for state?
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Post by jrbarry »

For the past three years, GA has played this way at State.

all prelim matches have 20 tossups and 10 bonuses.

last three matches or playoff matches in 5A, have 20 tossups and 20 bonuses.

About 30% of any NAQT set is unusable to us in Georgia, for our State Tournament. We all like NAQT questions, but our question formula, which is balanced by subject, and our use of only two-part bonuses, and our aversion to TRASH limit us to what we are doing now.

I have noticed absolutely no difference in results than when we tried to use 20T/B in the many years before changing to what we are using now. The abrdiged format really has made no difference in determining the top 4 finishers in any classification.
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Post by Rountree »

I agree that it might seem unfair if your team gets 11 TUs and your opponent gets 9 and you end up losing; however, that is not the case in my experience (at least not 99.9% of the time).

If you are playing in a prelim match at State you know that before the round begins the second half is more crucial that the first half. That means that a more knowledgeable team, as opposed to a faster team, should be rewarded by their superior bonus conversion and deeper subject knowledge regardless of whether they get all the TUs or not.

If you get more tossups than your opponent but can't convert the bonuses and you end up losing, that is your own team's fault - not the system's.

Quiz Bowl is all about learning more info than the next team and being ready/able to use that knowledge at the most crucial times, like the second half of State prelims.

As Mr. Barry pointed out, this "unfair" discrepancy disappears completely in the playoffs, where the top teams are supposed to be...in theory.

I predict at UGA next weekend:
1. Dorman A
2. Dorman B
3. Dorman F
4. Dorman Q
Or some small derivation thereof.

My predictions for Varsity State have not changed.
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Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

I'm personally confused about how you would standardize the distribution if all you have is 10 bonuses.
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Post by ragnarok2012 »

I agree with Charlie on that point. I also don't see the problem with doing 20Tu and 20 bonuses. Yes, someone said it adds variety, but the benefit of a more balanced round seems to outweigh that. To me, theres nothing wrong with doing all the bonuses.
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Re: GATA state

Post by ragnarok2012 »

Will Run PACE for Reese's wrote:
Would you like for me to move this topic over to theory?
Since this is GA state, I ask that you keep in the GA section please.
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Post by Captain Sinico »

elrountree wrote:If you are playing in a prelim match at State you know that before the round begins the second half is more crucial that the first half. That means that a more knowledgeable team, as opposed to a faster team, should be rewarded by their superior bonus conversion and deeper subject knowledge regardless of whether they get all the TUs or not.
That's not right. When you attach bonuses to only half the tossups, you make it less likely that a more knowledgeable team is rewarded by their superior bonus conversion since bonus conversion matters much less, even ceteris paribus; since the size of the sample of bonuses used to poll that team's knowledge is necessarily not increased and very probably reduced; and since you make it matter when a team gets a tossup rather than just whether the team gets a tossup. I see no good reason for such a format, especially in a tournament that tacitly acknowledges that 20/20 is superior by playing the important matches in it. Can anyone see a good reason to use a 20/10 format (understanding that that is the DECISION of the BOARD, etc?)

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Post by Ben_Dodson »

If you are playing in a prelim match at State you know that before the round begins the second half is more crucial that the first half. That means that a more knowledgeable team, as opposed to a faster team, should be rewarded by their superior bonus conversion and deeper subject knowledge regardless of whether they get all the TUs or not.

If you get more tossups than your opponent but can't convert the bonuses and you end up losing, that is your own team's fault - not the system's.
I agree with you Mr. Rountree....on the one stipulation that a team cannot convert bonuses. However, if both teams have near perfect bonus conversion, this is no longer valid. If a team gets more tossups than the other team, and 30's their bonuses, why should they not win, especially since 20 TU are multi sentence and of the same difficulty?

