icarium wrote:"Personal memories include coming across the 3 Boys and a Goy team for the first time. This was a group of middle-aged and older former quizbowlers who played many of the open and masters tournaments of that time despite never coming remotely close to winning any of them as far as I know."
Birdofredum Sawin wrote:I don't feel like scouring the Internet to find out--do any posts from the period exist?
On April 22, 1997 during his Young Turk period Andrew wrote:The University of Virginia will not be defending its CBI national championship. If you would like to know why we have decided it is no longer worth our time and money to participate in CBI tournaments, please read on.
Birdofredum Sawin wrote: There are other people still extant in the world of quizbowl who were playing at the tail end of the previous era (e.g. Seth, Jerry, Matt Weiner), and who have much more first-hand experience watching current players on top-level questions than I have. I would, of course, be interested to hear their opinions. But my own view--from having played the best teams as recently as four years ago, and from seeing the best teams at ICT since then--is that my list of "best teams, 1995-2005" have not been surpassed by more recent iterations of quizbowl excellence.
Published in 1920, this work is subtitled "A Novel of Ironic Nostalgia." In rather ironic fashion,
Newland Archer doesn't shoot for the "new lands" of the Countess Olenska, but instead convinces her to
not divorce her husband, and he rather ironically settles for Mae Weiland. FTP, name this work about
classes in nineteenth-century New York, written by Edith Wharton.
bird bird bird bird bird wrote:Birdofredum Sawin wrote:Montclair State ... we deaffiliated from CBI shortly after winning the tournament, which I like to think contributed substantially to the format's decline and eventual disappearance.Princeton's lexicon wrote:At 1997 CBI nationals at Montclair State, Jenn somehow convinced the team to spend an evening at the mall, where Jeff Crean and Peter Coles found a malfunctioning basketball game that gave free plays. Crean and Coles, well documented College Bowl addicts, displayed their typical insanity and played the game for three and a half hours, accumulating 4000 tickets which they redeemed for a slinky and a football.
In possibly-related news, Princeton also deaffiliated from CBI after 1997.
grapesmoker wrote:We had an extra packet left over this year but I think everyone was too exhausted for any sort of all-star game. I like the idea though.
Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:I have to imagine that the growth of the internet and the creation of public packet archives had a lot to do with the level of play in college quizbowl becoming much higher. Aren't high school teams also way better now in general - like didn't it only become standard for good high school teams to practice on college questions in the middle of the last decade?
jonpin wrote:"the mall" near Montclair State? I'm gonna have to prompt you.
Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:I have to imagine that the growth of the internet and the creation of public packet archives had a lot to do with the level of play in college quizbowl becoming much higher. Aren't high school teams also way better now in general - like didn't it only become standard for good high school teams to practice on college questions in the middle of the last decade?
bird bird bird bird bird wrote:Birdofredum Sawin wrote:I don't feel like scouring the Internet to find out--do any posts from the period exist?
Here's a start.On April 22, 1997 during his Young Turk period Andrew wrote:The University of Virginia will not be defending its CBI national championship. If you would like to know why we have decided it is no longer worth our time and money to participate in CBI tournaments, please read on.
The fictional ideal that a question must lead to a uniquely indentifiable answer from the get go is very seldom achieved. It is a rare question indeed that leads to a single answer without other possibilities from the first phoneme, or even the first few words as the players hear them. Yet every sound the moderator utters is a potential clue for the player,
Christina Aguilera’s song “Hero”
RyuAqua wrote:themanwho wrote:icarium wrote:4. ACF/NAQT Regionals/Sectionals - Despite improving over the course of the season, these two tournaments only solidified the fact that we were considerably behind Chicago and Michigan at both formats. Over the course of the next two months, I probably worked as hard as any time in my life over the last 20 years with the possible exception of preparation for parts of my medical boards. What I did, I can expound upon if people are curious, but isn't particularly a fond memory and therefore better left for another post.
I'm certainly curious.
I will second that I, too, am certainly curious, as is probably uniformly true of my generation of quizbowlers.
Birdofredum Sawin wrote:The one and only good thing I will say about CBI nats is that it always featured an "all-star game," which pitted the #1, 3, 5, and 7 overall scorers at the tournament against the #2, 4, 6, and 8 scorers. This was a lot of fun, and allowed for some very interesting combinations of teammates.
Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:I believe that Jason Keller quit quizbowl to focus on crossword puzzles (and possibly also competitive Scrabble) and has been extremely successful at this. I believe there was actually an epidemic of people quitting quizbowl for scrabble around 2007, which claimed at the very least Jason Keller and that player from Furman who now goes by Quinn James (I forget her original name, back when she was a he).
