Process of Elimination

[Great Bustard]

How often do good players think through possible answerlines at a tournament and rule things out based on whether they've come up so far that day? Like, let's say it's a HS tournament, and one hears the words "French Existentialist" and Camus came up in Round 2, and now we're in the Finals. How many buzz on Sartre with this in mind? Obviously, repeats in terms of content are to be avoided within a tournament, but is this sort of lateral thinking all but inevitable, or should even in well-written tournaments, the odd repeated answerline in a different context (this happens at NHBB all the time actually, due to the number of things we can realistically ask about and the volume of answerlines we need) appear to keep players on their toes and not thinking through which answers have come up earlier? I don't have a strong opinion myself either way; I think it's more a curious point that I haven't seen debated, so I'm interested in people's thoughts.

[Harpie's Feather Duster]

I think being able to do this to some extent is a useful skill to have, but it can also lead to some very ill-advised buzzes. It also tends to stop working once question quality and/or difficulty hits a certain point.

[Bosa of York]

This actually happened to me recently; I'll edit this post when the set in question is clear.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I am fine with a player who is attentive enough to process the entirety of what's already come up at game speed over the course of an entire day using that processing when convenient to help narrow down the list of possible answers. Players who are capable of doing this are quite rare and quite good at quizbowl already. What's more, it seems to me that, because tournaments generally try to cover a wide variety of subject matter even within subjects and avoid repeats, it is rarely the case that subsubcategories like "French existentialist" will come up more than two times in any given event.

A point of information: For what it's worth, Camus rejected the label of "existentialist" for his philosophy and writings, preferring to use "absurdist" or no label at all.