2019 ICT DI general discussion and thanks

[theMoMA]

Hi all,

Big thanks to everyone who played, staffed, and helped write or edit this year's ICT sets. From the production side, I'd like to extend my gratitude to Seth Teitler and Billy Busse for their excellent editing work, and to all of the writers whose submissions made it a real pleasure to edit the set.

This is your thread for general discussion of DI ICT. Have at it.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

This year's ICT was an absolute pleasure to write and moderate for. I saw excellent play by a ton of teams and players of varying skill levels on all sorts of clues, from less experienced players coming out of nowhere with first-clue buzzes to grizzled veterans scoring clutch gets late in the tossup, reflecting an impressive degree of control in early clue selection. In addition, I think the set managed to overall be fairly tame and reasonable, while retaining the feeling of "anything can happen" that makes the ICT more enjoyable - there were a ton of tossups on answerlines that were either long overdue or just out of left field and really exciting, and it seemed in my rooms like most of these went over very well. (What other "mainstream" tournament will have a tossup on boustrophedon ???) Teams of all skill levels scored lots of powers, a large number of teams got well over 15 points per bonus, and every team played like they had something real to get out of each game. It was an absolute joy to watch play out, and I'm incredibly excited to (hopefully) play the 2020 iteration of this tournament.

To dish out a bit of criticism: Several players shared their disappointments with me about the current events questions in this tournament, and I agree with them wholeheartedly. It generally felt like in this tournament, you were much more likely to be rewarded with a U.S. current events buzz for reading Michael Avenatti's Twitter account, knowing about fringe right-wing figures (somewhat to the exclusion of other fringe groups, though not completely so), or keeping up on miscellaneous fleeting political drama that got shared widely on Facebook or talked up on cable news, rather than from trying to seriously follow substantive policy issues and broad trends that persist over multiple years. Perhaps that reflects what a lot of "current events" is in the current sad state of our society, but I think we would be much better served as a community if we re-focused our current events at the collegiate level on other topics, in line with what Chris Ray talked about in his Chicago Open announcement. I think we could do with a lot more questions on such topics as tax, welfare, prison, and drug law reform discussions, major issues in health care and immigration, trends in labor contracts, employment, unionization, and wages, important individual laws such as FISA, the implications of technology across all of these areas, and a whole plethora of other issues that have major effects on people's lives. In addition, it seemed like most of the non-U.S. current events consisted of country tossups, and I think there could definitely be a bit more diversity in the world CE.

In addition, the first few rounds of the tournament seemed extremely heavy on U.S. military history, with a raft of questions on figures and fights in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars - to the exclusion of not just other history topics, but even of other topics in military history. Those are the two most important conflicts in US history and we should not ignore them, but there is a lot more that could be asked about. In particular, I think the tossup on that one fairly obscure Confederate went over quite poorly.

To suggest improvements: I think it might be good if NAQT modified its distribution at the collegiate level to have higher quotas for social and business current events tossups and lower ones for political tossups, not just because I think college players are more likely to be aware of and informed on these topics than high schoolers, but also because they don't end up presenting the (very understandable) issue of "tossing up this country's leaders and political parties will likely result in dead questions, let's just toss up the country instead." The same is true of US military history versus social history - I think there should be a quota for military history, as it's definitely important, but there's so much room to explore at the ICT level compared to lower levels that I don't think we need to mandate nearly as much as we do. Finally, I will reiterate many folks' suggestions that more world literature be added to the NAQT distribution for similar reasons, perhaps at the expense of some British lit - the canon just opens up a lot more widely for world lit compared to at the high school level, and I think the distribution ought to reflect this.

Thanks again to NAQT for putting on an excellent tournament!

[Important Bird Area]

Thanks for the feedback, Will.

