Week 91: Solo vs Solo
Singles Tournaments, Bill Belichick applied to quiz bowl, and hearing more colors than you thought.
This week I'm going to go through preparation to play solo in a format where everyone is solo: a singles tournament. The most notable form of this right now is NAQT's Individual Player National Championship Tournament, but I had cut my teeth on summer singles tournaments in the 1990's, and the IPNCT's format was derived from these.
The basic format of a singles tournament is to have several rounds of seeding in several rooms. As players move between rooms, each position finish in the rooms of the previous round are grouped together in the next round. So, all the first place finishers group together, and then all the second places, and so on. In the later rounds players are split out so that players who haven't qualified for the playoffs are given a chance to slide in.
The rounds also have a format where players are stopped from answering further if they reach a certain score. This means that a player either has a final score, or a question number where they achieved the qualifying score. That number becomes a tiebreaker. Because this is an inexact qualification structure, several rounds are required, and it's necessary to divide up questions so that there are as few categories as possible, but the order among categories is retained throughout. (Those categories are important to note for our purposes, as seen below.)
Let's separate out one set of expectations. If presented with a singles tournament, and you're only doing it for the experience, go right ahead. The reasons for self discovery mentioned last week are perfectly valid when applied to a singles tournament, and as long as a player uses the opportunity of a singles tournament to discover their strengths and weaknesses at this time, and does the in-tournament work to do this (recording the subjects of questions and their answers in their scoresheet), that's fine. But if the player is going in with the expectation of a high finish, there's some pre-event planning required.
The first thing to discuss is what is the expected strength of the field, and in what categories are their strengths distributed. If you've gotten to this point, you, the coach, have lots of scoresheets from tournaments which overlap whatever field will attend the singles tournament. A local singles tournament will draw from local teams, which your teams have played against, from that you could derive actual statistical opinions about which subjects players are not good in.
A national singles tournament will have a field whose stats are visible from results websites, but not their corresponding subject data. The best I can offer here is that players will scale up based on their stats, and their strengths will increase, but their weaknesses will be in roughly the same subjects. (A national field draw will up the overall quality of players, but the subjects where there are minimums won't change much.)
The next thing your player needs to know is whether their skills in a subject are significantly above the field strength. If there are categories where the player is strong but the field is weak, they are more likely to survive qualification rounds. If they are the kind who like to focus on "their categories" during a round, the singles format (with a repeatable rotation of categories,) is ideal for them, as after the first rotation, they know which questions will be their categories. Note this is not a reason to slack off during other questions, but an incentive to focus.
The difference this makes can be seen in my performance in my first singles tournament. In the match of all the #1 finishers in the third round (containing the players who finished 1-7 and 10 in the final rankings) everyone else in the field had roughly the same basic strengths, matching the 1990's ACF distribution. I wasn't as strong as any of them individually in literature, history, fine arts, or mythology, but I was above average on current events, science, and trash categories. I was able to apply that advantage every time two of the categories came around, and as a result, at the halfway point of the round I was ahead of the field by two questions, and went out second. I was not in any way the second best player in that grouping, but I scored as the second because I was able to take advantage of the categories which weren't easier, but were less fought over.
They had to fight each other for those categories where they all had strengths. This brings us to the second observation: If your strengths and the strengths of the field coincide, you should be more aggressive in buzzing. If you aren't aggressive in those categories, someone else will be.
The third observation is something that we stated earlier but need to restate clearly: The format of these tournaments, when category awards are given, is to rotate categories so that players get an even slice of questions to adequately sample results. This bends the overall distribution, grouping it into categories of equal size. This is a mechanical requirement of the distribution, which means it slightly bends the results of the qualifying rounds to a different result than if the rounds were balanced with the regular distribution. This can mean an advantage you have in a normally less represented category can be multiplied if it's also an award category.
