Being the Dartmouth college bowl president and having spent a semester in Britain that has culminated in my participation last week in an excellent British NAQT IFT, I thought I would throw in my 2.8 cents (0.02 pounds). I played in the IFT under University College, London, with the help of one of my fellow Dartmouth students, as multiple contacts with UCL yielded little interest. With two people, it made things tricky, but we still managed to go 2-9 and had a great deal of fun. Rob ran a very good tournament and did a large job to make sure that there was no advantage to be British, American, or Canadian. There was a lot fewer sports questions in general, a fact that I missed quite a bit as I normally do well on those. The tournament however, came out very well and I was pleased to say the least. The one thing that surprised me was the reaction that the British students had to the tournament as a whole. While I found it slightly easier than most in the States, I heard a great many say that they thought it was the hardest tournament they'd been at. I am looking forward with interest on the individual stats to see if they shed any light on this. My personal opinion is that the best British teams I saw could compete with the best of the United States if given an even footing. They certainly impressed me with their knowledge, even if they did find the questions difficult. As for WWTBAM, I was very annoyed that the 1 million pound question was that easy. There is some talk that it was a large ploy to pull away viewers as the BBC ended a long running show on the same night at the same time, and the afternoon papers gave away the fact that someone was going to win a million. British shows in general tend to be more abundant and more interesting than in the U.S, but the payouts are relatively puny. It's been an interesting comparison. In any case, I enjoyed the IFT's over here and feel that it would be beneficial to try and make the ICT's as neutral as possible where British students are included. I realize that this does limit the question writing bases and I have always thought that NAQT writes excellent questions. Perhaps this discussion will help the NAQT ICT's to be more Brit friendly. Michael Philpy
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