Just because there has been no change in Brookwood and Walton dominance in the finals rounds of State, does not mean there are not teams during the prelims that are getting royally screwed. Furthermore, because the playoffs results have not changed over the years, perhaps this is further testament to the strength and superiority of the 20/20 format over the 20/10 format. If the 20/10 format is still a fair format, then why not include it in the playoffs and squeeze out a few more pennies for the bucket? I would imagine that any coach or player would be upset if they lost a State title despite perfect bonuses conversion and superior quantity of tossups. If this is the case, why not extend the same courtesy to all teams at all levels?
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Post by jrbarry »

1. There is nothing sacred or even important about using 20 T's and 20 B's as a match format. That is our position in Georgia and it has been our position for over 20 years. We have used T/B formats because they seem the easiest for many inexperienced readers to handle.

2. I already gave the logic for using what we use. We simply cannot get 20T's and 20, 2-part B's out of an NAQT set according to our questions formula. (5 social studies, 5 language arts, 5 science, 2-3 math and 2-3 fine arts per match). We need 11-12 rounds of questions for our State Tournament. We use purely academic questions.

3. For me to believe that the abbreviated matches in our prelims are NOT producing the top teams for an 8-team single elimination playoff, I'll need to see a top 5A team NOT make the playoff first.
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Post by Captain Sinico »

jrbarry wrote:There is nothing...important about using 20 T's and 20 B's as a match format.
Understanding you to mean "having a bonus attached to all and not just some tossups," I disagree. Fairness is important. It seems to me unfair to say "This tossup is worth, on average, several times more than that one, though there's no difference between them other than where they happen to fall in a match." It also seems to me unfair that a team in a 20/10 format can lose in spite of converting (potentially very many) more tossups and having a (potentially very much) higher bonus conversion. In fact, that's the Colvin Unfair Result that people have been calling unfair for decades.
Therefore, I've missed something, or you're saying either those two things are fair, or fairness isn't important. Which is it?
jrbarry wrote:That is our position in Georgia... We have used T/B formats because they seem the easiest for many inexperienced readers to handle.
If this is your position, why then do you use that format for playoff matches (which, I would hope, are read by more experienced readers?) That seems to belie the contention that you think the other format is just as good.
jrbarry wrote:We simply cannot get 20T's and 20, 2-part B's out of an NAQT set according to our questions formula. (5 social studies, 5 language arts, 5 science, 2-3 math and 2-3 fine arts per match). We need 11-12 rounds of questions for our State Tournament. We use purely academic questions.
My understanding is that NAQT has the same number of bonuses of each category as tossups. If you're able to get 20 tossups per match, you should therefore be able to get 20 bonuses.
Of course, it's possible (or even likely) that your categories don't match NAQT's. That's fair enough. Perhaps you could get NAQT to make you a custom set, like it does for Illinois, or use a different question provider, or make up the difference yourself?
jrbarry wrote:For me to believe that the abbreviated matches in our prelims are NOT producing the top teams for an 8-team single elimination playoff, I'll need to see a top 5A team NOT make the playoff first.
I take two issues with this argument. First of all, you're begging the question, since tournament performance defines who is a "top" team. Relatedly, you can't possibly know for certain what teams would have made the playoffs with a different format.
Secondly, even if you did know for sure that every single playoff field thus far was exactly the same as it would otherwise be, I still argue that you should change the format if you think it might be unfair. Even if you haven't observed what you'd consider an unfair result yet, it would still be right to change the format if it allows for a large possibility of an unfair result. In other words, if something's broken, why wait until it hurts someone to fix it?

Later,
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by jrbarry »

I appreciate that some here might be concerned that we in Georgia do not have a handle on what is fair about our match formats. We believe it is fair and our coaches adopted it. We adopted it because we wanted to continue using NAQT questions but could not get what we needed out of a set because our standards are different than NAQT. Here is why: (1) We use only two-part bonuses and using bouncebacks is very important to us. Those two facts eliminate several NAQT bonuses from being used by us. (2) We also do not use questions with trash in them. That eliminates even more questions.

