Week 160: only 46 years in the making
For '78, '79, '91, '92, '96, '98, and '01, we thank you.
I managed to miss out on the big news of the weekend. Cornell Quiz Bowl, a program of which I am an alumni, worked through the field at NAQT ICT and delivered the school’s first national championship. Cornell is one of the few programs in quiz bowl that can trace its lineage from 1977 almost continuously to today.
Ron Loomis was head of the Student Union at Cornell, and he also was the presiding official of ACUI in 1977. He helped organize the connection between ACUI and College Bowl in that era. He also helped organize the Cornell team for the next decade, including the 1991 team, which led the tournament into the finals before losing to Rice. He retired from the university just after I got on campus. By winter of 1992-93 there was a complete turnover of that near championship team. And it was up to Ron’s successors in the Student Union, and the team that lost to the national runners up in the campus intramurals to put things back on track.
We did that, mostly. By 1994, there had been three more transitions in the student union, and a lot of the institutional memory was lost. It was up to the team that had formed to remind Student Activities that if their original plan for an intramural after spring break happened, whomever won would miss out on going to regionals. (Had we known of Dario Fo at the time, this incident would have been known as the “Accidental Deaffiliation of an Anarchist.”)
That alumni chain has kept Cornell’s team going for years. It’s been fed by a steady stream of local talent from the Masterminds program, players at high school nationals, and occasional minding by the alumni, making sure the program never completely disappears. While we’ve kept continuity, we’ve never made the final leap. There were two CBCI finals losses, a third place, and four fourth place finishes (including my own whiff at the ‘96 title, where a 40-point loss to Princeton in the final round robin game meant we missed out on the finals. ) I honestly can’t think of a team that’s been around this long, been close this often, and hadn’t won one title.
And now they’ve done it. When I posted the news in social media, there was a long line of teammates, predecessors, and successors who gave their thumbs up to it. So I guess we managed to make Ron proud. Though I almost think he’d be prouder we kept it going this long.
I’ll have some more thoughts on continuity next week, but I have to sort through previous posts to make sure I’m actually giving additional advice rather than rehashing things.
Smaller notes of the week 1: The J! Archive
J! Archive search capability is back online. This is excellent news for what I’ve written for the second book, as I can return to the much clearer instructions for finding television length questions in a category. This is also excellent news for the high school team, as I now know how I can manufacture sets of summer questions for them in preparation for a TV appearance.
Now that I have a reliable channel to send questions/study guides/flashcard decks with questions to the team, I’m trying to build stacks for the summer, and the J! Archive is going to have to be part of it.
Smaller note of the week 2: How to best knock your opponent off their game
A month ago, a thread popped up on hsqb asking how one can best knock one’s opponent off their game during play. This is a fraught course of action in quiz bowl because to do it reliably relies on developing a knowledge of how to best each individual opponent. You will not be able to modify your playing style enough to be able to tailor your attack to each opponent. To modify a slightly vulgar aphorism: “By the time you are able to read your opponent like a book, you will be too old to collect a library.” So if you are going to go down this path, you need general strategies that work against a wide swath of players.
Even at with that strategy in hand, it is still a fraught course of action. It is always easier to destroy yourself than it is to destroy another player in quiz bowl. And if you’re seeking opportunities to wield an attack against your opponent, you’re now adding another set of tasks to your duties during the game. The more things you’re thinking about outside of the question at hand, the less you’re paying attention to the one thing in that moment that governs who wins the match.
The most efficient way to knock an opponent off of their game is to beat them to something that they consider their specialty. The second most efficient way to knock an opponent off their game is to capitalize on their wrong answer. The third most efficient way to knock an opponent off of their game is to make them regret their inaction, like buzzing in with a guess at the end of a tossup that dumb lucks into the answer. What is the common thread in these actions? Two things: First these situations are you capitalizing on a mistake they made first. Second, they are actions you should be doing anyway, whether they make a mistake or not.
There is a third common thread in all these actions, but again the effectiveness of this has nothing to do with you, and has everything to do with your opponents’ memory. When I say that it is easier to destroy yourself than others, I mean that relies on your memory doing the destruction. If you dwell on the previous question, you are letting that diminish your effectiveness pointlessly.
Rather than finding a way to generate a single attack against an opponent, concentrate on defending yourself from you own destructive impulses. The most effective way to knock an opponent off their game is actually to get them believing in knocking opponents off their game.