Sun 'n' Fun 2010 Thanks and Discussion

[SnookerUSF]

With the unfortunate demise of the UIUC mirror, this tournament is open for discussion. Discuss! Allow me to thank Mehdi Razvi, Isaac Hirsh, and Sean Platzer for some clutch last minute questions. Also, thanks to Maryland for submitting two packets (history missing or not). Furthermore, Chris Borglum was exceptionally gracious to write a packet, and coordinate the details for the Valencia site, without him this tournament would not have happened at Valencia. Also thanks to Jonathan Magin for his editing efforts, he made some great suggestions, some of which I took, some of which I didn't probably to the tournament's detriment, but SnF is a personal labor.

As far my perspective on the tournament. I received a number of packets late, and thus the distribution suffered a little bit in the later rounds, which is my fault entirely, especially in the Weiner/Mukherjee packet. I don't like taking out well written questions even if they were hard or extra canonical, because I know how much people like writing those questions, and I know they spent a lot of time on them. Also, Editors 2 and the Weiner/Mukherjee packet were harder than I hoped. Overall I thought I did some good things, the questions were much shorter than in previous incarnations of SnF, no tossup was longer than 8 lines, most were in the 7 line range. Also, I tried to write some more history and science, hopefully that worked out. It probably could have used a finer grammatical eye than mine to edit the packets. Also, I tried to rail in my pomo tendencies, I was moderately successful at that. Anyway, have at it. Hopefully, my mistakes will serve as educational to future tournament writing.

[Nine-Tenths Ideas]

Tossups I wrote: Battle of Thymbra, Wallachia

I played only four rounds, but I thought what I saw of this tournament was good. I feel completely unqualified to comment on difficulty, so I won't.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

The College Park mirror was divided into two parts: an initial round robin with byes, played on the packets submitted by the UMDCP-site teams, and then a double playoff round robin on packets that were blind to the entire UMDCP field.

The first part of the tournament we all enjoyed very much. Indeed, over lunch (which was at the end of the initial RR), I was drafting an HSQB post in my head about how this was as good of a tournament as I've played all year.

Then the second RR happened and I was disabused of that notion. There were tossups on strange things, tossups that had no buzzable clues until the giveaway, bonuses that effectively had three hard parts (because the most notable clues about the middle and easy parts were not included), distributional imbalances, etc. We still had fun playing it, but I think for every team there were multiple moments of frustration during that second half.

Also, there was very little of the Ahmad quirkiness that made previous Sun 'n' Funs so enjoyable, even in the face of other flaws.

[grapesmoker]

There were a whole lot of crappy questions in this tournament that looked like they'd been written by teams that don't really know how to write very well. Detailed analysis forthcoming.

[rylltraka]

With the caveats that I haven't seen the packets or played the tournament, the concept of a tossup on the Battle of Thymbra seems a little unwise. Unless, of course, I'm living under a quizbowl rock and every decent player knows what it is.

[MLafer]

With the caveats that I haven't seen the packets or played the tournament, the concept of a tossup on the Battle of Thymbra seems a little unwise. Unless, of course, I'm living under a quizbowl rock and every decent player knows what it is.

"Coincidentally", it's also in that 100 Decisive Battles book that people were talking about in the "Books for Quiz Bowl" thread.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

With the caveats that I haven't seen the packets or played the tournament, the concept of a tossup on the Battle of Thymbra seems a little unwise. Unless, of course, I'm living under a quizbowl rock and every decent player knows what it is.

"Coincidentally", it's also in that 100 Decisive Battles book that people were talking about in the "Books for Quiz Bowl" thread.

I think Ahmad picked that answer before that discussion, so it may really be a coincidence.

[SnookerUSF]

As far as the Thymbra tossup was concerned, I can honestly say that I had no foreknowledge of that thread. I picked that tossup answer, I guess unwisely, months ago.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

If I can indulge in HSQB's most decadent behavior, I'd like to complain about a single question in a narrow specialty of mine.

The IR theory bonus (Waltz/balance-of-power/Tragedy of Great Power Politics) had a misleading middle clue. The bonus part was all about bandwagoning, but bandwagoning is not an aspect of balance of power. Indeed, bandwagoning disrupts the balance of power and runs counter to what is predicted by balance of power theory.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Is this set actually posted?

[Lagotto Romagnolo]

Well, the Maryland mirror certainly had more sun than fun (which would have happened regardless, it was steaming outside and the AC was too loud to use). I enjoyed most of the science (variational principle, etc.) with the exception of the multiple repeats (J-psi, Cannizaro), although at times I felt like the guy in the Chinese room, blurting out "Jahn-Teller" when I heard "octahedral." But anyway, it was nice to know that all that reading I did for my job somehow paid off. I'll post more details later, but I basically second Bruce's comments; there were transparency issues. But since I wrote for one of those late packets, I understand where Ahmad's coming from.

We collectively agreed to bitch about something else, but I can't remember off the top of my head what it was..

EDIT: Oh yeah, it was the math rock bonus.

[women, fire and dangerous things]

Oh man, math rock!

[Kwang the Ninja]

math rock bonus.

That was in Borglum's packet, right? Man, that bonus was a bitch.

[ValenciaQBowl]

Like American marathoners of the 1970s, everyone knows about math rock!

[grapesmoker]

Here's a brief recap of how not to make questions suck:

If your question is figure-outable by someone with a basic command of the English language, or contains clues that immediately narrow down the options to only one or two possibilities, that is a bad question. It seems like we've generally gotten people to accept the proposition that clues should be provided in reverse order of their recognizability, but we're still having trouble getting a lot of people to think about what those clues actually mean and how they're used by players.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

It is also important to avoid early clues that are not uniquely identifying, or early clues whose favorite Israeli Prime Minister is Menachem Vaguein. These lead to either early negs or to people sitting there for the first five lines and then buzzer racing on the sixth.

I feel this is of heightened importance at higher difficulty levels. If most players don't know your early specific clues, a vague clue down the line can lead to more trouble, even if the question is, in theory, completely pyramidal.