I started writing this week’s missive as I was writing last week’s. I had put one word on a sheet of paper, the title of this missive. And I had to follow that advice to get there tonight.
As I was preparing for the second practice of the year, I had gone into it with a few lessons I had wanted to repeat from the first practice, and had wanted to cover both the televised format, and the circuit format. There is a tournament at Carnegie Mellon at the end of the month, and I was planning to take them, and I know they will be getting a call about the TV show in a few weeks, since we’re one of the winning teams from last year, who get slotted into the field automatically. There was also a third format I wanted to introduce to the new players, since it was premiering in the past week. The show The Floor is entirely inapplicable for question content in comparison to circuit events, but the entire picture based format of the show is fairly similar to what the writers of the local TV show are attempting. For that reason I wanted to get them some exposure to the show’s questions, understanding that it’s only compatible knowledge with our local show.
For the first few practices, I wanted to practice both formats we would face, but I also wanted to emphasize the common skills useful in both competitions. My reasoning for this being that the universal knowledge of particular sets of skills transcend the knowledge base required to succeed in quiz bowl. And as long as our practice has new students, I want to give them knowledge of the universal skills that will help them, no matter how the questions are written.
I had gone into the most fundamental of these in the first practice: Everything repeats. Not only is it a truth of quiz bowl, it is the justification for everything you do in a quiz bowl outside of a match. If things don’t repeat, there’s really no justification to study or practice, or even compete, because the rest of this is a blind guessing game. And that fact that everything repeats, is true no matter the format. The circuit relies on it, the TV show relies on it, and The Floor is going to rely on it by showing some of the same pictures this season as last, and some of the same pictures that the local show does.
It was then I realized I had to change from the strategy I intended to pursue in the book. Because I have not one format to pursue in sequence, but two that I need to train the team on for the rest of the year, and because I didn’t know which students will form the teams going to which event just yet, I have to front-load the lessons on strategy with strategies that are universally applicable. If there’s methods that conflict based on format, we should approach them specifically in front of the event. Those lessons may need to be unlearned or relearned throughout the year. But what we do for the first month should be things that never need to be unlearned.
In the run up to yesterday’s practice, I had pulled five of these ideas that require no unlearning. I included them in my notes for second practice, alongside the TV practice round I wrote for the first practice (I read one team’s questions but not all teams’ questions,) and the second practice packet from a circuit novice tournament. I had intended to pick a circuit packet that repeated with my first round, but forgot; but there was a happy accident in repeating a reference to the definition of Mesopotamia, and then a second happy accident repeating the fact that nitrogen is the dominant element in the atmosphere. I love it when a plan comes together, especially without me. So what follows are my notes from the second practice.
Okay I've had you go through three different formats of quiz bowl and questions. We have what we do in college tournaments. We have what we do in televised competitions and we recommended that you watch episodes of “The Floor” because while it's not that close to quiz bowl, it does have several of the same principles that we can use.
Everything repeats.
If you can do it fast, you can do it slow.
Maintain your calm.
Preload your bonus questions.
There are very few perfectly fair games.
Everything repeats because a single writer will return to a good idea that they've had. Everything repeats because multiple writers will come up with the same idea. Everything repeats because there is some sort of structure that's imposed on quiz bowl question there has to be a certain number of questions about literature, certain number of questions about history a certain number of questions about science and the easiest way to get that sort of prerequisite completed his right question similar to what was in a previous assignment. Everything repeats because if it didn't, you would not need to practice in this because it would just be a game of chance.
If you can do it fast, you can do it slow. The Floor obviously runs on a clock. Television has to be done at a certain pace to get enough questions into the viewing allotted time. So they will cut you off if you don’t answer in time. Even on the circuit, which mostly gave up on showing a clock to competitors rigidly follows a clock in giving you think time to say an answer. Even if there is no clock in a competition, you're on the clock because you have to get through the competition before people get tired of playing. We always want to beat the clock in quiz bowl, so we want to do whatever we can as fast as is practical. Because if we do it fast, we get through more cycles of questions in the same amount of time. And if we can perform working at that pace, we are going to be fine if the pace slows.
Maintain your calm. In all competition is important to remain stable and calm. Calm permits you to focus on the question. Calmness allows you to recover from mistakes. It allows you to resist distractions. When you are watching the Floor watch how the people who stay calm succeed. The ones who make it through their rounds are the ones who don't panic or blank. They are the ones who survive because the game only has one resource: time to think.
Preload your bonus questions. Also, if you watch the floor, you may notice people coming up with answers to their question in their before the questions are even asked. This is a technique that I remind people going to play on Jeopardy! When you are faced with a category that you know has many answers that are going to be presented, you should try to use the time before the question is asked to suggest possible answers to yourself. This is something that we can do in every format if we know what the question leadin is or the categories are read to us. We know what the questions that follow will be, and we know it can't stray too far from that leadin or category name.
And finally there are very few perfectly fair games because there are so few questions involved in producing a result. Our televised program runs on 24 questions. There are only 80 total questions asked in 20 tossups. That's all you get to decide the entire game. That's very small sample size when you consider all the possible questions that could be asked of you. A single question can swing the game, so it’s important to stay calm, involved in the match, and collect every opportunity presented to you.
So I didn’t get to make that speech to them, mostly because the lineup from last week changed dramatically. We had three people not show up due to illness, and two more had to leave early. Two other people had missed the previous practice and had this been their introduction it would have required its own unlearning.
A final note on unlearning:
Many of my worst negs as a player came from being too current in current events. I would associate something that I saw in the news a day before the tournament, and apply it to the tournament, not realizing that something becoming newsworthy takes a week to or a month to transition to a question. To have precise striking power in current events, you had to unlearn what you had just learned because you had to catch up to the questions being asked, not the questions being written.
Thinking on this now, the correct solution was to write notes on current events with date of event attached and also note when the deadlines were for submitting questions to the tournament you were planning to attend. Knowing the writers would run up to the deadline, and knowing that the deadline was fixed, you could have actually created a spaced repetition study by reviewing the notes of the days before the deadline for the round robin, and the days just before the tournament for the playoffs.
Would this be applicable today? Sort of, but it depends on knowing how editors operate, knowing the last possible day that a set can be edited before being shipped, and knowing how much current events editors value in a set. Those are now more often than not hidden variables from the average player. They could still gain value from this form of study, but there wouldn’t be as much playoff value is diminished.