This is the culture from which Zeke emerged, and while I give him enormous credit for adopting and expanding upon these practices, and for transmitting them to later generations of Michigan players, it would be a mistake to posit that they emerged, Athena-like, from Zeke's head around the year 2000.
Birdofredum Sawin wrote:Another aspect of this was the '90s-era debate about "dinosaurs"--i.e., people who were beyond (in some cases, well beyond) their undergraduate years. The lines of demarcation will be unsurprising: people who advocated a cult of "amateurism" were in favor of capping participation, and really dreaded the specter of ancient players running roughshod over poor, defenseless newcomers to the game. I always thought this was absolute nonsense; in particular, as an angry young man, I wanted nothing more than to play (and, ideally, vanquish!) the very best players, whoever they were, and however old they were. This was also one of the central points of the wars about ACF--a lot of its opponents back in the '90s thought that it was pernicious because it allowed "dinosaurs" to maintain their dominance for years and years, while other formats would undermine the alleged inherent superiority that such veterans possessed. One might have thought that such criticism would have been dissipated by my leading a team to an ACF nationals win, and then founding the modern version of ACF, at the age of 20, though I don't think it was.
Matt Weiner wrote:The impression I get from reading this debate is that it was focused mainly on defending the legitimacy of College Bowl's rule, which settled on capping teams to a maximum of one graduate student and all players to six years of participation in official College Bowl events irrespective of their degree status or participation in other tournaments, from some point in the early 90s through the demise of College Bowl's program. There seem to be indications that in earlier periods, this rule was experimented with, and 0 or 2 grad students may have been the cap at other points in time. Anyway, the implication seemed to be that people were defending this because they wanted to defend College Bowl in the first place, and that independent tournaments, even those run by College Bowl apologists in a College Bowl style, had no real restrictions on which students could play. Can you speak to this point?
Another question I'd like to get the answer to is what ACF's and independent tournaments' attitude towards people just showing up and playing without even being students at all was. It's only as recently as 2012 that we realized that allowing open teams into random in-season events probably isn't the best thing for the legitimacy and growth of college quizbowl, but it was the norm from at least the start of my career in 2000 to treat official ACF events differently and make sure exhib teams didn't enter the championship bracket and affect the actual standings. I'm given to understand that people, e.g., "playing for" Maryland even at serious events like ACF Regionals and Nationals when it was an open secret that these individuals didn't really go to Maryland anymore used to be a thing in the mid-90s. Comments?
Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:Oh yeah, that's right: mACF bonuses used to come in a wide variety of formats. It always added to 30, but you had the [10] [5], where for all three parts you got a hard clue and an easy clue if you didn't get it on the hard clue, the [5] [10] [15] where the easy clue was worth 5 and the hard 15, the 30-20-10 here you got a hard clue, medium clue, and easy clue for the same answer and got the points depending on which clue you knew it on, etc. This was totally still a thing my freshman year in 2004.
I don't think CBI had this kind of variety, did it? Where did these come from? Where there theoretical debates on them back in the day?
Coelacanth wrote:Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:Oh yeah, that's right: mACF bonuses used to come in a wide variety of formats. It always added to 30, but you had the [10] [5], where for all three parts you got a hard clue and an easy clue if you didn't get it on the hard clue, the [5] [10] [15] where the easy clue was worth 5 and the hard 15, the 30-20-10 here you got a hard clue, medium clue, and easy clue for the same answer and got the points depending on which clue you knew it on, etc. This was totally still a thing my freshman year in 2004.
I don't think CBI had this kind of variety, did it? Where did these come from? Where there theoretical debates on them back in the day?
CBI had all this and more.
In addition to these, and the already-mentioned single-part 20, 25, or 30 point questions, there were several other forms. CBI questions were written with the clock in mind, so having more than two distinct parts was extremely rare. You'd frequently get bonuses with multiple answers in the same prompt: "Name the three largest..."; "Name this book, the author, and the main character"; "Put these 5 things in order from earliest to latest/largest to smallest/whatever".
ValenciaQBowl wrote:And CBI had spelling toss-ups! I loved sniffing those out. They'd go something like, "A plant without sun could become etiolated. FTP, spell "etiolated." To buzz in first on these, which were usually a lot easier than that weird example I just came up with, you had to sense that there was no other way the question could go. I actually remember getting one on "briquette," as in charcoal briquette.
dtaylor4 wrote:I also remember the 5/10/20/30 where you got points based on the number of parts you got right.
2005 HSNCT wrote:For 5 points for one, 10 for two, 20 for three, or 30 for all four--are these statements true of the {dot product}, {cross product}, both, or neither?