In fact, we would use 20T's and 20 B's if we could with NAQT questions. We cannot. We tried, but we cannot and neither could anyone else if they had our same other requirements/standards. Our playoff questions do have 20 T's and 20 B's because we can do that with an NAQT set.

Since most of us have been playing various 4-quarter or three-part formats for years, having a fist half with 10 T's only and a second halfwith 10 T's and 10 B's seems just fine.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by Captain Sinico »

Okay, that makes sense, then. You guys should see if NAQT will make you a custom set 20/20's with two-part reboundable bonuses. They do something similar for Illinois.

Later,
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jrbarry wrote:I appreciate that some here might be concerned that we in Georgia do not have a handle on what is fair about our match formats. We believe it is fair and our coaches adopted it. We adopted it because we wanted to continue using NAQT questions but could not get what we needed out of a set because our standards are different than NAQT. Here is why: (1) We use only two-part bonuses and using bouncebacks is very important to us. Those two facts eliminate several NAQT bonuses from being used by us. (2) We also do not use questions with trash in them. That eliminates even more questions.

In fact, we would use 20T's and 20 B's if we could with NAQT questions. We cannot. We tried, but we cannot and neither could anyone else if they had our same other requirements/standards. Our playoff questions do have 20 T's and 20 B's because we can do that with an NAQT set.

Since most of us have been playing various 4-quarter or three-part formats for years, having a fist half with 10 T's only and a second halfwith 10 T's and 10 B's seems just fine.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by AlphaQuizBowler »

What were the results for the Brookwood JV Tournament this past Saturday?
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

jrbarry wrote:In fact, we would use 20T's and 20 B's if we could with NAQT questions. We cannot. We tried, but we cannot and neither could anyone else if they had our same other requirements/standards. Our playoff questions do have 20 T's and 20 B's because we can do that with an NAQT set.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. So what you currently do is take apart an NAQT set and only use the bonuses you can turn into reboundable two-parters, right? And what you're saying here is that there are only enough bonuses you deem acceptable to have 20 per round in the playoffs but only 10 per round in the prelims? I just want to clarify for my own edification.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by centralhs »

What tournaments are Georgia teams planning to attend after the State Tournament? Who is going to the Ola tournament in March? What about the Dorman "end of the year" tournament in May?
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by theblitzer »

For those of you interested, I believe in the JV division at UGA Walton won, with Alpharetta coming second; I don't know if there was a match for third and fourth- if there was, I assume Dorman A came third and whatever other team that Walton beat in the Quarter finals came fourth. Anyone know who won Vasity?
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by Ben_Dodson »

Alpharetta's ability to upset at State was proven today when they beat Norcross 180-230. This round was interesting in that Alpharetta scored probably twice as many tossups as Norcross, but couldn't covert bonuses to secure a lead until the last two questions. We scored only 6 toss ups total. They definitely played better than us considering we negged a third of the questions and were really really slow on several others. Alpharetta catched us on probably the worst round we've had all year and were good enough to capitalize on it.

I think after this tournament, most of the top four teams in GA have played, beaten, and lost to each other at some point during the year. Norcross has beaten Brookwood, Walton, and Chattahoochee now, as well as lost to all of them. The Chattahoochee match today was pretty fun. The closest the score got was 220-230 after toss-up 14, but after that Chattahoochee got a run of them and the match ended 260-360. Nonetheless, very fun match. I noticed one person missing from Chattahoochee, although the top three was there. We had our top two, but thankfully for State we will have our 3rd and 4th (who finally managed to find time away from Chinese school and orchestra).
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by AlphaQuizBowler »

Yeah I was surprised when our varsity told us they were 4-1 at lunch. How did Norcross do in the playoffs?

