As I’m watching the Harry Potter marathon on ABC Family I can’t help but notice that with all it’s rules and structure…Quidditch makes no effing sense. How does catching the snitch immediately end the game? Isn’t there some type of time structure for the game that says another way it’s over? Why even have the other way of scoring points? The crowd just swells and swoons over every meager 10 points that a team scores, but who cares? Once the snitch is caught it’s all for naught anyway.
Here’s an idea for the ultimate Quidditch World Cup team. 5 snitch catchers and a goalie. Who cares if the other team constantly makes 10 point goals for an hour? Once you catch the snitch it’s all over anyway.
Yes, the game ends with the capture of the snitch with the team getting the 150 points. However as shown at the World Cup, the other team had more than 150 points so they still won.
Catching the snitch is not an automatic win, just a big gob o’ points.
No. I’m not a voracious Harry Potter fan, but I have read books one through five (can’t remember their names), and I recall from the first book there being a lot of discussion on how asinine the rules of Quidditch are.
Didn’t Harry *lose *a game once, because he caught the snitch when the other team was way ahead in points? His catching the snitch ended the game, but the other guys won.
IIRC, yes - he wanted to end the game fast for some reason, so he caught the snitch ASAP, even though the Gryffindors were behind. I can’t remember what was going on with that, though.
The World Cup game runner pat mentions was between Bulgaria and Ireland, and it was Viktor Krum who made the mistaken catch, losing Bulgaria the game by 10 points.
It’s also mentioned that Quiddich matches can last for days, so it’s entirely possible for the 150 points for the snitch to be a relative drop in the bucket compared to the points from goals. It’s just not as likely in a school match which won’t last nearly so long.
I do very much wonder what a team of 7 seekers would be compared to a “normal” team. With that much speed on the field you’d think the game couldn’t last long enough for the other team to score 15 times
Wasn’t that Krum that caught it? His team was getting destroyed, didn’t have any chance of coming back, and he didn’t feel like waiting around until the other seeker got it.
It would take 15*the amount of time it takes to reset after a goal. It’d be trivial to score on a team with no defense. Considering catching the snitch is basically pure luck I don’t think that team would do well.
Actually, they did have a chance of coming back, given that they ended only one goal behind. If Krum had delayed until they made just one more score, it would have been a tie.
Which reminds me of the one thing that does bother me about quidditch: The score for catching the Snitch is a multiple of the score for goaling a quaffle. If they had made the Snitch worth 145 or 155 points instead, then it would have neatly prevented the possibility of a tie. As it is, though, it’s never made clear: Is there some sort of overtime? Does it just stand as a tie?
Personally, I suspect that the regulation equipment is different at the scholastic and professional levels, specifically that scholastic snitches are much easier to catch. Harry’s really good for a scholastic-level player, so he usually catches the Snitch quickly, often quickly enough to single-handedly win the game. But Krum (who Harry acknowledges as a much better player than himself) can’t catch it that quickly, because he’s dealing with a professional-grade snitch, and as a result, the other players are able to rack up the points on him. And the World Cup game we saw was even a fairly short one: Games have been known to last for days.
Overall, there may be some illogical design elements to the game, but then, there are illogical design elements to real-world games, too. I can’t actually think of anything weird in the quidditch rules that doesn’t also show up in some Muggle game or another.
From what I remember, Ireland was blowing Bulgaria away and “Krum wanted to end it on his own terms”.
The book mentioned the Irish beaters were too good.
In another previous thread on the subject, I offered a hypothesis/fanwank: that once upon a time, broom technology was primitive enough that catching the Snitch often took days or weeks. In that length of time, enough points would accumulate that 150 points for catching the Snitch was by no means likely to win the game.
You can’t fanwank it away; it makes no sense as a sport, was made up by a person who rather obviously didn’t understand sports very much, and hadn’t thought it past the book she was writing, but needed a vehicle to make Harry special.
As has been pointed out, it was Krum who provides us with the only example of a Seeker catching a Snitch to lose a game, and his team was only behind 160-0 - which means, in effect, that they were behind by 20, not 160. All points are irrelevant to 150-0. Hungary wasn’t losing 900-0, they were just a goal from a tie and two from a win if Krum then catches it.
Better writing could have made the game more logical. The 150-point thing would be interesting in a case of a 160-0 lead in that you could have Krum trying not to catch the Snitch, but attempting to prevent the other Seeker from catching it, and if you must have him catch it have him do so only because he tried his damndest to keep the Irish Seeker from catching it and finally had nothing left in his bag of tricks but to grad it himself; Rowling doesn’t write that, though, she just has Krum lose on purpose.
Of course sports all have their weirdnesses, but it’s clear Quidditch is a HUGE deal to the wizarding world. You can’t name me a major team sport that has a similarly idiotic rule. The other major sports, in fact, fiddle with their rules from time to time. Bill James once wrote that the history of basketball rules changes - and they have changed a lot of rules - basically amount to eliminating one rule loophole after another towards an end desire to “just play basketball.” Hockey fiddles with the rules every couple of years. Football and baseball in their early years made a wide variety of rule changes. The authorities who run major sports aren’t quick to make rule changes, for fear of the laws of unintended consequences, but they DO make them to keep the sport logical and fair. It’s baffling as to why the people who hold Quidditch is such high regard would not.
Quidditch is the equivalent of having an NFL where a field goal is worth 50 points and the moment a kicker boots one, the game ends. And the Super Bowl has a star kicker deliberate kick a field goal with his team behind 51-0. It’s preposterous beyond any explanation that can be supported by the text of the series.