--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, thefool75 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > Having a Nats on Easter weekend is troublesome due to increased air- > fares (many of the normally economical AirTran fares to Atlanta were > not available for this past weekend--it is likely that for many teams > it was cheaper to fly to the NAQT ICT then ACF Nats)...my question is- > -how many teams would really be bent out of shape if ACF occupied the > same weekend as CBI...I doubt ACF would even lose a team and no doubt > would tick off 2 or 3 players...but may very well make up for that > with increased attendance from others... for that matter, does ACF nationals overlap very much with TRASHionals? i kinda doubt it. my one worry is that even if these tournaments aren't drawing the same players, it may be quite a bit harder to find moderators if two nationals are held during the same weekend. > P.S. Why did Michigan B anticipate a Nats tournament ending at 7:00 > p.m...who schedules a flight out the night of a tournament? That's > just strange...they have no cause for complaint.... as you yourself just observed, many of the affordable/desirable flights last weekend were unavailable. so it's entirely possible that they just took what they could get. it is a little unfortunate, though, that they had to leave early; certainly having a delay shouldn't surprise anybody. > P.P.S. Although ensuring consistency in bonus difficult is a > legitimate concern (as is attempting to keep packets relatively close > in overall difficulty)...you don't understand the point of ACF if you > think that having an obscure tossup followed by a hyper-accessible > one is somehow intrinsically flawed...there is nothing wrong with > having a tossup on Svevo followed by one on Shakespeare so long as > they are both pyramidal in structure.... i think "you don't understand the point of ACF" is rather strong language here. while i agree with your statement in principle, i have two quibbles. 1) italo svevo is still a ways from being tossup- worthy, even at ACF nationals. more generally, some topics are just too hard for tossups. dead tossups at untimed tournaments are a bad thing. 2) it can be a little disconcerting as a player to have extremely easy questions mixed in with an overall difficult set. certainly at ACF this is less of a factor than in other formats, since generally speaking you're waiting to hear a clue that you actually know instead of going in on instinct most of the time, but it's still true that if you train yourself to be disciplined because the questions are hard, it can be really frustrating to suddenly have a buzzer race in the middle of a question whose answer is shakespeare or abraham lincoln or what have you. i know someone will say something to the effect of "but just because an answer is easy doesn't make the clues easy," but beyond a certain point (and i think all of us who have played for a while have seen this point reached and exceeded), harder clues about well-known subjects tend to degenerate into pointless or uninteresting minutiae. certainly you could write an interesting tossup on a lover's complaint or henry VI part I, but if you wrote one whose answer was actually just william shakespeare, you'd have to start with something even more obscure than the well-known-but-trivial-in-the-bad-sense-of- the-word clues about his gravestone inscription and second-best bed. i think this would not be most players' idea of a good tossup. aggravating the situation is the fact that nobody likes to be beaten in on something they know, and that's pretty unavoidable for some topics. joon
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