About ACF

Suby10 · Mon, 16 Apr 2001 13:59:17 -0700

Andrew Yaphe asked me to post this on his behalf,
as he is not a member of this club, so these are his
words not mine, though they echo my thoughts on the
matter almost to a tee - Subash Maddipoti

As
I'm stepping down from active involvement with ACF, I
wanted to say a few things about the nature of the
format and where it belongs in the
grand scheme of
things. This post is doubtless far too long and rambling
for anyone to read it through, but I wanted to
address a few of the
commoner misperceptions about ACF
before I back away from it.

Over the period of
time I've been a partisan of ACF, complaints about the
format have centered on the same sticking points.
Critics say the
organization is elitist and that
ACFers are unfriendly. They also say that the questions
are too hard or obscure. Both complaints are
often
accompanied by a warning -- if ACF continues the way it's
been going, it's going to die out.

I won't
spend much time on the first kind of complaint, because
it's simply wrong. As I've said before, ACF is
actually the least elitist 
of formats. It's perfectly
straightforward about both the form and content of the questions
it asks. As a result, anybody who is interested
in
developing himself into a first-class ACF player can do so:
witness the meteoric improvements of a past great like
Jason King at Georgia Tech
(who, I am told, scored 2
points a game at his first ACF tournament, and went on
to become the most dominant ACF player in the
country his last
year at Tech) or a current luminary
like Subash. I've always thought that CBI is a much
more elitist format. By not disclosing its
distribution, and with its quirky questions, it effectively
prevents players from building themselves up from nothing.
If one is a "naturally" great player, like Brian
Rostron, one can go to CBI nationals as one's
second
college tournament ever and find oneself the tournament's
leading scorer. CBI all-stars are born; ACF all-stars can
also be made.

Since it's simply not true that
ACF is unfriendly, though it continues to suffer from
the personae adopted by some of its more vocal
defenders, I'll move on to the second charge. Are the
questions too hard? Too obscure? When critics make this
charge, they seem to assume that a secret cabal conspires
to raise the bar every year so that we can drive all
but a
handful of teams away from the format.
Unlike NAQT, however, ACF doesn't have a stable of
question writers and editors who generate tournaments
wholesale and thus determine the difficulty level of the
game. All we have are a few harried editors, who do the
best we can with the questions people send us. Far
from being elitist, ACF is driven by the desires
of
its participants. If they write hard questions, the
game will skew hard.

(message continued in next
post)