Things that happen at most well-run invitational quiz tournaments
This narrative is about Stanford's 2003 Cardinal classic but written generically enough that it could apply to several tournaments I've been to over the years. If you're one of the quiz-bowl people reading this, see how much of it you identify with.
Both teams in the final came from the same school, a local rival of the host school. A frightening amount of the tournament talent came from that school, split almost evenly into four teams that all did quite well.
Also a legitimate contender was a team from the school that traveled by far the greatest distance to get to the tournament, a group of really nice, really wizened quiz vets whom I've seen at quite a few tournaments before and will see at quite a few again.
The tournament ran on time for the most part, with the biggest delays -- just before round 1 and just before the round immediately after lunch -- caused by straggling team(s). The printed schedule did not list times next to rounds (indeed, lunch itself would come around lunchtime when central command made the call, "okay, lunch after
this round, be back at X o'clock"); the tournament ended between a half-hour and an hour later than anticipated. It was untimed but edited conscientously enough that no round accounted for more than five minutes' delay (based on 30 minutes a round), with rounds averaging maybe 32 minutes or so.
(The two being just enough to add up without any single round being annoying.)
Because of an unexpected shortage of printed schedules (you'd think N copies would be enough but it's unclear where they all went), I never really knew in advance who'd play in my room. I always could have found a schedule
somewhere to confirm that the teams were correct. On nearly every team, all but one of the players relied on the other one to tell them what room to go to.
Exactly one team had a coach (with a College Bowl Inc. logo shirt on) and two alternates; a handful of teams had an empty seat or two.
In one round in my room, somebody's B team beat somebody else's A team, 95-45, on a relatively hard pack. Neither of the schools involved plays in a whole lot of invitationals but players on both sides seemed to be enjoying themselves despite realizing early on that between the packs and the opponents they were in for a long day.
There were relatively few repeats, perhaps none. (This part doesn't represent
"how every tournament goes" so much as
"just how far tournaments have come".) Exactly one question had to be skipped, where the TD came around warning people to read tossup 21 instead of tossup 18.
Of packs submitted by relatively new teams, one was astonishingly good, arguably the best pack of the tournament. I heard second-hand that another one was not at all appropriate for this tournament, with uneven difficulty and plenty of one-line, one-clue tossups. Because of pack trades, the round that would have needed this pack was instead devoted to a pack by a team not present at the tournament. (Again,
"just how far tournaments have come": Ten years ago one would just hear the whammy pack and make the best of it, especially considering this was a 13-team, full round robin.)
The round right after lunch, my room was scheduled to get one of the best teams in the tournament (lost in the finals) versus one of the most inexperienced. Two players from the former team got caught up in some lunch-related snafu; the two players who did show up said to just go ahead and play. That pair of players still did extremely impressively, with a close side race on their individual stats but neither of them negging at all (despite both usually being aggressive buzzers).
There were no significant protests in my room. A few borderline cases on bonus parts that all turned out to be moot. The closest thing to a problem was when I inadvertently broke a judge (the power cord split; apparently it was already frayed) and we had to use an old, temperamental Quiz Pro that behaved significantly better during the game than during any given buzzer check.
There were relatively few pseudonyms but one team played as the Axis of Evil (Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Barbra Streisand) and another player requested that his stats be kept under the name
Dick Posthumus.
The closest games in my room were the aforementioned 95-45 game; a 100-90 game between a different pair of teams that finished low in the standings (that one was fairly dramatic: 90-90 after 18 tossups, then 90-85 after 19 tossups, then 100-90); and a game that a player who should have known better almost gave away.
(With the score 240-195 in an untimed game and no power tossups, if the leading team didn't take an incorrect interrupt, the best the other team could do on that tossup-bonus cycle would still leave them trailing 240-235. A player on the leading team negged
anyway but the other team could get only 10 out of 30 on the ensuing Norse myth bonus.)
Given a surfeit of staff, I read odd-numbered rounds and scored even-numbered rounds. Several months passed between a week ago and the previous time I'd read for a quiz tournament. Maybe it's age or throat rust but in hindsight it's surprising that so many people could read round after round, week after week. Paired with a really nice freshman from the host school -- coincidentally second week in a row he and I shared a room. He seemed very deferential, would have probably let me read more rounds if I'd asked to but I'm past being a prima donna about that sort of thing.
(But not past it by much; as recently as a year ago I might have game-hogged.) Good reader, probably gets plenty of chances at practice, every now and then he'd be unsure about whether to take an answer and point out to me what they had on the sheet, hoping I'd make a good immediate judgment call.
As smoothly as the tournament seemed to go, nobody really knows just how close it came to being a total disaster. Given how things-behind-the-scenes looked for this tournament as of a week ago, it took a superhuman effort by a handful of people (really one when it comes down to it) to make things go so well. Since nobody really got to see the crisis stage (even I'm just going by fortuitously overheard conversations, reading between the lines a bit, and so on), not nearly enough people will appreciate just how superhuman the effort was.
The pack editor, having been up H straight hours (H > 24), fell asleep on the way from the tournament site to where people went out to eat. Right before that, the final was a back-and-forth first half but one team pulled away at the end. Most people stayed to watch the final, with someone keeping unofficial score on the blackboard for audience entertainment value.
There were some great buzzes; other times people said stupid things. Sometimes in bonus conferring, people would suggest two different answers and the one directed at me would be the wrong one of the two. Sometimes right as someone was starting to buzz for some other reason, I'd read either the word that suddenly made the question a dead giveaway or the word that suddenly threw the person buzzing for a loop. Often that person would still be right despite being temporarily confused.
People talked about upcoming events, February being the height of the competition season, what with the three competing regionals/sectionals on consecutive weekends. (If anyone is totally unfamiliar with this -- and yet somehow got sucked into reading all these paragraphs anyway despite not necessarily identifying with them -- there's the company that's been around forever and has the relatively buzzer-speed-driven questions; the non-profit that has very high abstact standards for what questions should be like (very depth-of-knowledge, not the style I like but still a worthy one) yet relies on packet submissions; and the
one I write for, trying to stake out a happy medium and build a reputation on providing high-quality questions that are also fun to play on. Our part of things seems to be at least a modest success.)
Nearly everyone was friendly to the relatively new teams. At least a small part of my own motivation to be there was to encourage those teams to go to
sectionals next week. But I wasn't alone; they got the spiel from me, from the team hosting the sectional they'd attend, and even from two other sources who just happen to like NAQT and want to point newbies in our direction.
Getting away from the self-promotion part, well... it's unclear how to put it without being too cryptical or too banal. Sometimes I wonder why people bother to run tournaments like this. It's an awful lot of effort and expenditure on all sides, after all, from the organizers' sleepless nights to the effort teams make at both pack assembly and travel. (The dozen questions each player sends to his team's pack editor probably blow an afternoon, and then going to the tournament blows a weeked if there's any travel involved.) I marvel sometimes that enogh people find it all worthwhile. But then the tournament gets underway and the same things happen that happened at any other well-run tournament and despite not quite being able to point to one incident/reason/argument, I still feel intuitively at home:
"Oh... that's why we all keep doing this." And it really does seem worthwhile.