Also, some JV Results:
1. Walton
2. Alpharetta
3. Dorman and Norcross

EDIT- Included Norcross.
Last edited by AlphaQuizBowler on Sun Mar 02, 2008 3:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by Andrew's a Freshman »

/first post

Norcross's 3 man team came in 4th after losing to Walton in JV. Or possibly 3rd seeing as Walton came in first. Work it out how you want. We beat Central Gwinnett in the first round of the playoffs in a pretty relaxed match. Then the questions got exceptionally harder and Walton rolled us with Norcross only scoring one toss-up and the bonuses. We never saw Alpharetta at that tournament but I would be interested to know the semi-final score against Dorman.

Varsity was Dorman A, Dorman B, Walton, and Chattahoochee, I think.
AlphaQuizBowler wrote:What were the results for the Brookwood JV Tournament this past Saturday?
Westminster, Southside A, Dorman, and Chattahoochee B were went into the semi-finals. Southside beat Dorman in the finals. Quarter finals, from what I know, Westminster > Walton, Southside I never heard about, Dorman > Norcross, and Chattahoochee B > GSMST.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by Xerxes »

Andrew's a Freshman wrote:/first post

Norcross's 3 man team came in 4th after losing to Walton in JV. Or possibly 3rd seeing as Walton came in first. Work it out how you want. We beat Central Gwinnett in the first round of the playoffs in a pretty relaxed match. Then the questions got exceptionally harder and Walton rolled us with Norcross only scoring one toss-up and the bonuses. We never saw Alpharetta at that tournament but I would be interested to know the semi-final score against Dorman.

Varsity was Dorman A, Dorman B, Walton, and Chattahoochee, I think.
Alpharetta beat Dorman 110-90, but Dorman tried to protest a question. A replacement was read, which neither side answered correctly, so the result held.

Walton Varsity was not in the top four. The other three were, as far as I know. I'm guessing the other quarterfinalist was Brookwood.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by AdamL »

Yeah, Varsity yesterday was Dorman A, Dorman B, and semifinalists Brookwood A and Chattahoochee.

To answer AlphaQuizBowler's question for Ben - Norcross lost in playoffs to Chattahoochee in the game that Ben described.

Chattahoochee lost to Brookwood A in a close match in prelims. I'd try to blame first-round lethargy, but it was pretty clear they were faster than us... won every single buzzer race, which kinda hurt by the end.

I didn't particularly like the way the brackets were set up... Dorman A and Dorman B each had really easy schedules (for which I don't necessarily blame the bracket-setter) and the other two brackets had Chattahoochee/Brookwood A and Walton/Norcross/Alpharetta. Those last three teams all went 4-1 after playing each other, leaving Brookwood A as the #3 seed and CHS as #4, and Alpharetta didn't make the playoffs. That was quite unfortunate for them, as they were probably stronger than one or both of the teams that did make it in from the Dorman divisions.
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Chattahoochee is going to WoQ the week after State, and possibly another tournament in late April. Beyond that (and PACE nationals), I don't believe we're going to any.
Andrew's a Freshman wrote: Westminster, Southside A, Dorman, and Chattahoochee B were went into the semi-finals. [At Brookwood JV]
You must be thinking of another team. Westminster in fact defeated CHS B in the first round of playoffs.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by AlphaQuizBowler »

Andrew's a Freshman (referring to Brookwood JV tournament) wrote:Southside beat Dorman in the finals.
Does anyone have more information on this? I haven't heard of Southside or seen them at any tournaments this year.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by Andrew's a Freshman »

AdamL wrote:You must be thinking of another team. Westminster in fact defeated CHS B in the first round of playoffs.
As I heard it, GSMST beat MLK in the first round of the playoffs and then lost to Chattahoochee B in the quarter finals. That's from one person telling another telling another person telling me, though. It's very possible that I'm wrong. I heard the rest of the results of that tournament directly from the teams.

I havn't played against or seen Southside play at a tournament before.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by centralhs »

Dorman B may have had a "really easy schedule", but we (Central Gwinnett) only lost to them by 40 points in the second round, 250-290.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by Gunnells »

The UGa bracket was the most evenly distributed for the top teams I have seen at a college tournament, probably because most of the UGa team members played very recently for and against these schools.

