Missonary Church Bible Quizzing taken to far

[Monty]

Hah! My last posting gave more truth to what the SDMB denizens call Gaudere’s Law. “When discussing S&G errors, one will always make one!”

[kambuckta]

*Originally posted by ManDuh003 *
**This is a way to motivate people to study the Bible and why study if the goal isn’t to win? **

It seems to me (as a rabid agnostic) that the point of studying the Bible is to come to an understanding of the tenets of Christianity. I suppose some might call THAT winning, regardless of whether you ‘win’ the quiz or not.

[BraheSilver]

Okay. I think I was confused before. Let me see if I have it right now.
There are 4 people on each team. Anyone can jump in to answer a question; if he’s right it’s +20 and if he’s wrong it’s -10. Also, if he’s wrong, the person on the other team across from the first jumper gets a different question for the possibility of +10.

Now, ManDuh has nobody across from him, so it would behoove him to try to answer the question first so that if he misses, there’s nobody on the other team to get a bonus.

My questions:

1. If g1 jumps and is incorrect, why doesn’t r1 get to answer the question g1 failed on instead of getting a different question?
2. Why doesn’t the announcer go on to finish the question, and let anyone from red team answer?
   and 3)

The reason they officials let that go on is because it is in the rules that it is allowed.

Why don’t they change the rules to avoid this kind of exploitation?

I was only in Kiwanis Bowl, which had a simpler “team against team” competition, without the restrictions about who could answer when. I suppose your method encourages everyone to learn everything instead of having specific players focus on specific areas, but there are certain circumstances where a team can force these rules to work to the disadvantage of the other team.

Remind me again - who’s taking it too far? A team that would rather be beaten by a team that answers more correct questions, or a team that purposefully avoids answering questions to deny the other team the opportunity?

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

I think we should ask ourselves, WWJD…and I think that Jesus would say that “suicide jumping” is kind of a punk-ass move. I would have been pissed at you too.

[iampunha]

Let’s get all 90s and diagram this baby out:

G1 G2 G3 G4

R1 R2 R3 R4

If a seat is unoccupied, then the opposing team cannot ring in if an incorrect answer is given. So if R4 “suicide jumps” … that is, purposefully rings in with a bad response, and if G4 is unoccupied, then that’s the end of the question.

Now for this:

A little off the subject, I know, but how successful could “suicide jumping” in College Bowl really be? When I played College Bowl, I was under the impression that if you rang in, you had to answer within 15 seconds, and if you didn’t, the question was automatically thrown to the other side. If you’re far enough ahead to contemplate using that strategy, 15 seconds isn’t going to be that big a deal. With the bonus question, it can take over a minute for each question to be fully answered anyway, so you’d have to “suicide jump” at least four times for the equivalent of one question to be taken out of the game.

I’ve only seen the opportunity for it to be done a few times, but it can be successful. Say you’re beating a very good team 310-300 (negs are worth -5 points, last I checked). There are ten seconds left in the match and a tossup is being read (tossups are questions anyone can ring in on). The clock goes to 9 seconds then 8, then 7, as the losing team tries in vain to think of anything that could possibly apply.

With six seconds left, the captain of the winning team rings in, and waits to be promoted (both due to formality and to leech out as much time as possible). He slowly says “The People’s Republic of China” (there are longer single answers, but right now I can’t remember the one for England). I just timed this, and at a decent speed it would take six seconds to say if you were being quite clear in your response. If you had practiced doing this before in team practice, you could probably squeeze another second or two out of it.

It’s not a common move (in my experience) for a few reasons:

1. QB games usually aren’t decided by ten points or less.

2. Often the game ends on a bonus, since they take a lot more time to do.

3. The odds of a question being started with ten seconds left in a game is not all that high.

4. The chance that you’ll leave any time on the clock and hear something like “as a Jewish lens grinder” (BUZZ! SPINOZA!) and your entire team will want to strangle the person who rang in on “this philosopher is best know for his works [work1] and [work2]”, when everyone knows he’s the guy on the team for the O-Chem questions and his Simpsons trivia.

5. It isn’t practiced all that much, from what I have seen … it’s one of those things that gets talked about in practice some, but really, would you rather spend ten minutes practicing that sort of thing or ten minutes memorizing the royal succession of France from Hastings to Charlemagne? Much more useful to know when those kings came and left than practicing saying very slowly “The United States of America and her allies” or somesuch.

6. There is no “suicide jump” possible, as it was described in the OP, in college bowl because the concept of seat emptiness does not equate to question ending. Dwight Kidder would lose probably three times the number of games he currently loses if this were possible, because a team would just get fifty points or so against him and then suicide jump every chair but his every question unless it was an area he didn’t know.

To sum up: it’s not for if you’re far ahead but for when the question is starting with about ten seconds left (probably less, actually, now that I think about it) and you’re leading by at least ten points (really, more than five, but in academic tournaments there are rarely 1-point clues as there are in TRASH Tournaments. In ACF, fuggedaboudit:D) against a team with a very real chance of getting the tossup off “He kept a journal of every orgasm he ever had…” (answer: Freud).