A. Is {commutative}
answer: _dot_ product [The cross product is ~anti~-commutative.]
B. Gives a scalar [SKAY-lur] result
answer: _dot_ product
C. ~Always~ gives a non-zero result when applied to a pair of non-zero vectors
answer: _neither_ [Dot product is zero for perpendicular vectors; cross product is zero for parallel vectors.]
D. The result doubles in magnitude if you double the length of one operand
answer: _both_
Kyle wrote:brutal ..."A, B, both, or neither" bonuses
Matt Weiner wrote:The 5-10-15 bonus was from a time when there was very little conscious thought about what bonuses were for and the same sort of "feels right to the layman, is totally wrong when you think about it" instincts that produced head-to-head tiebreakers also gave rise to the idea that certain answers should be worth more points due to being harder.
I think that, in the zeal to purge unfair or stupid bonus styles like 5-10-15, or those that could theoretically be useful but seemed to never work out in practice like 30-20-10, we have gone slightly too far in making everything 10-10-10. In particular, I think there is a place for "for 5 points each, list six things that...." style bonuses if and when the premise is such that scoring will reflect the same distribution we try to achieve with 10-10-10.
Birdofredum Sawin wrote:Take, for instance, the use of biographical clues in literature. Back in the benighted old days, these clues were common (from pure trivia like "Born in [year]" to old-timey chestnuts like "He met John Galsworthy on a ship"). These were almost invariably the product of lazy writing (someone generating a perfunctory question by copying a few clues out of a biographical entry in an encyclopedia), and as part of the "realification" of the game, they were purged. It made sense for us to do away with them; that said, I think that there could be a place in the game for intelligently crafted, well-written questions that relied on clues from literary biography. Again, this is where experimental tournaments can do a real service to the community--if I were writing a lit singles tournament, I would be inclined to try throwing in a "literary biography" subdistribution to see if there is a way to make such clues work in the context of contemporary quizbowl.
vcuEvan wrote:Birdofredum Sawin wrote:Take, for instance, the use of biographical clues in literature. Back in the benighted old days, these clues were common (from pure trivia like "Born in [year]" to old-timey chestnuts like "He met John Galsworthy on a ship"). These were almost invariably the product of lazy writing (someone generating a perfunctory question by copying a few clues out of a biographical entry in an encyclopedia), and as part of the "realification" of the game, they were purged. It made sense for us to do away with them; that said, I think that there could be a place in the game for intelligently crafted, well-written questions that relied on clues from literary biography. Again, this is where experimental tournaments can do a real service to the community--if I were writing a lit singles tournament, I would be inclined to try throwing in a "literary biography" subdistribution to see if there is a way to make such clues work in the context of contemporary quizbowl.
I absolutely agree with this. Tommy and I are both planning on putting some of these clues in our questions for CO Lit Singles and I hope the other writers do the same.
powerplant wrote:So because of this thread's discussion of old quizbowl and the evolution of the game, I reached out to Jeff Kipnis, who the qbwiki credits with setting packet length at 20 questions when he was a player with Georgia Tech in the 1970s. He has agreed to meet up with me so I can ask him questions about his playing days, and I figured I'd ask here if people had specific things they'd like me to ask him? I have no idea how much time he'll give me or how much he'll remember but I figured this was a neat opportunity. If he's okay with it I'll try and record our conversation as an interview and upload an mp3, otherwise I'll just try to jot down as much as I can and type it up.
powerplant wrote:So because of this thread's discussion of old quizbowl and the evolution of the game, I reached out to Jeff Kipnis, who the qbwiki credits with setting packet length at 20 questions when he was a player with Georgia Tech in the 1970s. He has agreed to meet up with me so I can ask him questions about his playing days, and I figured I'd ask here if people had specific things they'd like me to ask him? I have no idea how much time he'll give me or how much he'll remember but I figured this was a neat opportunity. If he's okay with it I'll try and record our conversation as an interview and upload an mp3, otherwise I'll just try to jot down as much as I can and type it up.
Matt Weiner wrote:a general description of how a quizbowl season worked before the Internet
Coelacanth wrote:One more difference that has nothing to do with things being pre-internet but I haven't seen it mentioned. The Saturday-only tournament was by no means a standard. The norm (at least around here) was for teams to get in a car on Friday morning and do some kind of check-in at the playing site around 5 pm. Then teams would grab dinner and play 4 (or so) matches Friday night starting around 7. Things usually wrapped up on Saturday mid-to-late afternoon and teams would hit the road.
Yor, the Hunter from the Future wrote:dysprosium meant “green twin”
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