The Quizbowl Resource Center

This has been discussed before, but I'm quite confident that this performance will never be matched.

The following is a metaphysical certainty: by 2014, no player will have had 2.84 times as many powers as the second place powerer at ICT.

Way to link properly, doofus!

SHUT UP

At the highest level, I don't think it's a stretch to make such a claim. Given how many great individual players there are now, the amount of work one would have to put in to get that far above the field is just mindless.

Wait, holy hell. Number 44 in DII. Is that Andrew's brother or something???

Andrew Jackson's Compatriot wrote:Wait, holy hell. Number 44 in DII. Is that Andrew's brother or something???

Yes.

It's also worthwhile to point out that the game, especially at ICT, has changed too much to allow such a performance to be duplicated. Not that this diminishes Subash's accomplishments in any way.

grapesmoker wrote:It's also worthwhile to point out that the game, especially at ICT, has changed too much to allow such a performance to be duplicated. Not that this diminishes Subash's accomplishments in any way.

Yeah. One of the reasons for this thread is as a record of the terms of a bet I made with someone (giving enormous odds) that it wouldn't be matched, and this is exactly why. Not only are there more people studying the exact way Subash did (in kind if not in quantity) meaning separation is harder but, more importantly, questions just aren't the same.

Wow, Berkeley's third-best DI team finished twelfth AND they won DII? I knew Berkeley used to be really good, but I didn't realize it was THAT dominant.

Well, that Vinokurov kid on the DII team was a decent player; he beat my team to the "freedom fries" toss-up in the DII final, anyway. I wonder what ever became of him.

ValenciaQBowl wrote:Well, that Vinokurov kid on the DII team was a decent player; he beat my team to the "freedom fries" toss-up in the DII final, anyway. I wonder what ever became of him.

i did what

Y'all did get that toss-up according to my score sheet. Maybe it was one of your teammates. But saying it was you fit the narrative.

ValenciaQBowl wrote:Y'all did get that toss-up according to my score sheet. Maybe it was one of your teammates. But saying it was you fit the narrative.

I'm continually disturbed by the fact that the hsqb hivemind seems to know more about me than I do.

edit: for what it's worth, I'm almost certain that this question would have been answered by either Brendan Shapiro or David Boyk, and not by me.

grapesmoker wrote:

ValenciaQBowl wrote:Y'all did get that toss-up according to my score sheet. Maybe it was one of your teammates. But saying it was you fit the narrative.

I'm continually disturbed by the fact that the hsqb hivemind seems to know more about me than I do.

edit: for what it's worth, I'm almost certain that this question would have been answered by either Brendan Shapiro or David Boyk, and not by me.

hey jerry how was that turkey sandwich you had in 2004

This may be neither here nor there, but since we're reminiscing, at the risk of tooting my own horn, I'd just like to point out the ridiculousness of the Berkeley quizbowl factory: from 2004 to 2009, one of the ICT finalists was either Berkeley or had a Berkeley connection. Excluding the 2006 finals between Texas A&M and Michigan, every final of ACF Nationals from 2003 to 2009 (with the exception of 2007, which Chicago won outright and Brown placed second on points) featured a Berkeley connection as well. I know that in the very distant past this was a role played by Maryland, but I wonder what other institutions have been the seeding ground for this many good teams.

grapesmoker wrote:This may be neither here nor there, but since we're reminiscing, at the risk of tooting my own horn, I'd just like to point out the ridiculousness of the Berkeley quizbowl factory: from 2004 to 2009, one of the ICT finalists was either Berkeley or had a Berkeley connection. Excluding the 2006 finals between Texas A&M and Michigan, every final of ACF Nationals from 2003 to 2009 (with the exception of 2007, which Chicago won outright and Brown placed second on points) featured a Berkeley connection as well. I know that in the very distant past this was a role played by Maryland, but I wonder what other institutions have been the seeding ground for this many good teams.

This is obviously a much smaller thing than the Berkeley legacy, but we were amused to note at the 2003 CBI NCT* that three of the four teams in the playoffs were captained by three former Swarthmore teammates (as in people who had actually played on Swarthmore teams with each other at tournaments, not just three people who had graduated from Swarthmore at some point). I wonder how many playoffs have been that full of ex-teammate matchups.