DI ICT calls for 5/4 US military history (compare 12/12 government history, 8/8 social history, and 3/3 any US history). There were US military tossups in rounds 1, 2, and 6, and bonuses in rounds 4 and 5, so I think it's understandable why players might feel there was a lot of this subcategory early in the tournament.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Another point: in the pop culture distribution, I would suggest reducing the number of TV questions. This is not because TV is an unimportant topic, but rather because TV tends to have a much more bimodal distribution of knowledge than other pop culture areas - people who watch a given show tend to have watched most/all of the episodes, and the other people have either engaged with the content minimally or not at all. This leads to questions that don't have a good range of buzzes - anecdotally, in the rooms I moderated for, every single TV question was either first-clued by a player who had watched the show, gotten after FTP, or went dead. This was not true of the other pop culture questions.

Given the long-standing complaints about a general de-emphasization of fine arts in the NAQT distribution, and in particular NAQT's lack of a quota for jazz questions, I would suggest that TV be reduced in favor of having a small quota for jazz questions across the tournament. Alternatively, these extra TV questions could be turned into a small quotas specifically for "art film" within the film distribution.

I actually liked reading this set's sports questions despite not knowing anything about them, because they seemed to pick out moments that seemed interesting even to someone like me who doesn't watch any sports at all, and players had a good range of buzzes on them. However, in general I think sports could be reduced to be of similar size to the other major components of the pop culture distribution. I'm not sure why sports needs to get such a big quota - two to three times the size of the "other/misc fine arts" quota (listed here as 2/3) - in an academic tournament. Maybe that's where we can carve a quota for 2/2 or 3/3 jazz across the set, which would be in line with major college tournaments, and put less of a burden on the other auditory arts categories.

[Cheynem]

Amusingly, there was a tossup on Charles Wilkes, the guy who captured John Slidell in last year's ICT (and then Slidell this year).

I don't inherently disagree with Will's take on current events--despite having written a fair share of the questions he didn't like (I stand by my blexit question!). I think his suggestion that CE Political be reduced or tweaked at the higher level makes some sense--CE Social, at least for me, is hard to do at a lot of the lower levels without being kind of vague or plumbing the same topics over and over, but at the higher levels, that might make more sense. One of the challenges I encounter and this might just require more out of the box thinking is to take the very important topics Will mentions and do a tossup on them--for example, I've wanted to do a question on prison reform for a while, but I can't figure out how to do a concrete, non-transparent tossup on the topic. Bonuses are another story, of course: I really liked the bonus part this ICT had on "felons," for example.

[Wartortullian]

Another point: in the pop culture distribution, I would suggest reducing the number of TV questions. This is not because TV is an unimportant topic, but rather because TV tends to have a much more bimodal distribution of knowledge than other pop culture areas - people who watch a given show tend to have watched most/all of the episodes, and the other people have either engaged with the content minimally or not at all. This leads to questions that don't have a range of buzzes - anecdotally, in the rooms I moderated for, every single TV question was either first-clued by a player who had watched the show, gotten after FTP, or went dead. This was not true of the other pop culture questions.

Given the long-standing complaints about a general de-emphasization of fine arts in the NAQT distribution, and in particular NAQT's lack of a quota for jazz questions, I would suggest that TV be reduced in favor of having a small quota for jazz questions across the tournament. Alternatively, these extra TV questions could be turned into a small quotas specifically for "art film" within the film distribution.

Will's post is extremely good, and I was actually typing out the same argument before I saw it.

[ThisIsMyUsername]

Another point: in the pop culture distribution, I would suggest reducing the number of TV questions. This is not because TV is an unimportant topic, but rather because TV tends to have a much more bimodal distribution of knowledge than other pop culture areas - people who watch a given show tend to have watched most/all of the episodes, and the other people have either engaged with the content minimally or not at all. This leads to questions that don't have a good range of buzzes - anecdotally, in the rooms I moderated for, every single TV question was either first-clued by a player who had watched the show, gotten after FTP, or went dead. This was not true of the other pop culture questions.

