One of the knocks against bonus stealing is that it magnifies mismatches, creating more games that are blowouts, and making the margin of games that would be blowouts anyway even larger. The practice reduces the relative importance of tossup play, making it quite possible for stronger teams to play terribly (on tossups) in a match against a weaker team and still win handily. Upsets become a good deal less likely, especially assuming the bonus questions are of sufficiently challenging difficulty. I like knowing that if I'm going to beat an opponent I'll have to have speed as well as sheer superior knowledge -- that I'll actually have to stay alert and play reasonably well to win. It must be embarrassing to play a weak team and know that you're probably going to maintain or increase your lead on most every tossup-bonus sequence due to bouncebacks, whether you get the tossup or not. So what if you risk a neg. five, if you know that most likely you'll pick up a majority of the bonus points either way? Obviously that wouldn't be the case in a match between teams that are of similar strength, in which case the bounceback wouldn't alter much -- you can of course still have superbly exciting close matches. But there are likely to be fewer close matches, and a great many more of the large blowout variety that are frustrating to the weaker party, mildly embarrassing for the stronger one, and dull for all.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:42 AM EST EST