Green Eggs and Hammond 2012

[Panayot Hitov]

Hammond's coach didn't post a thread on this this time, so I thought I'd do it.
There were 50 teams this year, from around 24 schools, split into 5 brackets of 10. Each team played 5 games, with 5 teams staying in one room the whole time, and the other 5 rotating around. Because there could be a maximum of 5 undefeated teams per bracket, but only 16 teams advancing to the playoffs, this theoretically could have caused some trouble. We got into the playoffs, but lost in the first round.

The questions were bought from Avery Enterprises. This meant that, instead of the usual housewritten speed questions of fairly poor quality, but with a fairly average amount of trash, we had speed questions with an extremely large amount of trash, including, but not limited to, spelling questions and questions about types of detergent. I remember one match against Whitman B, our third game, which featured almost exclusively trash and sports.
Interested to know who won.

[sir negsalot]

I distinctly remember the Hammond coach saying at the Centennial tournament that he "wanted to avoid controversy" so he chose a "reputable company". It is an absolute travesty that 50 teams attended this.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Green Eggs and Hammond is a known bad tournament, run on known bad questions, by a team which goes to very few (if any) good tournaments in any given school year, despite bringing in a lot of money from hosting which they should be using to attend the many good tournaments in the immediate area. It is in the best interest of all remaining teams in the DC circuit to know this and keep this in mind before deciding to spend their money to go to it.

I remain concerned that DC-area tournaments like this survive year after year while the pyramidal circuit is deteriorating. The number of tournaments is bloating and the field sizes are shrinking. It will take a concerted effort by every tournament to do real communication with all It's Academic and quizbowl-playing schools in the area - developing reliable email lists and using them to advertise every single event at minimum - to reverse this trend.

Was there a time in the morning for people to announce upcoming tournaments in person? Did anyone take the opportunity?

[salmon of wisdom]

So we showed up to this with a B team of new players for their first tournament. We were expecting a tournament around the quality of last year around Keegan level of difficulty maybe a little more ( obviously not great but O.K. for people who have been playing Quizbowl for 3-4 weeks). After going through the first 10 questions it was apparent that this set was a steaming pile of full of in a of . After we met up with our B team for lunch, our new players thought this was the worst set they ever heard and begged us to play pyramidal questions. It was actually kind of an effective way to make sure our newer members prefer pyramidal Quizbowl. This experience made me feel so, so, sorry for the teams stuck playing this sort of questions who don't even know about pyramidal Quizbowl.

To clarify the "spelling" questions they weren't even phrased "spell x." They were posed as a normal question and at the end it was "FTP spell this basically random word in the questions we just asked you." It was actually impressive how they made embedded a hose into an inherently terrible form of question. I am ashamed to say I attended this tournament.

Edit: I heard comments from teams who had never played pyramidal Quizbowl before( that I know of) commenting on how much they disliked the questions. It's not a matter of preferring terrible questions; it's a matter of not knowing about good Quizbowl.

[The Stately Rhododendron]

Was there a time in the morning for people to announce upcoming tournaments in person? Did anyone take the opportunity?

There were no tournaments announced

After we met up with our B team for lunch, our new players thought this was the worst set they ever heard

Nothing was worse than the game we played against Whitman B when the category for the 1st ten questions was "pop culture" and the individual round was "Sports" and "More Sports". That means out of 55 questions, 30 were automatically trash, plus at least 8 trash questions in the toss up rounds. Also, almost all of the questions were very poorly written. I came out of it feeling like I hadn't learned anything new (except how to spell hygienic).

[The Herb]

Was there a time in the morning for people to announce upcoming tournaments in person? Did anyone take the opportunity?

It would have been a little awkward to announce an upcoming pyramidal tournament after the Hammond coach declared war on pyramidal quizbowl in his opening speech.

[Cheynem]

Can you explain that more?

[The Herb]

Can you explain that more?

He didn't exactly declare war. He more just talked down pyramidal quizbowl (indirectly), saying something along the lines of "There aren't going to be any of those long, drawn out, convoluted questions at this tournament that you might hear at other places. The questions are short and I think this tournament is going to be decided by one thing: buzzer speed." And then he said something cringe-inducing: "But while you can live by the buzzer you can also die by the buzzer"--and looking back at how many times teams were killed by hoses, he was right.

[The Stately Rhododendron]

"The questions are short and I think this tournament is going to be decided by one thing: buzzer speed."

We still had to wait in our room for 10-15 minutes between each match, and that's with a fairly slow reader.

[sir negsalot]

What do they do with all the money from 50 teams if they only go to a few tournaments a year? Simply pocket it?

[Panayot Hitov]

After we met up with our B team for lunch, our new players thought this was the worst set they ever heard and begged us to play pyramidal questions. It was actually kind of an effective way to make sure our newer members prefer pyramidal Quizbowl.

Yeah, I'm hoping that this tournament will help convince a lot of teams, especially most hoco ones, that speed is stupid. This will take some effort, though, as OM, Howard, and sometimes Centennial are the only teams that do any pyramidal in hoco, and probably the Baltimore region, as well. Given that practically every high school has an It's Academic club,and that many of them would definitely be good at pyramidal, this is unacceptable. As my little way of trying to help this, with every new team I saw, I told them about qbpackets.com and Torrey Pines. Obviously, this isn't much.

[The Herb]

What do they do with all the money from 50 teams if they only go to a few tournaments a year? Simply pocket it?

Their coach said that it goes towards a charitable scholarship fund.

[Panayot Hitov]

Ok, here's what I did. I made a Google Docs spreadsheet with all It's Academic schools on it. Fill in the rest as needed. For other, put anything you know about the school or program.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... mFHcXdya2c

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I'll add what I can to this, if no one minds.