I wonder how much of this is inherent to TV show questions, and how of much of this is a product of how these tend to be written in ICT and similar sets. I feel like many of the late clues that I have heard in these tossups are plot points from the most celebrated episodes or the names of the secondary characters, without naming the actors who play them. Now, maybe I'm unusual, but unless it's a show whose characters/episodes have become touchstones, I will often be entirely unable to recognize these. However, I often know the cast of the show due to seeing their faces on billboards or commercials; or, if it's an older show, I might know that this is where Actor X got their start before they became a bona fide film star. (e.g. I don't know the name of a single character on Grey's Anatomy [EDIT: Except for Grey; I'm aware that that's the lame source of the title], but I know at least five or six members of the cast.)

I'm agnostic on how large a role TV questions should play in the distribution. And perhaps I shouldn't generalize from my experiences here (I'm led to believe that I'm a rather atypical trash player), but I thought that I'd raise the possibility that more emphasis on actors could improve things.

[rahulkeyal]

Another point: in the pop culture distribution, I would suggest reducing the number of TV questions. This is not because TV is an unimportant topic, but rather because TV tends to have a much more bimodal distribution of knowledge than other pop culture areas - people who watch a given show tend to have watched most/all of the episodes, and the other people have either engaged with the content minimally or not at all. This leads to questions that don't have a good range of buzzes - anecdotally, in the rooms I moderated for, every single TV question was either first-clued by a player who had watched the show, gotten after FTP, or went dead. This was not true of the other pop culture questions.

Given the long-standing complaints about a general de-emphasization of fine arts in the NAQT distribution, and in particular NAQT's lack of a quota for jazz questions, I would suggest that TV be reduced in favor of having a small quota for jazz questions across the tournament. Alternatively, these extra TV questions could be turned into a small quotas specifically for "art film" within the film distribution.

I actually liked reading this set's sports questions despite not knowing anything about them, because they seemed to pick out moments that seemed interesting even to someone like me who doesn't watch any sports at all, and players had a good range of buzzes on them. However, in general I think sports could be reduced to be of similar size to the other major components of the pop culture distribution. I'm not sure why sports needs to get such a big quota - two to three times the size of the "other/misc fine arts" quota (listed here as 2/3) - in an academic tournament. Maybe that's where we can carve a quota for jazz.

I wholeheartedly agree with the distributional changes Will has laid out in this post. In particular, his points about the general lack of engagement with most TV for the average player really hits home for me. I think his solution to use the freed-up space to allow for a quota of jazz questions seems like a pretty good solution to better reflect the sheer scope of the subject (not that I don't enjoy my Duke Ellington). That said, I personally think the current way film is categorized in NAQT actually works pretty well, as it allows for the representation of directors like Alexander Payne (who as far as I know, doesn't neatly fit under the "art film" or "popular film" labels).

Of course, huge thanks to the editors and writers who made the set possible! I thought the literature in the set was very well done, with a good mix of more core and more fringe topics. I do second Will's point that the canon for world literature is quite broad with a set of this difficulty, so being able to see a wider representation to reflect that would be greatly appreciated.

[Mike Bentley]

I agree with Will that it would be great to see more questions like the fun one on the newspaper industry. I agree with Mike that there's likely more room for these types of questions at higher difficulty levels. I'd rather see the way we reward people for having in-depth current events knowledge is by testing their knowledge of policy, important bits of culture, etc. rather than having them go deeper on relatively unimportant senators, governors, world leaders, or second and third-tier members of the Trump administration.

Not sure if this tournament invented the practice, but I liked the "review these complex answer line" instructions to moderators. This is especially useful for a timed tournament like ICT where you are maybe cutting out that extra couple of seconds before starting reading the tossup. More tournaments should do this.

[CPiGuy]

This tournament was a ton of fun to play! I really enjoyed the high concentration of unusual but still playable answerlines, and thought that the tournament's difficulty was consistent and not oppressive despite it being a national championship. Thanks to NAQT's writers and editors for a great tournament!