The only possible quibble is Alpharetta could have been put in a Dorman bracket in place of another school with a bigger rep that has fallen off since most of the UGa guys graduated HS. Alpharetta is probably underseeded now due to the one to two year lag between results and reputation. Norcross went through the same adjustment period a few years ago.

Compare UGa to Berry, where six of the top nine teams were placed in the same division-
Dorman B/Chattahoochee/Heritage/Central/Norcross/Brindlee Mountain A vs. Dorman A/Walton/Brindlee Mt B.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by AdamL »

Gunnells wrote: The only possible quibble is Alpharetta could have been put in a Dorman bracket
That was indeed what I was suggesting, and my main/only problem with the brackets being the way they were.
centralhs wrote: Dorman B may have had a "really easy schedule", but we (Central Gwinnett) only lost to them by 40 points in the second round, 250-290.
Sorry, I guess that did come off as very insulting to the other teams in that division. Not an ideal choice of words. However (this is something I didn't mention before), Dorman B's team was missing half of their starters and had freshmen playing instead. Given their relative weakness, they probably had a disportionately easy schedule compared to if they had their full team (note: the assumption I'm making is that the TD figured Dorman A and B to be the strongest teams, and put comparatively weaker teams in those divisions accordingly). I'm guessing the UGA staff didn't know this, so that's why I said I couldn't blame them for making it like that. That was the point I was trying to make: that given the circumstances (a relatively weaker Dorman B), it may have been more appropriate to put a team such as Alpharetta in that division instead of (again, I'm making the assumption that the TD designed it as follows. I could be totally wrong) putting Dorman A and B with relatively weak competition and stuffing the rest of [what the TD thought were the best of the others] into the other two divisions.
Gunnells wrote: Compare UGa to Berry, where six of the top nine teams were placed in the same division
But there were only 2 divisions there. I do agree that the divisions could've been tweaked a bit, I'm just saying we can't really make a direct comparison between UGA and Berry on how evenly distributed they were.
AlphaQuizBowler wrote: Does anyone have more information on this? I haven't heard of Southside or seen them at any tournaments this year.
I watched Southside play against CHS C in a prelim match and they were pretty good. One kid had Lit Nobels (2 or 3 came up in that match) down pat, so I guess they're studying. That said, I was a bit surprised that Dorman lost, having seen Dorman play in several matches. I'm told the finals came down to the last question.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by centralhs »

One last point about Dorman B... they may have put two freshmen in instead of their regular starters. However, two of their regular starters (Freddy and Todd) were there and I am pretty sure that they are the strongest members of their team. And my understanding is that Dorman B got to the Finals on Saturday with playoff wins over Walton and Brookwood, so I don't think they could be considered that "relatively weak."
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by AdamL »

Yep, they did beat Brookwood in the semis. I heard it was a very close game, though. When I say "relatively" I mean compared to their full team. By no means did I intend to say they were actually weak, so I hope no one took it to mean that. But yes, I'd like to drop this subject now. They were stupid points to begin with.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by AlphaQuizBowler »

Did anyone else notice that for the JV Division at least, the questions seemed very difficult? In our semifinal match against Dorman, 9 of the tossups went unanswered. That really shouldn't happen for two of the top 4 teams at a tournament. The packets varied in difficulty as well, because in our matches against Walton and Brookwood more of the tossups were answered.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by Ben_Dodson »

AlphaQuizBowler wrote:Did anyone else notice that for the JV Division at least, the questions seemed very difficult? In our semifinal match against Dorman, 9 of the tossups went unanswered. That really shouldn't happen for two of the top 4 teams at a tournament. The packets varied in difficulty as well, because in our matches against Walton and Brookwood more of the tossups were answered.
Deja vu ala Walton 2007.

