Lies, linked bonuses, etc.

bigflax29 · Tue, 13 Nov 2001 11:06:19 -0800

First time poster, but I've been reading the
debate on this subject in the past few days and I just
thought I'd throw my two cents in.

First of all, I
don't think it's any one person's place to say that
these things definitely do or do not belong. I think we
can pretty much all agree on that. But of course
differing opinions are what message boards are all
about.

Looking at the examples of lie tossups posted just
recently, I have to say (though I haven't played any of
them myself in actual matches) that I'm not in favor
of them. For one thing, they don't reward knowledge
of the subject, just a tangential ability to figure
out riddles (i.e. the Giants play at Pac Bell Park,
so the Giants' Causeway would fit; or Ricky and
David Ricardo). To me, that's not really in the spirit
of quiz bowl and it's certainly not in the letter
(what happened to "must lead from the start to a
specific answer"?). I agree with one poster that it is the
kind of thing more suited to a TRASH format, but in my
opinion TRASH doesn't need it, as the main purpose of the
lie seems to be to make academic tossups more TRASHy.
Of course, it has no place in ACF, but at the same
time it's not necessary in TRASH, leaving NAQT or CBI
(or related but unaffiliated formats) to mess around
with it. Frankly, I'm against it, but if it's going to
be used at all it should be on a minimal
level.

As for linked bonuses, I think we can all see both
sides of the argument on this one. I'm frankly not
really sure which side I'm on - there were certainly
lots of times at TRASH UMW Regionals this past weekend
that I wished the bonuses were linked as I (and the
rest of my team) knew basically nothing about the
bonus material. (Certainly we had terrible bonus
conversion in the finals until the last couple of
questions.) There is of course the argument of "how related"
should a bonus be (does a tossup to which the answer is
"Brahmaputra" lead to an "Asian rivers" bonus, an "Asian
geography" bonus, or simply a geography bonus?) if at all,
but the principal debate is simply are we rewarding
specific or broad knowledge?

Broad knowledge is
certainly the goal, but this can also be obtained by the
distribution of questions in a whole packet. On the other
hand, should a couple questions of the same ilk pile up
it gives a distinct advantage to the team which is
better at that subject, which strikes me as slightly
unfair - as was said, if the idea was to reward
knowledge of one subject, we'd just give 40 points for the
tossup.

In short, I'm not sure which side of this argument
I'm on - it would probably depend on when you asked
me. (As I said, if you'd asked right after TRASH
Regs, I'd have begged you for linked bonuses.) I don't
think it's the sort of thing that should become
incredibly common, but it's certainly worth using on a
limited basis at least, much more so, anyway, than lies,
which as far as I'm concerned aren't a very viable type
of question for the purposes of quiz bowl.