Oh yeah, and:

(What other "mainstream" tournament will have a tossup on boustrophedon ???)

This might have been my favorite quizbowl question of the year.

[Excelsior (smack)]

Echoing Mike Bentley, I also thought that the "complex answer lines" directives at the beginning of each packet were a brilliant innovation, and anyone writing packets intended to be used at a timed tournament ought to include these directives.

Maybe even packets for non-timed tournaments, really - the amount of time it takes a moderator to rule a tossup answer incorrect is sort of a "side-channel" that can leak information about the answer to the opposing team, which might help the opposing team power-vulch or something.

[vinteuil]

I was disappointed in this set, which I thought represented a real step backward from previous years. In something like descending order of severity:

• Too many tossups had horribly misplaced leadins ("___ parametric down-conversion," Come Sunday for Ellington, Cassiodorus (and then Boethius!) for Theodoric, principle of explosion for contradictions), early clues (the description of Puberty in the Munch TU would fit nicely into an HSNCT tossup in almost the same slot), or powermarks ("grand ___" gets you 15 for strategy).
• No clear vision for hard parts (Gordon Lish in one bonus, some Swedish vibes player in another)
• Same with easy parts. It seems that, in the effort to reduce the number of "touch your butt" parts, some were simply edited to be less concrete/force players to give their best "this is proooobably what this has to be given these contextual clues" guess. I personally dislike this strategy, especially for easy parts. It's always much easier to whiff on the guess than the editors seem to think!
• Some subdistributional problems (e.g. something like 4/4 1860s American history)
• Too much of "the same fucking shit NAQT asks about in every goddamn set I've played." Every Yale quizbowler for the past 6 years has heard me rant about how knowing that Ometepe is in Lake Nicaragua will get you 15 at every fucking NAQT tournament; here it got you 30 on a bonus. Notably minor composers Barber, Kachaturian, and Villa-Lobos come up with hilariously predictable frequency.
• Maybe this is my faulty memory, but was a single woman athlete clued?

A lot of this, I think, comes down to the decentralized nature of and diffused responsibility in NAQT's system. To speak from personal experience, I found that I had to work my ass off when working on the 2017 and 2018 SCTs to give the sets some kind of difficulty consistency; it would have been very easy to look at each question, think "this is a good question [in isolation]" (because NAQT's editors usually do a good job!) and move on. Many of this set's inconsistencies brought me back to that experience. (This isn't to accuse its editors of laziness, more to express the wish that they had taken a far more activist approach to evening things out.)

[Cheynem]

There was a bonus on Serena Williams (obviously, there could have been more).

[A Dim-Witted Saboteur]

I agree with Jacob's critiques regarding the set as a whole; I kinda felt cheated after failing to parse a lot of what seemed like excessively vague wording on easy parts (which led to far more frequent than usual Maryland 10s and Michigan 20s on our part). Will's critiques regarding the CE and "modern world" are also spot-on; in NAQT sets in general I would appreciate significantly less of what I call "Drumpf bowl": CE questions centered on often-minor members of the Trump administration, Trump-associated figures, or Republican senators doing dumb things. The Michael Avenatti question that clued heavily off of his twitter was a perfect example of this; like other categories, CE should reward reading and engagement with text (in this case, newspapers, magazines, or news websites) rather than engagement with minor media personalities' twitter feeds.

Military history in this set definitely seemed excessive, with 2 (???) American military history tossups (John Andre and Battle of the Crater) in the first half of packet 1 and another military history tossup in the second half. Especially in American history, this set definitely tended toward writing tossups on people with one notable thing about them (a tossup on John Slidell that went a few lines before mentioning anything about the Trent affair, a tossup on Oscar Underwood, a tossup on John Andre). I doubt there's much of a demand from anyone for more question content about tariffs (I counted 1/1 in this set) rather than other questions on US economic history, but here we are.

