1. One could certainly argue that a college sophomore with 4 years of high school QB (at say NAQT or PACE tournaments or maybe Latin Bowl (whatever it's called) as opposed to Beallness) has more cumulative QB experience than Kelly, Subash, Raj or myself to name a few examples. Curiously, if I remember correctly limiting the game to 6 years of experience would not remove any of the top scorers from last year's NAQT ICT or ACF Nats. (Not that a scoring title means much--a player averaging 40 points a game who always gets her tossups early in the question may well beat a player achieving 75 points a game who always gets the tossup near the end--and this bears out in actual playing as well). 2. I think it's taken me a couple years to be brought around to the idea of writing easier tossups--though there's a point beyond which accessibility can be taken too far--then you might as well just play CBI. Nevetheless, it's much easier to write good hard tossups than quality "easy" ones. In other words, probably the last tournaments in the world that should be packet submission (at least by the participants) are novice tourneys. For example, at a novice tournament, if a question is discussing an Aztec deity, you might as well just buzz in with Quetzacoatl. This rewards nothing. Either A. you need to have a packet difficulty set such that Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilpoachtli, Coatlicue, Chalcuitlicue, Chantico, Tlaloc, and Xolotl are possible answers, or B. the question needs to be written perfectly so that someone without a fair amount of knowledge would have no clue that an Aztec deity was being discussed until the end of the question. 3. Most people don't want to spend any time writing quality questions, you want to ban most of the people willing to do it? 4. QB by its very nature is an elitist activity--we've seen a great deal of growth in the past couple years--compare the Maize pages to a couple years ago--and a huge growth in novice and trash tournaments. I'm not sure that we could grow much more anyway without becoming CBI. What do you want? To play on TV, groupies, regular coverage on the sports page? It's never going to happen. Play because you love it, not for recognition. The day we write packets for the average college student is the day 90% of all lit questions will be on contemporary short stories plus Catcher in the Rye, all geography and history will be Americana etc. Thankfully, it's only a fiction that our questions actually reflect what one learns in the first couple years of college--it would be really scary if QB actually did. Don't allow your schooling to interfere with your education--we ask questions about things not in the freshman-sophomore curriculum because it's assumed that as an intellectually curious human being you actually read books (and I don't mean Benet's). A misplaced egalitarianism will destroy this game (it's not a sport--at least not in any athletic sense--I always thought "mathlete" was the most amusing term ever), not save it. My 3 cents, nathan freeburg (who never played in high school or college--the same is true of quite a few grad student players)
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