<<we wanted to do it all in one day>> Unfortunately, there's a real physical limit to doing that. Consider if you get eight teams, two trash-better, two academic-better, and four about equal at both. For a single round-robin (seven rounds, or eight with submission), there is going to be at least one medium team that ends up facing the trash-better teams on trash rounds and the academic-better teams on academic rounds. You can't avoid this without initial seeding; I haven't done the math, but I strongly suspect you can't avoid it at all. Consider, then, a double-round-robin with eight teams, in which each team faces each other team on both an academic round and on a trash round. This is fourteen to sixteen rounds in one day -- a stretch on ACF-length questions, but possible -- but where do you get the packets from? I can't see teams submitting two packets apiece; I suppose DUCKS could generate seven packets internally, but I've never seen that work really well. This is, of course, all scaled down to eight teams. If you have ten, things get much much worse...18 rounds in one day is probably beyond reasonable boundaries if teams want to be fit to drive home. Then there's the question of exactly what you're testing. With all due respect to those whom I am about to mention, the Chicago and UIUC squads have placed so highly nationally are not, with the same roster, going to place equally well on trash rounds. Then, atop that, there's the inherently different nature of squads in trash and academic events; apart from explicitly masters' events, academic tournaments are the domain of students, while a trash tournament's is almost universally a blend of undergrads, graduate students, and the elderly. I guess what I'm getting at is that there really isn't a "truest" format. There are academic tournaments that have trash in them; there are trash tournaments; and while the rules of the two overlap more than the DNA of a human overlaps with the DNA of a chimpanzee, different quiz bowl tournament simply test for different things. Comparing them isn't necessarily a good idea. Edmund
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