Tossup conceits I really disliked included _Second Partition of Poland_ (I wonder how many other people also said "partitions of Poland", got prompted, and said the wrong one since there's not a whole ton to differentiate especially the second and third partitions) and others I'll elaborate further on once I have the set with me. Tossups I liked a lot included _Croesus and Solon_ and _ice_.

Misplaced clues include using Omar Bongo's creation of national parks as a leadin for Gabon, mentioning their late abolition of slavery in the second line for Mauritania (where does this question go from there?), and the Nakba for Israel. I'd advise moving all of these significantly later. The tossup on _Finland_ mentions "Every man's right", which is also a concept in Swedish law, which is arguably more famous for it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden). I know Eric Chen and I both buzzed with that and were disappointed to be negged.

Overall, this set had some cool ideas and some definitely non-cool ideas, and could've used more of an eye toward balance and stricter editing standards in history, geo, and CE. The literature, meanwhile, was excellent and consistently rewarded knowledge in an interesting way.

[Cheynem]

I don't think the question is that good, but the Avenatti tossup (which I wrote) only has one clue about his Twitter feed; it's not cluing heavily from it at all. That said, I see your point about the CE questions as a whole.

[Sam]

This was a great tournament; thanks to Andrew and all the other writers for the set.

The current events criticism is appropriate, though I don't know if this is a recent development--it feels like ICT always has had a handful of "Bozo of the Week" type questions. I actually thought this year had some of the more interesting CE questions I've heard. There was the "newspaper industry" mentioned above that I remember being good. There were also tossups on ICE and Wells Fargo that I don't remember as well, but I think fit the kind of questions people are clamoring to see more of. But there is certainly room for improvement, and Will Alston's suggestions are good ones.

Especially in American history, this set definitely tended toward writing tossups on people with one notable thing about them (a tossup on John Slidell that went a few lines before mentioning anything about the Trent affair, a tossup on Oscar Underwood, a tossup on John Andre).

I don't know if the set "tended toward" these kinds of tossups, but I agree with Jakob that there were definitely more than in the average tournament, and, like Jakob, I'm not a huge fan of them. To be fair, I think one of the selling points of NAQT is that the shorter format means you can have as actual answer lines things like "boustrophedon" and it won't be a painful slog even if it goes to the end. Maybe there's a similar philosophy behind tossups on Oscar Underwood, and this is just an aesthetic difference of opinion in what questions should look like. A reason I believe it's more than aesthetic is that, while I can imagine the way in which someone interested in Classics or linguistics would come across early clues for boustrophedon, it's harder for me to imagine someone interested in Civil War history would come across early clues for John Slidell, or someone interested in American trade policy would come across early clues for Oscar Underwood.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Maybe there's a similar philosophy behind tossups on Oscar Underwood, and this is just an aesthetic difference of opinion in what questions should look like. A reason I believe it's more than aesthetic is that, while I can imagine the way in which someone interested in Classics or linguistics would come across early clues for boustrophedon, it's harder for me to imagine someone interested in Civil War history would come across early clues for John Slidell, or someone interested in American trade policy would come across early clues for Oscar Underwood.

To offer a second aesthetic opinion, as someone who's very interested in both of these topics, I would completely agree. I actually liked the tossup on the Battle of the Crater quite a bit, because that's a really interesting and unique battle and the clues seemed to gradate pretty well. By contrast, the tossups Sam cites really don't do that. I think questions on minor figures mostly known for being involved in one important occurrence should almost exclusively be used as a vehicle to talk about said occurrence or things relevant to it, not only because this is what's going to generate a good distribution of buzzes, but because it's why we'd care about them in the first place.

Amusingly, my anecdotal experience even further confirms Sam's theory, because I had just learned what boustrophedon was from a lecture series on ancient history the very week of the tournament! (I of course hadn't seen the question, since I can only see my own questions above the HS level for important security reasons)

[Cheynem]

Every clue aside from his invocation at the Klanbake convention (a fairly famous thing) in the Underwood tossup was about the Underwood Tariff, so I feel like that is doing what Will is suggesting (trying to make a tossup in that vein thematic and focusing on the famous thing).

