A couple comments: All in all, this tournament was an uneven experience for me. On the one hand, I mostly had fun, the teams we played were almost exception pleasant to play against, and the moderation was reasonable (although in my (possibly slightly biased) opinion there were willing and competent moderators scorekeeping while a couple less competent moderators read rounds in the same rooms). The major issue I had was the questions that we played on, which were often prone to hoses and early negs (then again, so was my team, but based on the performance of our opponents, the questions exacerbated the problem). There also seemed to be grammatical errors that tripped up the moderators to varying degrees. Since the submission deadline was nearly three weeks before the tournament, it seems like more attention could have been paid to editing for these kinds of issues. Though detailed planning obviously went into some aspects of the tournament, others seemed somewhat lacking. In the first game of doubles, I was told that I couldn't protest a tossup which I answered "cinematography" (the answer was "mise-en-scene", which three seconds later in the question was described as "a part of cinematography"). Though I have no strong basis for the assumption, I got the feeling that this was because a protest mechanism for singles and doubles matches hadn't been determined (or if there was one, the moderator hadn't been informed). There also seemed to be a great deal of variation in moderator leniency--one moderator told us that "vowels didn't matter" as long as consonants were in the right order, which is specious advice if I've ever heard it--and there were also some purely factual issues that could have been cleared up by closer editing. Finally--this was my first tournament in almost a year, but I don't think I'm off-base in saying that marathon QB, past a point, is no fun. The first night was somewhat exhausting for me (18 rounds of 20TU in a schedule that ran so far behind that we only played 17 before we apparently had to vacate the building at 11pm), but the next day (when we started at 9am and played until 3:30 pm, with no lunch break, then returned at 5 for Trash which lasted until 10) was really pretty bad. Since there wasn't such a rigid schedule for that second day, a lunch break somewhere near the time of actual lunch would have been appreciated. All that said, though, my thanks to Minnesota for hosting this tournament and TRASH Regionals this weekend, and thanks to David Levinson for TDing and for the box of books from his basement which were generously donated as prizes. Lindsay
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