Another quick poll

[Gautam]

I wanted to get some quick numbers on this again, so that we can get a sense of where people stand on the difficulty vs. field openness issues.

I'm going to ask that you vote for 2 of these options: either 1 or 2 and either 3 or 4. Please don't vote for 1 and 2 or 3 and 4 because that makes no sense. I don't particularly care if you describe your position this time, though I request that if you did vote, please indicate it here. I'd better see the total votes tally to an even number.

Sorry for creating more polls. I think this will be the last one for a while.
--Gautam Kandlikar

edit:

An 'open' team can win a tournament. An 'exhibition' team cannot. (I'm making this distinction to appease the Brucian crowd)

By 'regular difficulty plus' I mean something like VCU Open 2010 or some past Illinois Opens (not 2011.)

edit 2: I guess we're only talking about tournaments that happen during the school year. Summer tournaments can do whatever they want, i.e. I don't care if there's an ACF Fall level open tournament a la VCU/UCSD/Mich 2010 Sunday tournament.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

I voted for 2 and 4.

My view is that openness/allowing exhibition teams and difficulty are two completely different questions. The view of these two questions being linked is, I think, a result of the assumption that the only reason for having open/exhibition teams is to allow very good players to play together (or very good retired players to play at all).

I think this assumption is wrong-headed. True, most open teams of the last few years have been for one of those two reasons. But if you look back further in history, you see that exhibition/open teams have existed for many other reasons and taken many forms.

There is a strong argument for not letting Jerry play ACF Fall or ACF Regionals. But suppose that two fairly medicore players from different schools want to play a regular-difficulty tournament together; that's happened before and the argument is weaker. Or suppose that only one player from a given school can make it to a regular difficulty tournament, and he's not very good by himself, and asks the TD if he can have 1-2 freshman from the host school as token teammates. I've seen this before too. These are all things that have actually happened. Heck, as recently as last weekend, two teams showed up to noted easy tournament Moon Pie at half strength (due to the tornado) and were merged; the resultant chimera team finished somewhere in the middle of the field.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

If we are going to decide which tournaments should allow open/exhibition teams and which should not, I think there are standards far more relevant than difficulty.

These include, for example, the official purpose of the tournament. ACF Nationals has the purpose of crowning a national collegiate champion; ACF Regionals obstensibly has the purpose of crowning a regional collegiate champion, though nobody really thinks of it this way. The argument against open/exhibition teams is a bit stronger at these tournaments for that reason. But what is the official purpose of THUNDER or Penn Bowl? That's much less clear.

I'm sure other posters could supply other critiera, and I invite them to. Difficulty of the questions is going to be a proxy for many of these critiera, for sure, but since these criteria are going to be relatively easy to measure by themselves, why bother using question difficulty?

In closing, I urge quizbowl to view the issue of open/exhibition teams as a more diverse phenomenon than just Jerry playing THUNDER or me and Ted playing whatever Maryland tournament we played with Montgomery College. Even if those kinds of teams should be banned below a certain difficulty level, there is an entire other class of open/exhibition team whose ban based on difficulty level makes little sense.

[Cheynem]

I think most regular tournaments during the season should not have open or exhibition teams (maybe circumstances dictate that some of them need to be formed ad hoc, that's different).

I think if you're an open tournament you can do whatever difficulty you want. I think quizbowl is too hard.

[cvdwightw]

Voted 1 and 4. To me, "regular difficulty" implies a whole host of other things than difficulty: it implies, chiefly, that it is a tournament that a standard college club ought to send a team to (as opposed to a "novice" tournament, which clubs struggling for recruits may opt not to attend, or a "nationals" tournament, which clubs may not qualify or feel ready for), and that there should be enough such clubs to make a field of all college teams possible without open/exhibition teams.

I also agree with Mike that if you're an open tournament, you should be able to target whatever difficulty you want. In fact, if we are going to allow open/exhibition teams during the season at all, I am very strongly in favor of converting a so-called "novice" tournament into an "open" tournament with performance based eligibility restrictions instead of student status (e.g. undergrad/grad/not in school) based ones. There is probably a huge class of former players out there that don't play a lot because they were never good enough to score more than 1 or 2 total tossups at a Minnesota Open, or they played a long time ago and their top-level skills have rusted or become obsolete; sadly, that's the difficulty level that's available for them to play.