ACF Fall Tournament Commentary

Arsaces_I · Mon, 05 Nov 2001 05:53:51 -0800

I am, of course, biased, so view what I'm about
to write through the lens of what is common
knowledge about me. Nevertheless, because I have strong
feelings about the ACF Fall tournament I'd just played,
I'd like to express them with the group; ignore if
you wish.

I've been around the game a while;
indeed, I was playing back when ACF was run by Caril
Guthrie, Ramesh Kannappan, and Jim Dendy. In the course of
my play I've seen the most god-awful tournaments
imaginable, and others which took my breath away with their
perfection. In sum, I've seen it done right, and I've seen it
done wrong, and as far as I'm concerned, this Fall
tournament was as close to being perfectly right as I've
seen from an official ACF event as I've seen in a long
time. 

The questions were _accessible_. Note
that I didn't qualify that; basically, almost all the
questions were such that they could be answered by players
of all experience and skill levels. That veteran
teams could get them at earlier points than novices
means that the fundamental philosophy of ACF was
observed: reward those with the most knowledge. The
individual writers and the editor seemed to have gone out of
their collective way to place the answers within easy
grasp of all players, and I hold that being beaten to
things you've _heard of_, while frustrating, is much
easier to take than knowing you lost by 500 points
because there was literally nothing in the packet you
knew. I get the feeling that no one staggered out of a
room at that tournament feeling overwhelmed by the
difficulty; indeed, in conversations with our Division II
teams the thought process seemed to be "Wow, we don't
know anything, and really suck" and more like "Wow, if
we just work at it a little bit we can beat some of
these teams that defeated us, since we lost so many
close games". That, to me, speaks of the overall
rectitude of Kelly's approach, and I congratulate him on
another thoroughly excellent job. The questions were,
frankly, good stuff.

While I'm at it, I want to
thank Charlie and company for their continued
hospitality, and specifically for the enlightened decision to
award a greater-than-usual number of individual
accolades. I'm not terribly fond of the idea of a Division
II, but if a separate Division has to exist, I like
how it was done here: everybody played each other, so
the protective hedge was removed, and the individual
awards served to encourage younger players that, while
not yet on the same rung as the vets, they are on the
right path.

An overwhelmingly positive
experience. Well done, UTC, ACF, and Kelly.