The JV questions were hard because they were meant to be Varsity questions. I thought the questions were a bit sporadic, which some bonuses easy 30's while others just went dead. Same thing with the tossups. Some were clearly JV level questions, while others seemed on the level of NAQT Nationals. This was a rare occurrence though. Mostly, the questions were well written and about the right difficulty for Varsity. I agree they were very difficult for JV, but that's what happens when you go to Varsity/JV tournaments.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by AlphaQuizBowler »

The bonuses were frustrating, especially when they moved from "Name these obscure Dickens works FTPE" to "Give the prime factorization of...".
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by NoahMinkCHS »

So, as the tournament director/bracket-setter/lots of other things, I thought I'd jump in and say a few things. I do really appreciate the feedback, and will be soliciting coaches for more when I send out a wrap-up email tonight or tomorrow. (The very next thing I'll do after this, BTW, is make a results post in the tournament thread, but since I haven't received the JV stats reports yet, I'm holding off in hopes I'll get them in the next 5 minutes...)

First, about the questions: They were indeed varsity questions, and probably too difficult for a regular-season JV tournament. My preference would have been to have replaced some or all of the questions with easier stuff, but it wasn't feasible to write two tournaments; our goal then became to write a set that would both challenge the Dormans of the world, while still being accessible to average JV teams. I agree that we probably veered too far on one side of that continuum, and I hope it didn't ruin the tournament experience for anyone.

That said, bonus difficulty fluctuation at any level is a big problem, and in that respect, we could've done better. We tried to follow the standard 3-part formula used in good college tournaments (one part that everybody gets, one part a lot of teams get, one part only excellent teams get), but that doesn't always work out. I'm not sure specifically which question had the Dickens works, but I suppose that could/should have been written where the answer to the first part was actually "Dickens" or something very gettable. As for prime factorization, well, we wanted to include math computation because GATA does, and that doesn't always lend itself to the same discriminations of difficulty as other areas. If anyone has any ideas on how to do math comp. bonuses better, I would be all ears.

Now for the brackets. I believe, as I think most TDs do, that you don't want to match up good teams in the prelims if you can help it. But I found, as I was making the brackets on Thursday evening, that we had so many good, nationals-caliber teams, that it became a question of how, not whether, to put good teams in the same divisions. I try to follow HS-area discussions on here, partly for curiosity and partly for stuff like this, so I felt like I had a rough idea of where people stood, especially given the recent discussion in this thread about who the best teams in the state were. (Short answer: Half of our field, including some non-playoff teams...) I also looked at the Byko Ratings, but they were really only helpful for a handful of teams, because of such a small sample size being entered into his database. A lot of the bracketing was pretty much pseudo-random, just making sure not to stack ALL the good teams in one bracket. I thought Chattahoochee might be weaker than usual due to missing some players (though for some teams, relatively "weaker" than usual is still really good -- apparently Dorman B proved that, as well), but it's not like there were many other places to put people. I just did a quick, back of the envelope analysis, and of the 4 brackets, only Dorman A's was seriously weaker. By average ppg, we had Clayton (Dorman B's bracket) with 217; Hancock (Brook A and Chatt A) with 215; Washington (Walton, Norcross, Alpha) with 218; and Broad (Dorman A) with 182. (Crossover games not included, which might have made the strength-of-schedule easier or harder for any given team in the Hancock and Washington divisions.) There were 5 teams that ended up being under 50 ppg, and two of them ended up in Dorman A's bracket; since at least one division had to have two of them, we could certainly have swapped one of them for Alpharetta, but I'm not sure that would have done anyone (except maybe Walton and Norcross...) any real favors. At any rate, this is all retrospective analysis, so it couldn't have been factored into the division-making anyway.

