Re: ACF Fall

tgallows · Mon, 05 Nov 2001 15:39:29 -0800

I played in the Florida version of the ACF Fall
tournament. There were no separate divisions, but USF did
recognize a top Div II team (Valencia CC), as well as the
top Div II scorer. This seemed like a good
arrangement, as a 13-team field was probably too small to
split into 2 divisions (especially since div II would
have only had 3 or 4 teams). Personally, I've always
liked an arrangement where there's some form of general
round robin (or round robins within two equal-strength
pools, etc), followed by the top group playing each
other, and the same for the middle and bottom groups. I
think it gives the newer teams an opportunity to play a
few top teams but play more matches against teams of
their own calibre. 

While both experienced and
inexperienced players seemed to enjoy the questions and the
tournament in general, I did want to throw in a couple of
question-related suggestions. The first is something that was
posted here earlier, the pronunciation guides. We had
several inexperienced moderators at the tournament, and
the terms which seemed to cause the most trouble were
from mythology, especially classical. (I was guilty of
one of those myself, not including a pronunciation on
Tezcatlipoca.) I'd certainly advise adding pronunciations on
names from Greek myth, however ordinary they may look
to the experienced qb-er.

More significant,
some of the bonus parts seemed unnecessarily long. I
haven't seen the packs, but there many bonuses which
seemed like each of the three parts were three sentences
long -- and in many cases, the length of the bonus
part was unnecessary (as a made-up example, a
3-sentence bonus part on an author which mentions that he
wrote The Sun Also Rises). I'm not saying bonuses
should be as brief as those of NAQT, but excessively
long bonuses make the matches drag on and wear down
the moderators.

As for some of the ongoing
threads, Stan (I think) complained about excessive
repeats, including hearing about Sucre "47 times." I only
heard 13 of the available rounds, but I don't recall
more than a couple of things that could be considered
repeats. In the case of Sucre, I recall one bonus part on
the general, and a tossup in another round on the
city. 

But enough of that. I liked the
tournament, and I congratulate Kelly on putting together a
set of accessible questions from the available
packets. 

--Raj Dhuwalia