It probably won't be a surprise to anyone that I share the sentiment of my teammate (and, I suspect, the entire field) concerning this year's tournament, which I thought was a resounding success. In order to avoid the appearance of another mindless panegyric and preserve some semblance of objectivity, it must be said that two small things could have been made better: 1) stats could have been posted; mine were such that I didn't mind too much not seeing them, but it would have been nice to have seen them every once in a while; 2) the option to prompt could have been used more often; I can think of at least three incidents in which a prompt might have made things more comfortable. That having been said, back to the encomium: the tournament ran smoothly and almost seemlessly, despite the occasional buzzer vicissitudes that could have caused endless complications but didn't, not even a little; the moderating was quite good, and games seem to have been singularly bereft of scoring difficulties; the competition was diverse and excellent, giving my team the chance to play some teams it hadn't seen all year; and, most importantly, the questions - with the notable exception of one packet - were excellent, about as close to perfect as one can expect. The fact that they were so good is, I suspect, largely attributable to the editing corps and especially to Bhan himself in light of the indolence which teams seem to have displayed concerning packet submission, and while that is disappoing, I recognise that the tournament was the indirect beneficiaries of the filed's laziness. As far as I'm concerned, that, ladies and gentleman, was what ACF is supposed to sound like, and teams would do well to invest the twenty dollars and use them as models on which they could model future packets. Bravo, Roger and crew; congratulations to Michigan, and thanks to all the teams who were such pleasant competitors. This year's nationals provide ample illustration for all the low-foreheads and half-wits who demand a dichotomy that a tournament can be both hardcore and great fun, as this one certainly was.
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