The BigFlax Quiz Bowl Farewell Tour, Stop 2

As most or all of you know by now, this is the last year that Alma and I plan to play quiz bowl. It's just not that important to us anymore - I've stopped keeping my own stats, which should tell you something about my priorities. Interestingly enough, I appear to be playing some of my best Trash ever, which could just be because I'm older or could be because I'm no longer overly fixated on game scores and the like. At stop #1 of the Last Hurrah Tour, I put up 48.5 PPG at TRASH Regionals, good for third in individual scoring at the tournament and my second-best corporate TRASH showing ever (half a tossup per game behind 2003 Regionals). At stop #2, I put up 61.25 in eight round robin games at Ann B. Davis, also good for third place individually and my best-ever showing there. (Of course I'm not sure that those stats are exactly right - they rarely are - but it's probably close enough.)

As for the tournament itself, it went all right. We went 5-3 in the round robin with a couple tough losses - after starting off 2-0 by thumping one of the Pitt teams and squeezing past Eric Hillemann and Julie Stalhut's squad on the last question (with all due respect to Eric, he's got something of a Beloit Curse on Colby and myself, as his results against us in Trash are always drastically opposite to the tournament standings), we hit a tough packet for us and dropped a 220-210 heartbreaker to Illinois A. It's pretty hard to win a game when you neg four times - all we had to do was not neg and we would have won, even if Illinois had picked up the questions exactly as they did after we negged. But woulda, coulda, shoulda, after all. We rebounded with three straight routs, including collecting 16 of a possible 21 tossups against the other Pitt team in our bracket. Then we met the Michigan alum team (Traicoffs/Long/Erinjeri) and lost 280-250 on the last question, followed by our expected drubbing at the hands of the O'Reillys + Quintong (because if there's one thing the O'Reillys needed, it was adding one of the country's top ten players as a free agent), though we only lost by 130, the closest anyone got in the round robin (and one of just two games in which they didn't have at least 14 of the 21 tossups available).

At 5-3 and having lost to the three teams ahead of us, we got shunted into the middle playoff bracket, but that worked out just fine for us, as we rolled through it, including hanging more than 500 points on one of the Chicago teams in our last game, to finish seventh. Of my six trips to ABD, seventh actually is just the fifth-best finish my team has recorded, but that says more about the consistency with which my teams have done fairly well at the ABD than about this year. I thought we played about as well as possible and hit one rough packet at the wrong time - had we swapped the round in which we played Illinois A with the one directly following it, we probably would have won both, finished 6-2, and made the top bracket, and given how well we played on the playoff packets maybe we could have been top two or three. On the other hand, we could easily have lost to Hillemann's team, finished at .500, and had to cling to a top ten place. All told, I'm perfectly happy with how we played. It was, I thought, a solid question set (ABD usually delivers on this count), which is all I'll say as there is a mirror yet to come.

I used to sequester this stuff in the Quiz Bowl section, but since I'm not copying down everything for a full recap anymore, you're stuck with them here. Sorry. There'll be three more of these at most, and those'll be in March, April, and August (only the April one, TRASHionals, is guaranteed), so I think you'll live.