At the TRASH New England regional yesterday, my team found ourselves in a buzzerless room for a couple playoff matches. Since slap-bowl can be a pretty awful way to play quizbowl, we introduced our opponents to a method of buzzerless quizbowl that Rutgers has used at times in practices and tournaments - name-bowl. Name-bowl involves calling out one's name to be recognized rather than slapping one's desk. IMO name-bowl is much better than slap-bowl in distinguishing who buzzed in first. Whereas desk-slapping by different people usually sounds pretty similar, individual voices are more distinct and all the players in a match usually have different names. Slap-bowl can create difficulty calls for moderators because of different slapping techniques. The half-inch above the desk slap hits the desk quickly but is sometimes barely audible. The high-hand slap can take longer to hit the desk but sounds much louder. This can create problems of visual vs. aural evidence. Some people like to shorten their names for name bowl, though it's not too difficult to notice who starts their name first. I just figured I'd bring name-bowl to people's attention, because I think it's an improvement over slap-bowl and I don't come across anyone using it. Thanks, James McGhee (Rutgers alum from Voltron Crew team)
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