Aside from the probably very real chance that the clues weren't good or evocative enough, I wonder how much of this also is just the nature of the beast--if you don't know the first few clues, you might not realize what they were specifically talking about, and in a fast-moving game, you don't have a lot of time to chew on those clues and connect the dots. And the nature of the short tossups means you can't always be super descriptive and connect those dots for the players.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Every clue aside from his invocation at the Klanbake convention (a fairly famous thing) in the Underwood tossup was about the Underwood Tariff, so I feel like that is doing what Will is suggesting (trying to make a tossup in that vein thematic and focusing on the famous thing). Aside from the probably very real chance that the clues weren't good or evocative enough, I wonder how much of this also is just the nature of the beast--if you don't know the first few clues, you might not realize what they were specifically talking about, and in a fast-moving game, you don't have a lot of time to chew on those clues and connect the dots.

That's fair - I think that tossup basically is how such a question should be done then, and that's an appropriate and relevant leadin. Despite barely remembering the tossup, simply from hearing its conceit alone I shall now praise it as "a good idea"

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

Jacob nicely summed up my thoughts about this tournament. This tournament was pretty solid, but felt a lot less polished than the last three or so ICTs. There were early drops in power (e.g., I lost in-power buzzer races on two works I recently read.) There was also some pretty crazy bonus variance, a lot of the literature bonuses felt like gimme thirties, but the history and some other categories just had bizarrely difficult hard parts (is anyone really converting the judge who convicted Clay Shaw?)

[Cheynem]

(is anyone really converting the judge who convicted Clay Shaw?)

I'd hope not.

[setht]

Hi all,

Big thanks to everyone who played, staffed, and helped write or edit this year's ICT sets. From the production side, I'd like to extend my gratitude to Seth Teitler and Billy Busse for their excellent editing work, and to all of the writers whose submissions made it a real pleasure to edit the set.

This is your thread for general discussion of DI ICT. Have at it.

I'd also like to thank Jeff Hoppes for his advice on some geography and history questions.

I'll go ahead and call out the writers and subject editors who wrote or subject edited more than 25 questions in the DI set. Ordered from most questions to least, they are:
(writers) Will Alston, Ike Jose, Matt Jackson, Danny Vopava, Will Nediger, Mike Cheyne, Billy Busse, Kurtis Droge, and Corry Wang
(subject editors) Andrew Yaphe, Matt Weiner, [me,] Andrew Hart, Billy Busse, Jason Thompson, Kyle Haddad-Fonda, Auroni Gupta, and Rob Carson

[everdiso]

I found this tournament somewhat disappointing. It was still a good set, but compared to some other recent sets and to NAQT's usual high standards, I found it a bit lacking. Specifically:

- Somewhat differently from others commenting, I found easy parts of bonuses to generally be far too easy for this level. I played for a mid-tier team, which should definitely be zeroing some bonuses at a national tournament. Yet even in literature, by far our weakest category, we managed 10 on almost every single bonus. We had many games in which we failed to zero a single bonus. Given that P.P.B.s in general weren't excessively high in this tournament, this means that medium and hard parts were appropriately very challenging while 10s were often being given out close to for free. At that point, easy parts don't seem to have much of a purpose besides making people feel better by 10ing categories that they should probably be 0ing. Some slightly harder easy parts could've done well to differentiate between teams more. And if what multiple others have said about finding easy parts to be vaguely worded is true, then it seems as if many of the zeroes that did happen happened somewhat randomly, based on being able to figure out a vague question rather than on knowledge. Clearer but significantly harder easy parts would be a welcome change, I think.

