metsfan001
10-09-2006, 11:49 PM
So Friday night, my dad was kind enough to drive my Hunter teammates and I to . . . my very first quiz bowl tournament! For those unfamiliar with quiz bowl, the format we played goes like this: two teams of 4 start out hearing questions, known as tossups. Tossups are several sentences long, and players can buzz in at any time. If they get it right before a certain, unknown point (a "power"), it's worth 15 points; after that point, it's worth 10. If they buzz in before the question is finished and get it wrong, they lose 5 points (a "neg"), and their teammates can't answer for the remainder of the question. The team that gets the tossup right gets a 30-point, multi-part bonus read only to them. If you really want to test your trivia knowledge against mine, scroll down to the bottom. I'd prefer it if you read the whole thing, though. :)
Anyway, we spent much of the night driving down to northern Virginia. We got in at 12:30, waking up at 7 the next morning. After eating a very good breakfast at IHOP, we went to the site of the tournament: Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology. Now, we weren't expected to do anything profound here—after all, it was our first ever tournament, and the field was pretty tough: the final standings would have a top 3 identical to that of last year's national championship, and the host (who was not playing) had a 3-year winning streak of national championships ending last year. So we started.
Each game is subdivided into two 9-minute halves, with a maximum of 24 tossup-bonus cycles being read. Our first matchup was against the A team from South County (RI?). We got started quickly, jumping up to a 140-0 lead after just 5 questions. I'll spare you the boring parts, but when it was all said and done, we had won 475-10.
Our second matchup was against the B team from Stuyvesant. Yes, that Stuyvesant. We were the two schools that had come the farthest by far for the tournament, and as such, we garnered quite a bit of attention. Anyway, both teams were extremely fast, but I had 4 powers in the first 5 questions (!) and we won 410-230. The tournament was Swiss paired, so as the day went on, we would be playing teams with comparable records/point differentials. The matchups should be getting harder about now . . .
Our next game was against Collegiate, who had very flamboyant headgear. We were a bit up and down on bonuses, but we won handily, 415-60. At this point, we were one of three teams in our section with a 3-0 record. The other two? Richard Montgomery A and State College A, who had played in a hotly contested final at last year's national championship. Oh boy. We went to lunch at Quizno's and came back to the excellent news that we were playing the latter, whom we thought was the more formidable anyway (Richard Montgomery's amazing player had graduated in June, while most of State College's team was returning).
While we did hold a slim lead for a while, their knowledge breadth was simply larger than ours; somehow, it ended with a respectable score of 340-195 (they had averaged about 550 PPG before that).
Our final preliminary match was against Georgetown Day School. I generally choked, negged 4 times, as we lost by a mere 5 points. I was upset, but there was still a good chance that we would make the playoffs, with our 3-2 record and high point total. The top 8 in our section of 24 made the playoffs, by the way.
As it turns out, we did make it in, and we played Richard Montgomery's B team. The questions didn't really fall our way at all, and we lost quite badly, 350-155. Nevertheless, though, we were very happy with our performance—for our first tournament in such a tough field, we had done extremely well.
Now let's see if you can get some of the powers I got (just for fun). I'll post answers in a few days. :)
"This woman spent much of 1959 in Holcomb, Kansas, helping a childhood friend—"
"The entire first page of the January 13, 1898 issue of Georges Clemenceau's newspaper <i>L'Aurore</i> was filled with this work warning Felix Faure—"
"The author of this book noted that he only included one equation after being warned—"
"The full name of a bill recently passed in this state is the Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act—"
"He lost his right leg while serving as governor of the Netherlands Antilles—" (This one is particularly amusing. I'll explain why when I post the answers.)
Anyway, we spent much of the night driving down to northern Virginia. We got in at 12:30, waking up at 7 the next morning. After eating a very good breakfast at IHOP, we went to the site of the tournament: Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology. Now, we weren't expected to do anything profound here—after all, it was our first ever tournament, and the field was pretty tough: the final standings would have a top 3 identical to that of last year's national championship, and the host (who was not playing) had a 3-year winning streak of national championships ending last year. So we started.
Each game is subdivided into two 9-minute halves, with a maximum of 24 tossup-bonus cycles being read. Our first matchup was against the A team from South County (RI?). We got started quickly, jumping up to a 140-0 lead after just 5 questions. I'll spare you the boring parts, but when it was all said and done, we had won 475-10.
Our second matchup was against the B team from Stuyvesant. Yes, that Stuyvesant. We were the two schools that had come the farthest by far for the tournament, and as such, we garnered quite a bit of attention. Anyway, both teams were extremely fast, but I had 4 powers in the first 5 questions (!) and we won 410-230. The tournament was Swiss paired, so as the day went on, we would be playing teams with comparable records/point differentials. The matchups should be getting harder about now . . .
Our next game was against Collegiate, who had very flamboyant headgear. We were a bit up and down on bonuses, but we won handily, 415-60. At this point, we were one of three teams in our section with a 3-0 record. The other two? Richard Montgomery A and State College A, who had played in a hotly contested final at last year's national championship. Oh boy. We went to lunch at Quizno's and came back to the excellent news that we were playing the latter, whom we thought was the more formidable anyway (Richard Montgomery's amazing player had graduated in June, while most of State College's team was returning).
While we did hold a slim lead for a while, their knowledge breadth was simply larger than ours; somehow, it ended with a respectable score of 340-195 (they had averaged about 550 PPG before that).
Our final preliminary match was against Georgetown Day School. I generally choked, negged 4 times, as we lost by a mere 5 points. I was upset, but there was still a good chance that we would make the playoffs, with our 3-2 record and high point total. The top 8 in our section of 24 made the playoffs, by the way.
As it turns out, we did make it in, and we played Richard Montgomery's B team. The questions didn't really fall our way at all, and we lost quite badly, 350-155. Nevertheless, though, we were very happy with our performance—for our first tournament in such a tough field, we had done extremely well.
Now let's see if you can get some of the powers I got (just for fun). I'll post answers in a few days. :)
"This woman spent much of 1959 in Holcomb, Kansas, helping a childhood friend—"
"The entire first page of the January 13, 1898 issue of Georges Clemenceau's newspaper <i>L'Aurore</i> was filled with this work warning Felix Faure—"
"The author of this book noted that he only included one equation after being warned—"
"The full name of a bill recently passed in this state is the Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act—"
"He lost his right leg while serving as governor of the Netherlands Antilles—" (This one is particularly amusing. I'll explain why when I post the answers.)