It seems there has been some confusion about what I meant when I said in a previous post that teams who work at the game should be rewarded for their efforts. Some people have interpreted this to mean that we should somehow find which teams are working at the game and tailor the questions to ask about things they have learned. Actually, I was arguing for the exact opposite idea. What I meant was the following: Presumably, the topics which come up frequently in quizbowl are of some fundamental importance to their fields. Some teams decide to try to learn about these important things to improve their tournament performance. This improvement of results due to learning what is being asked about is what I meant by a team being rewarded for their work; that is, seeing the fruits of their labor. If they have done a good job, they would almost certainly hope that nothing has changed since previous tournaments in the format or types of questions being asked, since that would undermine their work. So what I was saying is not that we should actively try to reward teams that put some effort into this game, but rather that we should not pull the rug out from under them by changing the playing field, so that they can reap the benifits of their labor.
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