- As people have mentioned, lots of tossups had easy clues dropped very early. Examples include the Fiji tossup opening with a clue about an Indian-named person carrying out coups (one of the very first things anyone will know about Fijian history if they know anything about it at all is the coups), the Nakba being mentioned bizarrely early in the Israel tossup (which, by the way, was a strange choice for a set that also had a Six-Day War tossup), the Mauritania tossup clueing slavery in power (this is literally the most famous thing about Mauritania; like Jakob, I was curious as to what on earth might've come later and, when I read the pack, found the next clue to be far more difficult), and perhaps the Ireland tossup mentioning the Garda in power, though this was certainly less severe. Overall, these were common enough in my areas of the distribution that they weren't just isolated incidents, but made the overall difficulty of the history/current events/geography distribution confusingly inconsistent.

- This is the list of the five sports tossups that my team played at ICT:
- college football
- NBA
- college football
- horse-racing
- NBA
This is just a clear lack of any effort to have any subdistribution at all. The entire set only tossed up three sports, two of which got tossed up TWICE (in one case, two tossups on far from the biggest/most famous form of that sport!) and the third of which is extremely minor. Imagine if a tournament had multiple tossups on Cubism and multiple tossups on classical sculpture but no tossups at all on any Old Master paintings. There may be a tendency to take trash less seriously, since it's "only" trash, but when it's included in a tournament, it matters just as much as the rest of that tournament. Including trash in tournaments can't just be an excuse to not take seriously what trash gets tossed up. And I'm sure there'll be a response that there were tossups on other sports in packets that weren't played, but frankly, when these are packets that are so likely to not be heard by almost every team, this doesn't help.

- Another subdistributional issue, which others have mentioned: round 1 had three American history tossups, two of which were military and two of which were on the American Civil War. I've gotten used to NAQT's overemphasis on American content, but this is a whole new level. For a Canadian team playing an American team on that pack, it was pretty hard not to feel like we were playing an unfair game.

I can't comment on most of the distribution, outside of my areas, and obviously I'm far from a top player. But in the areas that I play, these were definitely some issues that stood out compared to other tournaments and to last year's instance of this tournament.

[Cheynem]

For the record, the sports tossups in this ICT:

Packet 3: College Football
Packet 5: NBA
Packet 6: NBA
Packet 9: College Football
Packet 12: Baseball
Packet 13: Horse Racing
Packet 15: NBA
Packet 16: Wrestling/Fighting
Packet 17: Baseball

You're right that the set is tilted very early on to college football and the NBA (at least in tossups). I was amused that at least in tossups there were no NFL questions as well.

[everdiso]

Thanks for counting that up. 3 NBA and zero NFL or NHL is not good. And while there was baseball and a more prominent "minor" sport, they were all put into packets that very few or, in the case of pack 12, zero teams played. I think there really needs to be care taken over which questions go into tiebreaker packets to avoid incredibly skewed subdistributions like what resulted here.

[kitakule]

This is an extremely minor point, but I need to chime in my agreement with the last couple of posts. One of the reasons I like NAQT is because their tournaments are the only chance I get to hear soccer questions. This time, I didn't even hear a sniff of a soccer bonus part. Yet we had at least two trash tossups that clued or were about video-game speed-running?? I can't help but feel a little hard done by here.

[AGoodMan]

This is an extremely minor point, but I need to chime in my agreement with the last couple of posts. One of the reasons I like NAQT is because their tournaments are the only chance I get to hear soccer questions. This time, I didn't even hear a sniff of a soccer bonus part. Yet we had at least two trash tossups that clued or were about video-game speed-running?? I can't help but feel a little hard done by here.

I endorse this post 100%. It's pretty sad to hear not a single soccer question in the entire set while hearing about "horse trainers."

[Deepika Goes From Ranbir To Ranveer]

I enjoyed this tournament very much and thank all the writers and editors.

My only complaint is that across the thirteen packets my team heard, I heard zero tossups pertaining to India in any way (literature, history, religions and folklore, art, trash). I think da Gama might be the closest thing we got.