Re: ACF Fall

I would also like to chime in and say how much I
enjoyed the questions. 

I think the crowning
achievement of this set was the total lack of factual errors.
For most tournaments, hard editing work will
eliminate all but a handful of potential hoses, and we
accept that editors are human if the mistakes are kept
to a bare minimum. Unless I'm recalling something
wrong, this tournament was COMPLETELY factually
accurate, hitting a crucially important goal of editing on
the nose.

Also, except for perhaps one or two
incidents, there were no vague or misleading clues of any
kind. Essentially, this tournament was a model for
question style, my only complaint on that front being the
length of bonus parts. I understand the value in writing
"Name this author of A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also
Rises" rather than "Name this author of The Sun Also
Rises" in a gimme first part of the bonus, that value
being that people who know the easy clue will learn
something new, but perhaps it wasn't necessary to include
six or seven such pieces of information in each bonus
part.

Finally, this set was amazingly accessible. Excepting one
juniorbird played on NAQT IS questions, this was the easiest
real tournament I've ever been to, yet I still think
the games between top teams turned out fairly. That's
a hard balance to pull off, and it was done well by
both the submitting writers and Kelly's
editing.

Some people will complain about any tournament they
don't do well at, and will take advantage of whatever
negative stereotypes are floating around about ACF, NAQT,
or whatever label the tournament had to back up
their own logical fallacies. These people are wrong and
should be ignored. Specifically regarding this set,
anyone who thinks the difficulty level was too high
really needs to reconsider his methods of acquiring
academic information, because 90% of the ends of tossups
and first bonus parts were answerable with a decent
high school education, and that's as it should
be.

Accentuating the positive,
--M.W.

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:45 AM EST EST