*We were amused to note SO many things, really.

grapesmoker wrote:This may be neither here nor there, but since we're reminiscing, at the risk of tooting my own horn, I'd just like to point out the ridiculousness of the Berkeley quizbowl factory: from 2004 to 2009, one of the ICT finalists was either Berkeley or had a Berkeley connection. Excluding the 2006 finals between Texas A&M and Michigan, every final of ACF Nationals from 2003 to 2009 (with the exception of 2007, which Chicago won outright and Brown placed second on points) featured a Berkeley connection as well. I know that in the very distant past this was a role played by Maryland, but I wonder what other institutions have been the seeding ground for this many good teams.

Maryland produced the Berkeley team founder, and also Zeke's Michigan team, so I would say Maryland still is the ultimate quizbowl progenitor team.

grapesmoker wrote:Brendan Shapiro or David Boyk

How could you forget Devang?!

-Seth

setht wrote:

grapesmoker wrote:Brendan Shapiro or David Boyk

How could you forget Devang?!

-Seth

Oh, you're right! For some reason I thought David was the third on that team, but it was actually Devang Parekh.

Further hilarity: as the winning team that year, we managed all of 13 powers on the whole set. Last year's champion Yale had 85. Times sure have changed.

People got smarter than you, obviously.

just because your skull is giant and green doesn't mean other people don't have bigger, greener skulls

grapesmoker wrote:Further hilarity: as the winning team that year, we managed all of 13 powers on the whole set. Last year's champion Yale had 85. Times sure have changed.

The Red Queen wrote: Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Fred wrote:just because your skull is giant and green doesn't mean other people don't have bigger, greener skulls

I just think that what's crazy is how bad that field was by any modern standards. I would naively suspect the questions weren't much harder (although who knows at this point, see next paragraph) so it just must have been the case that we were all terrible. Virtually everyone in the top half of the ICT DII field this year was objectively better than us. Of course, a great deal of this was caused by a massive sea change in the high school game; at the time I played this tournament, I'd had just about 3 years of collegiate playing experience, whereas the best freshmen playing last year had easily that much, against far better levels of competition, and on much better questions.

I don't know if this is the case, but on the other hand it does seem that the older ICT DIIs were much harder relative to the field. In 2000, only the winning team even cracked 200 PPTH! That's actually harder per capita than the notoriously impossible 2005 ACF Nationals. Maybe Jeff can comment on what was going on here if he knows the history.

2000 was the last year that Division II used the Division I question set. We started producing a distinct DII ICT set in 2001 for precisely the difficulty reasons you mention.

I just wanted to make a joke about Jerry's avatar.

Fred wrote:I just wanted to make a joke about Jerry's avatar.

And look how much you learned in the process!

tl;dr

This actually has shown some interesting things about the history of the game though!

OK, I know necro-posts are in bad taste, but did anyone catch the last two Jeopardy ToCs? Last year's winner Colby Burnett finished 44th at that ICT, and Jason Keller won the most games that season after finishing 46th. The year before's winner, Roger Craig, finished 4th at ICT, and the 5th place finisher Joon Pahk also appeared on that ToC. Of course, 3rd place Vik Vaz and 57th place Larissa Kelly made ToCs final, too. Raj apparently only appeared on Who's Still Standing. So, with quiz bowlers having a track record like that, why is it that Maddipoti or Yaphe never did anything major on a game show?

Yep. I'm spending my Saturday night comparing previous ICT individual standing to Jeopardy tournaments. What a life I live!

bradleykirksey wrote:OK, I know necro-posts are in bad taste, but did anyone catch the last two Jeopardy ToCs? Last year's winner Colby Burnett finished 44th at that ICT, and Jason Keller won the most games that season after finishing 46th. The year before's winner, Roger Craig, finished 4th at ICT, and the 5th place finisher Joon Pahk also appeared on that ToC. Of course, 3rd place Vik Vaz and 57th place Larissa Kelly made ToCs final, too. Raj apparently only appeared on Who's Still Standing. So, with quiz bowlers having a track record like that, why is it that Maddipoti or Yaphe never did anything major on a game show?

A fair number of others from that ICT have appeared on Jeopardy as well; I (Raj) was on for two shows way back in '02. As to the more general topic of this thread, Subash's performance at that ICT was the best I've ever seen in qb, bar none. I know he didn't think quite as highly of it, but it was pretty damn spectacular. He scored 145 and 140 in the two games against us, and I don't feel like there's anything we could have done differently to even make a dent in those numbers. We (Florida) lost one of those games 515-290, and it felt like an accomplishment we should be proud of. What's not in those stats is the final against Berkeley A -- I've never seen stats from that match, but it felt like he scored 200.