The Quizbowl Resource Center

Berry College is pleased to announce our annual Southeastern tournament to be held April 16th. We will be mirroring a modified version of 2011 Penn Bowl.

The base fee is 75$
-5$ discounts for each reader/scorekeeper
-5$ discounts per buzzer


Please direct all questions or confirmations to [email protected]

gregpweinstein wrote:...a modified version of 2011 Penn Bowl.

Just out of curiosity, what does this mean?

I am not sure as I will not be editing them, but I believe my coach plans to just shorten them. Any other changes he will make, I don't know anything about. Thankfully penn bowl gave us their permission and the ability to modify it. Hope that helps.

gregpweinstein wrote:I am not sure as I will not be editing them, but I believe my coach plans to just shorten them.

But if that's the case, what would this accomplish?

mhayes wrote:

gregpweinstein wrote:I am not sure as I will not be editing them, but I believe my coach plans to just shorten them.

But if that's the case, what would this accomplish?

Presumably it would keep the ten-second attention span of the tournament participants from being overwhelmed. I would take some umbrage at the fact that this tournament is being scheduled against ACF Nationals, but somehow I don't think we're exactly competing for the same group of teams here.

grapesmoker wrote:Presumably it would keep the ten-second attention span of the tournament participants from being overwhelmed.

That seems like a lot of work for the sake of making the questions more "manageable". I don't know how you can shorten the questions without removing actual clues, and I think most would agree that this isn't a good thing.

Forgive me for being too forward, but I can't think of a good reason for doing this.

mhayes wrote:That seems like a lot of work for the sake of making the questions more "manageable". I don't know how you can shorten the questions without removing actual clues, and I think most would agree that this isn't a good thing.

Forgive me for being too forward, but I can't think of a good reason for doing this.

I was making a bad attempt at being facetious. Anyway, you are entirely correct: there's no good reason to do this. Not only is it a ton of effort for nothing, but it literally keeps your players from hearing interesting clues that they might learn from.

It would be one thing if Berry was just talking about having the editors ease the difficulty a bit, since I believe Penn Bowl was considered a fairly hard set this year and the field for this tournament probably wouldn't be featuring any top teams. Even that is probably unneccessary (just play the hard questions even if you suck, you'll be better next time because of it), but just shortening the questions is completely unacceptable. Not only does that rip out some of the pyramidality of the questions, it suggests that Berry believes that quizbowl players shouldn't have to sit and listen to questions that are long because it may hurt or something.

OK, maybe nobody will know the first few clues of the questions (surely some people will for at least a few of the questions), but if everyone is listening like they should, they'll have learned some clues for the next goddamn time they come up in another tournament. And THAT is infinitely more valuable than preserving everyone's delicate attention spans for a few extra seconds every question.

Hilltopper22 wrote:OK, maybe nobody will know the first few clues of the questions (surely some people will for at least a few of the questions), but if everyone is listening like they should, they'll have learned some clues for the next goddamn time they come up in another tournament. And THAT is infinitely more valuable than preserving everyone's delicate attention spans for a few extra seconds every question.

But if you learn early clues, next year you have less reason to self-righteously shorten questions, and where's the fun in that?

Given the inexplicably secretive nature of everything the Berry College club does, I don't think we will convince them of anything.

Hilltopper22 wrote: OK, maybe nobody will know the first few clues of the questions (surely some people will for at least a few of the questions), but if everyone is listening like they should, they'll have learned some clues for the next goddamn time they come up in another tournament. And THAT is infinitely more valuable than preserving everyone's delicate attention spans for a few extra seconds every question.

And that is my biggest problem with this. Pyramidality in questions exists not only to reward those with real knowledge, but to also facilitate learning. As you and Jerry pointed out, if a player doesn't know anything about the subject, (s)he can at least learn something from the clues.

I was speaking to a high school kid a few days ago whose coach only plays on 's questions because pyramidal tossups are "too long". I would hope that the Berry team doesn't share or endorse this belief in the "detriments" of longer questions.

Assuming I'm off I wouldn't mind driving down to this. Although it is a mystery as to how this tournament will be question-wise and quality-wise, tournaments that I am within feasible distance to and eligible to play in are nice. I'll hopefully have some friends to drag along with me, but if not I'll play solo I suppose.

Have we results from this tournament?

They were keeping stats on a computer but at some point during the lunch break the power surged and the computer lost all data, so stats were kept on hand. I assume Dr. Carpenter hasn't been able to enter them yet.

A short breakdown yields thus:

1st-Berry 10-0
2nd-Wofford 7-3
3rd-Me Solo 5-5

All-Star Team
MVP - Mark Morris
2nd - Eli Miles
3rd - Greg Weinstein
4th - Dude from Wofford?
5th - Girl from Wofford I believe (not so good at names from this tournament)

THE HUMANITY!