In response to Mike Burger's post, I think a lot depends on what the tournament is and why people attended it. Take D2K1. Without intending any disrespect to the hosts or the victors, I don't think the outcome of the tournament was a life or death matter, or that it was the sort of tournament that a player or team would devote all their free time to preparing for. Rather, I imagine people went to it to have fun and play some exciting games on questions they happened to enjoy. (For gosh sakes, they had the game show rounds at the half and bags of chips as prizes. How cool is that? :-)) Since this was a pack-submission event, the drudgery involved in putting the pack together was part of the cost of playing, while the drudgery involved in set editing was part of the cost of running the thing. Back in the day, I used to edit academic tournaments with absurdly - asininely? - detailed submission guidelines. Seemed like a great way to make the packs as good as they could be, except that it was also something that many of the pack writers found to be a pain in the ass. I'd like to think that these guidelines resulted in better packs and that the tradeoff was worthwhile - I WHOLEHEARTEDLY agree that "stump the chumps" packs defeat the purpose of having fun playing games - but we'll never know for sure. For some tournaments, even some trash tournaments, detailed point-by-point requirements are a good thing. But necessarily all trash tournaments. Maybe someone somewhere will have his entire weekend ruined by a quiz round that didn't have enough baseball, football, and/or basketball. Then again, maybe someone somewhere will nail a Calvinball question and remember that stick forever, at least until the next trash tournament. Matt (Who occasionally submits packs to ACF Regionals/Nationals for the sole purpose of subverting the canon even while obeying the letter of the posted requirements. :-))
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