Once your player gets to the singles tournament, the general rules about notetaking we discussed last week still apply. Those records of the match may require a special scoresheet, but they are also excellent data to study for the next year's singles tournament, either for the player who is competing again, or for their teammates who might be doing it for the first time. It would help them to decide whether to approach it as a competition, or solely as an exercise in self-improvement.
The Monday Night Football game this week inspired this note about strategy. During the Bills-Patriots game, the Patriots only passed the ball three times, while using the run game almost exclusively. The run game was effective, and the Bills were unable to recover from this. The Bills' run defense was weaker than their pass defense, but because most teams employ a mix of offensive plays the pass defense disrupts their opponents' offense enough to weaken it. By running, finding it effective, and then continuing to run, the Buffalo advantage in pass defense was removed.
This was seen by some football pundits as the apotheosis of Bill Belichick's general strategy. I've seen this formulated two ways.
- Bill Belichick teams take what your team does best and nullifies it, forcing you to find a new way to win without your best tool.
- Bill Belichick teams take your weakness and exploits it until you adjust, not because if you're reacting to that, you're not using your own advantage.
The first formulation of this is useless for quiz bowl. As much as I just talked about the interaction between people in this week's first section, the real dynamic of quiz bowl is both teams interacting with the questions, rather than with each other. Nullification of a team's strength in quiz bowl requires study, and a quiz bowl tournament doesn't allow time to study to beat a particular opponent between rounds. But this second formulation is applicable, precisely because the adjustment isn't possible in a single quiz bowl match.
If you have an advantage of more knowledge over the field in a certain category, and that category comes up, it means you will have that advantage over the field until somebody studies it more than you have. The timeframe for that to happen is greater than the match length, or the tournament length. And if that category is wide enough to have multiple questions devoted to it in the match (as is especially true for a television quiz bowl program), the advantage is multiplied.
There is also a psychological aspect to this. Pressing the advantage, and combining advantage in multiple categories can provoke panic in the opposing team, leading them to playing reactively, or varying their strategy by trying to buzz in early indiscriminantly. A team playing reactively, or trying to adjust strategy on the fly is not positioned to apply their own advantages. When that happens, your team's advantage has multiplied.
Finally, a small note that I have to include somewhere, though it's probably not bound for the book.
In the facebook page for The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl, I went over “The Case of the Second Swiss Sanitarium”, which is when a player transitions over a level of difficulty to find that a clue that was once a direct reaction play (mention of a Swiss sanitarium provokes a buzz about Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain) now has a second example, which is not as well known but equally valid. (There's a Swiss sanitarium in The Idiot, by Fyodor Doestoevsky.) and though the other clues didn't really fit, the reaction play is so strong, the player thinks the other clues aren't direct warnings, but rather details they didn't know about The Magic Mountain.
A variation of this occurred during CMU's practice last week. A question about a composer mentioned the condition of synesthesia, and immediately I recognized it as referring to Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Nobody else reacted to it, so I mentioned at the end of the question that in a quiz bowl context "synesthesia" is practically a reaction play for Scriabin, especially when it's mentioned after the first sentence of a question. I was then surprised when I found that synesthesia was not unique to Scriabin among composers, or even among Russian composers. But in quiz bowl, the reaction play rule holds very well, but it isn't actually uniquely identifying. (90% of the questions I found mentioning it as a mid-level clue or later lead to Scriabin.)
In wondering how this could be true, and not sparking at least one controversy somewhere along the way, I had to think about the circumstances. While the other composers mentioned in lists of musicians with synesthesia are more notable than Scriabin, most didn't use their condition as part of their composing as intimately or publicly as Scriabin, who colored the circle of fifths, and painted a keyboard to reflect how he saw music. Also the other composers mentioned as synesthetic have more clues which can be attached to questions about them, and when their synesthesia is given as a clue, the answer is invariably the condition, not the composer. For now the reaction play here holds, but only because quiz bowl writers find it convenient, not because it's unique. Not quite a second Swiss sanitarium, for now.