Re: National Open Thoughts

Clearly, this young'un hasn't grasped the concept
of a summertime Masters tournament, yet. The idea
isn't to make rising sophomores feel good about
themselves. Rather, it's about providing a challenging
playing field for the legends of the game. Anyone else
who wants to throw their hat in the ring is welcome,
but they do so at their own peril.
 I thought the
questions were of an appropriate difficulty level. Sure,
Tom and I went undefeated, but we had several close
games--including a real nail-biter with runners-up Hentzel and
Hillemann. The questions were hard, but gettable.
Importantly, they were consistent in difficulty level--both
tossups and bonuses. I've been competing in these
summertime Opens since the summer of 1984. This was
certainly the least "up-and-down" one (if the hardest) I've
ever been to. Kudos to Andrew for an excellently
written tournament.
 Finally, one should not confuse
this weekend's tournament with ACF, as the youngster
obviously did. This was not an ACF event, but a tournament
written by Andrew Yaphe who happens to be the president
of ACF. Furthermore, ACF doesn't strive to make all
of its questions this hard. After all, ACF packets
are aimed at college student teams, not the wizzened
graybeards who dust themselves off for these summertime
Clashes of Titans.

Albert Whited

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