Brooklyn Bridge Battle Tournament

The Brooklyn Bridge Battle Tournament was an online, open tournament using a “regs-” question set of the same name written by Vidyut Arvind along with Bhavya Thakur, Xavier Neptune, Madhav Thakur, and Raghav Thakur.

The Tournament

The tournament started off with two seven team brackets competing in a round robin. “Team ROT Qwiz” cleared the “Brooklyn” bracket whilst “Gus Uncle’s Pakistani Fried Chicken” cleared the “Manhattan” bracket. Playoffs were originally supposed to be held single elimination, but after many complaints from the players, the teams were instead bracketed into a championship bracket and three consolation brackets (a 4/4/4/2 split). After playoffs were held, “Team ROT Qwiz”, “Gus Uncle’s Pakistani Fried Chicken”, and “Church of Christ, Scientist!” were left tied with 2-1 records. Because the tournament didn’t have enough packets to be able to satisfactorily break the tie, moderator Josh Xu, who was consequently brought on to fix some of the blatant errors of the set, decided to take the reigns and play a three team, one tossup tiebreaker round, which Bill Condron of “Church of Christ, Scientist!” managed to power, winning his team the tournament.

Controversy

This tournament has gone down as one of the more controversial tournaments in recent memory.

The set itself was criticized for not having a dedicated editing team and instead being the product of a few friends, resulting in a lack of quality control. The questions differed wildly in difficulty and quality, with some questions asking relatively easy, novice level content (i.e. a bonus on Harry Potter) whilst some questions asked things that were more common at regs+ (i.e. The King and I). BBBT also featured multiple bonuses written in the first-person. The tournament’s questions also contained blatantly incorrect information, with one tossup asserting that the primary headquarters of Samsung was in San Jose. The distribution of the set was also called into question, with its odd 1/1 RMPSS and 3/3 geography. While the tournament was aimed for novices, the tournament’s literature was criticized for overemphasizing “kid lit,” with many tossups asking about classic child novels such as Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and various Eric Carle works. The packet itself wasn’t fully completed by the day of the tournament, resulting in writers editing tossups live mid-tournament. Perhaps one of the biggest controversies with regards to the set was the sample questions released by Vidyut so as to assure participants of the quality of the questions. The tossups released were eerily similar to tossups written in the Reinstein housewrite, thus resulting in accusations of plagiarism. However, after the tournament, David Reinstein commented under the thread about BBBT, saying that after looking at the questions, he didn’t believe that the packet set plagiarized his work.

The tournament was ran using Neg5, resulting in some stats being erroneously entered and the stats for some games being lost when Josh Xu eventually manually converted the stats to SQBS.

Protests were handled incredibly poorly, with people giving completely opposite rulings on certain protests. Staffers were not reached out to about the tournament, and had to reach out personally in order to gain access to the tournament’s discord server.

Vidyut was criticized for not having the logistics of the tournament finalized until soon before the tournament date. The original plan was for the tournament’s playoffs to be held in the style of single-elimination, but after protest from the players, settled for rebracketing, which resulted in a shortage of packets for such a format. There was also much confusion about who the lead tournament director was, meaning that no one had a clear idea of who to go to for information or to lodge protests and complaints. As a result, the group of tournament directors would constantly defer the task of fixing things to the other tournament directors, severely hindering the tournament.

The tournament directors also promised that the funds from the tournament would be donated to charity, but little clarity was given as to which charity the proceeds would be given to and the status of the donations.

Aftermath

Josh Xu wrote a forums post after the tournament, detailing his criticisms regarding how the tournament went and potential lessons that he felt should be learnt after such a fiasco. Among those lessons were:

• Having a dedicated protest committee, or someone who can research info about protests in order to prevent moderators giving opposite rulings on protestations.
• Not underestimating the ease in which a quiz bowl question set can be written. Even sets meant for novices take time to write and edit properly, and cannot be written in the span of a few weeks with the help of friends. Quiz bowl sets need time to be fine tuned and playtested in order to make sure the questions are the best they can possibly be. This goes for both the quality and difficulty of the questions and the number of packets being provided (9 is almost never enough packets for most tournaments, which generally run for about 10 rounds on average).
• Building off the previous point, involving experienced editors in the question-writing process to help control the difficulty and quality of questions.
• Having open and constant communication between tournament directors and players, tournament directors and staffers, and between the tournament directors themselves in order to settle on both a tournament format and other overall logistics.

Another forum topic was started by Young Fenimore Lee, regarding how the overall circuit should respond to other poorly executed tournaments in the future. In particular, Young questioned, “Is there some sort of responsibility on the part of the greater community to intervene when a project seems like it’s obviously going to result in a bad tournament?” Young noted that, “If this tournament was… run 10+ years ago, these kids would have gotten flamed, right?” The overall sentiment of the responses was to provide kind yet constructive criticism so as to not discourage potential young tournament hosts from trying their hand at writing/hosting a tournament. In particular, David Reinstein noted, “It is appropriate for one or two people to ask questions, … and it is appropriate for one or two more to add another perspective to that conversation if they think doing so would be productive. A pile on doesn't really help things, but a couple of people asking questions and pointing out obvious truths is not a pile on.” Arya Karthik later chimed in, noting that there are also adults who put on “bad versions of good quizbowl,” citing GATA’s single-elimination style and positing that that was more destructive than a group of middle schoolers hosting a poorly-run tournament.

Other Notable Moments

Tyrus Kitt, of “Gus Uncle’s Pakistani Fried Chicken”, managed to attain a 300 PPG during the Brooklyn Bridge Battle Tournament, solidifying his legacy as the best quiz bowl player in the history of the game, with a perfect PPG and a 100% power percentage.