I'll have more to say on specific things later, but right now, I just wanted to briefly note that I enjoyed the hell out of this tournament. With the exception of a few questions, everything was very solid and well-edited; the bonuses were very hard, but I never felt like there was a great unevenness in the difficulty. It was a great set and I want to thank the Minnesota crew for producing it.
Perhaps the only real problem I had with the set was not with the content but with the fact that it was pitched as something like a "regular difficulty" event. From the original announcement, I read:
I think this was an understatement of the eventual difficulty of this set, to put it mildly. When the first question of the tournament is on Eugenio Montale (well, it was at MIT anyway), I think we can all safely agree that this is going to be way harder than the Deep Bench quads from last year. I felt this set was substantially more difficult in its answer selection than either IO 2007 or Cardinal Classic of last year. Again, that's not to say that I didn't enjoy myself (any tournament where I can answer a tossup on "Naming and Necessity" is a good tournament in my book) but I think it might have been quite the trial by fire for some of the weaker teams that showed up at the MIT site.Target difficulty: The target difficulty for this event will be similar to that of the Deep Bench quads set last year, which is probably just a tick easier than Illinois Open or Cardinal Classic, but still comparable. Basically, we want any team that has played regular-difficulty events to be able to convert tossups and average at least one part per bonus answered. At the same time, we want the top teams to be challenged with the early clues, third parts of the bonuses, and a few tossup answers.
Anyway, great job by all involved, and thanks to MIT for another quality tournament experience. You guys rock.