Any further feedback can certainly be posted here, or emailed to the team at [email protected], and I'll be glad to answer any questions or concerns. I hope that, shortcomings aside, everyone enjoyed the tournament overall and will be back in the future.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by DumbJaques »

believe, as I think most TDs do, that you don't want to match up good teams in the prelims if you can help it.
While I can understand how a TD would take this position, I actually never felt this way when I was a player. I would think that good teams would want to maximize, not minimize, their games vs. top competition at a tournament, particularly when tournaments require such significant investments of time and money, and occur at such a relatively low frequency. I'd be interested to see what other people think about this issue. I would more want to avoid having one medium to pretty good team play more than one top team, but I don't think having a top team play another top team in the prelims is such a bad thing.
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by NoahMinkCHS »

I understand what you're saying, and it makes sense -- I think power matching is great for this, as is re-bracketing like a lot of college tournaments do. However, the standard among high school tournaments in this area has been (in my experience, which is substantial but not comprehensive) a set of (usually 4-6) preliminary rounds, done either as pool play or a random subset of the field... followed by single-elimination seeded playoffs. In that type of format, the risk when putting good teams together is that those teams might not make the top 8 or 16 or whatever -- so, for example, if we threw a couple "bubble" teams into Dorman's division, there's a very good chance they have a worse record, and thus less of a chance at the playoffs.

My teammates and I have discussed, on occasion, potentially running our tournaments with more of a college model, but I think high school teams generally prefer (or at least, are satisfied with) fewer games, and many lower-end teams -- which are a substantial part of any tournament -- would end up leaving early and screwing up the re-bracket. Even if you only have a championship bracket (instead of multiple new brackets), an additional complication is that high school tournaments seem (often) to be bigger and have more teams with a legitimate shot at winning or doing well. So, for my tournament yesterday, I would have wanted at least 8 teams into the championship flight, meaning that those teams would've played 12 total games before leaving. Many teams would love that opportunity; many would not.

I would be interested to hear some feedback though. While I'm graduating, I'm sure my teammates and others running HS tournaments elsewhere could benefit from seeing if circuit opinion is different from what we've surmised. (Of course, those posting here is a biased sample, but still...)
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Re: Georgia 2007-2008

Post by Gunnells »

We're veering off into theory, but I think the most important thing is that each team play schedules of relatively equal difficulty, particularly because every tournament in the Southeast is decided by single elimination playoffs.

While I would love an event where each match is potentially competitive, I don't want to see it if teams you need to get past in the playoffs are piling up victories and high points per game against relatively weak competition. Theoritically, you may enter the playoffs more tested and sharper, but it is much nicer to enter with one or two playoff warmups than battle your way to the late rounds from a low playoff seed.

It's exactly why you don't lineup Duke and Kansas across from each other in the first round of the NCAA's. The winner will definitely feel they've achieved more than they would have by beating up an cupcake, but they'd rather not take the risk until they have to.

Chattahoochee's experiment with Swiss pairing at their JV tournament is the ideal answer. It provided more competitive matches and ran pretty smoothly, despite none of the FR and SO players having ever played at NAQT Nationals. I am hopeful that someone in the area will try it at the varsity level in the near future, but I can undestand how it may be too daunting, particularly at large events.

With the almost perfect balance between regional/national programs and local teams at the Berry event, I think they missed a great opportunity to have separate divisions by ability. It is something I've never seen in this area, and it would have definitely made the tournament distinctive. I can almost promise the other teams wouldn't mind missing the four and five hundred point losses for a chance to compete against schools of relatively equal ability.

I don't want to set off another tempest in a teapot, particularly since I feel a Norcross player went too far in his criticism, but preliminary scheduling is something else that could make the playoff seedings for state interesting. Almost everyone has some vague idea of where each team falls on a relative continuum by this point, but (I believe) we still play every team in our GHSA Region (understandably), then draw at random for the remaining games. There is usually one contender that gets a fairly easy draw, and one that gets a World Cup Draw of Death, with the rest falling somewhere in between. That could lead to playoff seedings that do not conform to pretournament expectations and make a relatively wide open year even more interesting.
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