Speaking as anything but someone who puts effort into being good at trash, I enjoyed Beltway. There were a few things I found too difficult, but I'm going to be a less than 20 ppg player on even the easiest trash, and my teammates were not fazed by most of the stuff I found hard, so it was probably just my own ignorance of most trash areas rather than the questions. The periodic leaps into academia were amusing and surprising. Whoever wrote them did make efforts to trashify the clues. It was NOT the long-anticipated turnabout of inserting 2-10 academic questions in each trash round to show why equivalent amounts of trash in academic puts some people off. Rather, I would say about every other round had about 1 question that was certainly trash but COULD have been answered by someone with academic knowledge of the subject. To wit, the Portrait of a Lady and Jane Austen questions were about the movies, Mersenne primes was about a screen saver, and the Dr Zhivago clue was not "name this character from a Russian novel" but rather "name the character played by Actor X in the movie Dr Zhivago." The Malinkowski q was about his appearance in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and only threw a single academic bone, the Trobriand Islands. So in summary, there were maybe 6 or 7 total questions that perfect knowledge of ACF or NAQT academic topics would have helped on, and none of them were just sitting there unexplained; all were linked to trash. There were a few bad things that stuck out in the multitude of good questions. The Dark Empire tossup seemed to be written from the blurb on the back cover and also inserted a factual error; it probably would have caused an issue if more than one person who had even seen the thing, let alone read it, was in a given room. The Cliff Burton tossup in the last playoff round was just anti-pyramidal as it mentioned "bassist" and "Metallica" in the first sentence. Also, I don't think Thelonius Monk is trash, but I was happy to get the question anyway. And while I wish that more of our packet could have been used (consult Ann B Davises past for how to use submitted rounds for playoffs) the combination of questions in the prelims did result in very strong, well-written packets with an almost complete lack of the cliched leadins from which some trash packets suffer. So, good tournament. --M.W.
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