ACF Nationals Commentary

oilbaronsball <*no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com*> · Tue, 22 Apr 2003 02:40:35 -0000

First of all, congratulations to Berkeley for holding off a 
determined Michigan team and winning the premier national tournament 
of quiz bowl.

However, there was a problem: the tournament did not seem like the 
premier national tournament of quiz bowl.

The most egregious problem was the tournament did not end until well 
after 11 pm.  The majority of teams finished their last game at 10:15 
pm.  This resulted in a tournament time of more than 14 hours from 
when teams showed up for registration, and the vast overrun prevented 
Michigan B from participating in the playoffs because they had to 
catch a plane; they assumed the tournament would end by 7 pm like it 
did last year.

As it was, the number of games in one day was pushing the envelope.  
Most teams played 14 games in one day.  Combined with the various 
slowdowns, it wore on lots and lots of people.

One potential solution to the problem is returning ACF Nationals to a 
Friday-Saturday format.  Although NAQT ICT lasted almost as long, the 
time was split by a long period of rest known as going to sleep.  I 
see no reason why ACF Nationals cannot play five or six games Friday 
evening and complete the tournament Saturday by the early evening.  
For those teams that fly in, they will be spending some portion of 
Friday flying.  For those teams that have to drive 12 hours, it does 
not make as much difference leaving Thursday night rather than Friday 
morning because they have to miss class Friday anyway.  However, this 
solution only covers up the two main causes of the length of the 
tournament: length of rounds and organizational problems.

Although this improved over the course of the day and night, the 
average round lasted 40-45 minutes.  This is not to say all 
moderators were that slow; however, rounds last only as long as the 
slowest room.  In addition, no room had a scorekeeper.  When Duke 
dropped out from competing in the tournament, Georgia Tech removed 
their house team to make the field an even 22.  That action should 
have increased the number of staff by four or five.  It does not 
appear that extra staff was put to use in games as scorekeepers to 
help the inexperienced and/or slow readers.  The addition of 
scorekeepers could have reduced each round by five minutes.  The 
slowness of moderators was also an issue that needs to be improved.  
We do not need, nor necessarily desire, moderators with Samer speed, 
but they should be able to finish an ACF round in less than 30 
minutes.

Also inherent were organizational problems.  Start with the lack of 
scorekeepers: that tells us ACF and Georgia Tech did not bring enough 
staff to run the tournament smoothly.  The biggest problem was the 
delay following the preliminary rounds.  It took 45 minutes to learn 
Harvard and Vanderbilt needed to have a tiebreaker of sorts to 
determine who would play in the upper tier.  Mr. Keller from 
Vanderbilt pointed out two days later it was not necessary, as 
Vanderbilt had defeated Harvard head-to-head.  Every other tiebreaker 
was done by head-to-head or total points, yet this one went to a 20-
tossup shootout, on questions from another tournament.  As stated by 
others, ACF needs to announce its tiebreaking procedure before the 
tournament.  Overall, this resulted in a delay of almost 75 minutes 
from the end of round 11 to the beginning of round 12.

Maybe Georgia Tech and ACF can enlighten us as to why it took so long 
to determine playoff matchups.  If they had been using a modern 
statistical application like SQBS or even Stats 99, the playoffs 
would have been determined in less than 15 minutes.  This 15-minute 
period assumes an experienced stat master, but everyone expects such 
a prestigious tournament to have an experienced stat master.  I 
wonder if that was the case.

Other logistical problems were related to food and travel.  There 
were very few eating options within a 15-minute walk of the 
tournament site.  Those teams without a car were put in a hard 
place.  Directions to the tournament site were another problem.  
While there were driving directions to the Georgia Tech campus, there 
were no directions to the Instructional Center, the site of the 
tournament, on the tournament webpage.  Unlike my group, most teams 
had never been there before and needed the tournament hosts to 
provide such directions.  A few people have mentioned the provided 
maps were difficult to understand.

The usual complaints about questions are relevant here.  The 
difficulty varied uncomfortably both among packets and within 
packets.  A tossup on sisplatin, a biochemical compound with a 
central platinum atom our moderator, a biochemistry Ph.D, had never 
heard of, proceeded Camp David Accords, something a high school 
player should know.  The difficulty varying across rounds is 
understandable since this is a packet submission tournament, but the 
varying difficulty of rounds 12 and 13, presumably written by ACF 
people, was puzzling.  Also puzzling was only one quarter of my 
team's packet was actually used.  The packet used in round 4 was
an 
amalgam of Maryland and Vanderbilt.  Even more troubling was there 
were three visual art tossups; two tossups on John Updike works (one 
in the extras); and the Sekhmet tossup had been infused with a clue 
pertaining to Hathor.  There were many other soft spots in packets 
that make me wonder if Mr. Bhan was correct when he said a few weeks 
ago the submissions he had received were very good.

Overall, these problems suggest better care must be taken by ACF and 
their host when ACF Nationals is run.  One thing that was unclear to 
me was the duties of the host (Mr. Vishnubhakat of Georgia Tech) and 
editor/director (Mr. Bhan).  The model used by NAQT for ICT works 
very well.  As I understand it, NAQT deals entirely with the 
questions, schedule and rounding up moderators from around the 
nation; the host takes care of directions to campus and food, 
reserves rooms, provides NAQT with the computer resources necessary 
to do their job, and rounds up moderators from the host institution.  
I cannot remember seeing the UCLA host director outside of the team 
meeting and the awards ceremony.  I would suggest for the next ACF 
Nationals Mr. Berdichevsky, aside from editing, create the schedule, 
run statistics, and round up moderators from around the country, 
while the host (possibly Maryland) deals with site-related issues.  I 
also suggest ACF choose a different weekend for Nationals so it does 
not conflict with TRASHionals.

Dan