Lists

sdrossboss · Mon, 12 Nov 2001 03:39:57 -0800

It seems like alot of what has been discussed is
turning into a discussion about lists and their
memorization translating into success on the ACF
format.

Personally I'm all set to let this thing drop and just
relax, but let me ponder the following:

Does list
memorization result in better scores for those who engage in
doing so exclusively in the tournaments with the
monicker ACF Regionals or ACF Fall? I would contend no.
Given that packets are submitted for all ACF
tournaments and given that invitational tournaments we submit
packets for are usually mACF why should not results
across players be roughly similar? For example, in my
region, the questions written for WIT and say
Technophobia were definitely similar in both content and
difficulty. While distributions among those tournaments vary
slightly, I find it difficult to argue that one tournament
rewards list-memorization more than the other.

I
furthermore have no reason to believe that an editor would
greatly edit a tossup unless it read poorly or had
misleading or difficult to understand clues. Most certainly
not to change the question to read like biography
bowl and if anything the opposite. 

Basically
what I'm getting at is that what is to be considered
ACF is highly amorphous given that, unless you're
playing in a tournament like "This tournament goes to 11"
or "Deep Bench" you're playing mACF with real people
submitting real packets.

Lastly there's no
subsititute for knowledge - whether something one picked up
or something you memorized. Memorization should
reward knowledge on tossups as well as bonuses.

To answer to something Samer posted a short while
ago - I think there is plenty of stuff out there to
figure out bonus conversion if you want to look for it.
Whether or not it tells anyone anything the info is there
and it takes someone to look at it and calculate it
if interested.

As people improve on tossups,
bonus conversion should improve proportionally. I would
think that should be the trend. If possible I'd be
interested in hearing theories that would suggest that this
isn't always true. Certainly proportionally in the
categories one has knowledge in.

In any case it's a
shame that all of this has gone down but nevertheless I
challenge persons to look at what's available and think
about what kinds of tournaments we compete in and what
those formats are like before we come out one way or
another. 

Ross