And they wonder why we don't play ACF

We went to the Trash tournament that followed the ACF-style Chicago Open today. It was supposed to be like "Trash written like ACF questions," and if you ask me, it proved why there is generally so little overlap in the two communities and why this doesn't figure to change anytime soon.

First, the good:

* Things generally ran pretty quickly, although there was a sizable post-lunch delay while playoff brackets were worked out, I think because there were some computer issues.

* It's a good time playing with an Alma/Colby/Tyler team.

* The questions weren't too bad.

And the bad:

* The places where the questions were bad, however, they were pretty bad. It was more just that the overall style was problematic; you could see the places where the writers had limited knowledge. Pretty much every sports tossup went one of two ways:

"Drafted by team, he was traded to other team for some guys. Later he was traded to another team for some other guys. But you would know him mostly from this one team, and here's the really famous thing he did."

or:

"In year, this player had these stats. Later he had these stats. Drafted out of college, he had these stats in his rookie year, and then later he was traded, after which he had these stats."

Just very cookie-cutter, and not indicative of knowing anything about sports beyond how to access baseball-reference.com. In fact, a lot of questions in general seemed to go like this; just a ton of dull listing, and unless you happen to know some guy's batting average in a given year or the eighth track on a band's fifth album, or an actor's bit part from a mid-90s film you've barely heard of, you're going to be doing a lot of sitting until the giveaway rolls around. Is this really how ACF works normally? Why bother having eight-line tossups when the first six are so obscure that they might as well not be there? Bonuses had a similar problem; on a number of occasions we took 20 because the first part of the bonus was so vague that you could barely figure out what was going on, like "This guy played a man in a film. For ten points, name him." Then once you found out who it was, you could actually get the next two parts based on real knowledge. But overall I wasn't terribly impressed by the structure, especially considering that a large part of the reason that tournaments like this exist seems to be that ACF disdains the structure of Trash. I'll grant that Trash sometimes has awkward pyramidality, but even some questions today had certain clues come in too early, and some of the powers ran on forever, well past the point where it seemed like it was still impressive for someone to have gotten it.

* Meta-referential bullshit. I'm sure they had their reasons, whatever they may have been, but I don't think meta questions belong anywhere in any format. Maybe a not-that-helpful clue in a regular question that mentions someone offhand, okay, just for color. No more than once a round or so, though. Here, though, not only were there four or five of those in every round, but there were also various questions like "Name these hsquizbowl.org posters based on profile information" and two tossups to which the answer was Lee Henry, including the very last question of the last round, costing us a chance to tie the game (particularly since I thought it might be Henry but assumed, clearly incorrectly, that they wouldn't repeat an answer). I know this is just one tournament and not necessarily affiliated with anything, but it seems from my vague recollections of message board discussion that a lot of the ACF-related tournaments feature stuff like this, which is conspicuously absent from NAQT and TRASH. I don't understand the point of the circle-jerking, especially if these guys claim to want to be more inclusive. Attend one of these tournaments and it just seems like you're missing a big joke that half the players are in on and half couldn't care less about. It really should just be excised completely.

* This one shitty question. I just have to get this out of my system and I'll be done. There was a question in the final round that started about like so: "One thorn in his side is Jolyon Wagg, who has a habit of descending with his unruly family on Marlinspike Hall." I buzz in and say, "Captain Haddock." Neg. The answer ends up being Tintin.

Now, Tintin is not incorrect there, and of course later clues led exclusively to him. But how can you have a lead-in that not only doesn't distinguish between two main characters in a work but also points better to one when the answer ends up being the other? Wagg is always much more Haddock's nemesis in the Tintin oeuvre, particularly in - IIRC - The Calculus Affair, when Wagg and his family descend on Marlinspike when Tintin and Haddock have left the country chasing the kidnapped Professor Calculus. Marlinspike is really Haddock's mansion, after all; Tintin ends up moving in there, but Haddock really owns it.

You might argue that I just overthought this one. I would argue that it's shitty to write a question about something that punishes someone for having deeper knowledge. Can you name 100 characters from the Tintin books? Yes? Then fuck you. Can you only name Tintin? Congratulations, have these ten points. And, as noted, I would point out that Haddock was, at that point in the question, not only a perfectly acceptable answer but also a BETTER answer, and that at a tournament where there were entire bonuses on genres of music that eight people listen to, Captain Haddock doesn't seem like he should be too obscure an answer to come up.

That question virtually ended up deciding the last game (since the other team picked it up, of course, and we only lost by 40), so it annoys me much more than it would have otherwise, but ultimately I considered protesting and then decided not to because I simply didn't care enough.

And that's the ultimate lesson that I took out of today's tournament. For the first time in a long time, I didn't keep score (except the one round where I kept official score for the reader), and I didn't write down my tossups for the first time since freshman year of college. And this is the only post you're getting, rather than some big rundown. It's not that I don't still enjoy playing quiz bowl on occasion... it's just that I'm rapidly growing out of it. Alma feels the same way, and if either of us is still playing within three years, I think I'd be pretty surprised.