LL80: LearnedLeague

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quarterrican
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by quarterrican »

Finished with the same TCA for the third straight season. Enough to keep me in B for another season - my fifth straight, and by far my longest stay on one level without relegation or promotion.
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morbeedo
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by morbeedo »

Troydozzy wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 10:52 am I had mixed reactions about this article. It initially made me laugh, but then I really don't like the idea of publicly shaming people for how they do in trivia things. :https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/mic ... 329e147a61
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boson
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by boson »

alietr wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 8:58 am I went to the Kusama exhibit when it was here in DC, so that was an easy 3. Which denied my opponent winning the rundle. Curiously enough, 1st place going into the last day also lost their match, but the top 2 kept their positions despite both losing.
That's because this chump who was in third also lost. This was my chance and I blew it. Good match to Patkav who staved off relegation by throwing down the six-pack against me.

See you in LL81.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by jeff6286 »

Linear Gnome wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 11:04 am
This Is Kirk! wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 10:31 am
Linear Gnome wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 7:13 am In June and August 2018, there were some decisions made by TAI that nearly caused me to quit LL
Care to expound on this?
I spent a lot of time composing, editing, and deleting posts, so it's hard for me to remember what I actually posted at the time and since then. I will spoiler this just on general principles.
Spoiler
The most egregious thing was the question whose answer was "infinitesimal"--the question was edited twice during an active match day. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think that should ever happen. Defense is (arguably) the defining characteristic that distinguishes traditional LL matches from most trivia contests, and, aside from the inherent unfairness of changing the question, it makes defense meaningless. I'm really strong in math; when I played that question, it seemed extremely difficult and obscure, and I defended accordingly.

My opinion is that, once the match day goes live, the questions should not be edited, period. I can see why it would be necessary occasionally for advance access, but there was one time when questions got traded between match days after someone played one of the match days by advance access, so they played one question twice and another not at all. How can defense be meaningful in such a situation? In both cases, having different players answering different versions of a question, or two of one question and none of another, is bad enough, but defensive considerations make it unacceptable, IMO.

The other issues I had were:

(1) Letting essentially the same question play simultaneously in two mini-leagues (answer was Galois). This gave a lot of people ethical dilemmas and put many others at a disadvantage on defense if they were only playing one of the mini-leagues. It would have been easy to avoid this systemic chaos.

(2) One of the questions in the Airplane! 1DS was carelessly edited and had no correct answer, and was scored accordingly. All of us have seen carelessly written trivia questions occasionally, but nothing was done to protect the people who moneyed the question in good faith. Again, I think moneying is what makes 1DS's unique, and it's a tenet of every reputable trivia contest that every question has a correct answer. If I have to start wondering whether a question in a 1DS is a "whammy" with no correct answer, well, count me out.

Some people may say, "well, it's just a game, it doesn't really matter". But the crux of LL is (please forgive the shouting) WE'RE SUPPOSED TO PRETEND THAT IT MATTERS. Literally the first thing we do is promise not to cheat and not to forfeit, because we're suppose to take it seriously. But it's hard for me to take it seriously when the rules are so capricious. I'd rather enjoy the excellently-written trivia questions a day late and not bother with the scoring. It's well-established that I'm a C-rundler and I have nothing more to prove there.

Whew. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.
I wanted to address a couple of the issues you had here. One was the infinitesimal thing which I was also shocked by at the time, and sent a message to Thorsten about and his reply indicated that this was absolutely not intentional or regular practice and that there was some sort of a weird caching error with the site that caused an earlier draft of the question to appear as the live version for some period of time. He felt terrible about it and this was coming right on the heels of having to rebuild the entire site after the crash and backup failure so he was in a very down place the time. Suffice to say this is unlikely to happen again and he was quite mortified that it happened once.

Secondly the Airplane mistake, I think he perhaps has come upon a new solution for a case where there is essentially a broken question. The finals of the rock and roll mini league contained a question that had a typo with a wrong date given, placing a 1987 U2 album in 1997. It was decided that this was such an egregious error that it would not be fair to expect people to figure out the correct album with the date being so far off, so everyone was given a correct answer for this and everyone had only their best four money choices count.

This would’ve been a fine solution to the Kareem Abdul-Jabber snafu on the Airplane quiz, to throw out the question and only count four money questions for every player so that anyone who moneyed this one would not be penalized. I suspect that if we have more examples of this in the future that this is the model we are likely to see.

Certainly it would be ideal to never have a question that has to be thrown out but I don’t expect Thorsten to research every question submitted for a 1DS and ML. As long as there is user submitted content occasionally errors are going to happen, I think all he can do is try to make the best choice after the fact to make the contest as fair as possible, sometimes it’s just not going to be doable.

Yesterday he made a poor choice of phrasing on the 9 to 5 question implying that it was the characters rather than the actresses that appeared in both. Some players dismissed the correct answer for this reason and that is very unfortunate. No matter how much you strive to make your questions airtight, it’s just not possible to be perfect all the time so occasional mistakes like this are inevitable. I get frustrated sometimes by rulings he makes or certain decisions but try to remember that he is human and doing the best he can and I try to remain as supportive as I can be.
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econgator
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by econgator »

Linear Gnome wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 11:04 am
Spoiler
The most egregious thing was the question whose answer was "infinitesimal"--the question was edited twice during an active match day. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think that should ever happen. Defense is (arguably) the defining characteristic that distinguishes traditional LL matches from most trivia contests, and, aside from the inherent unfairness of changing the question, it makes defense meaningless. I'm really strong in math; when I played that question, it seemed extremely difficult and obscure, and I defended accordingly.

My opinion is that, once the match day goes live, the questions should not be edited, period. I can see why it would be necessary occasionally for advance access, but there was one time when questions got traded between match days after someone played one of the match days by advance access, so they played one question twice and another not at all. How can defense be meaningful in such a situation? In both cases, having different players answering different versions of a question, or two of one question and none of another, is bad enough, but defensive considerations make it unacceptable, IMO.

The other issues I had were:

(1) Letting essentially the same question play simultaneously in two mini-leagues (answer was Galois). This gave a lot of people ethical dilemmas and put many others at a disadvantage on defense if they were only playing one of the mini-leagues. It would have been easy to avoid this systemic chaos.

(2) One of the questions in the Airplane! 1DS was carelessly edited and had no correct answer, and was scored accordingly. All of us have seen carelessly written trivia questions occasionally, but nothing was done to protect the people who moneyed the question in good faith. Again, I think moneying is what makes 1DS's unique, and it's a tenet of every reputable trivia contest that every question has a correct answer. If I have to start wondering whether a question in a 1DS is a "whammy" with no correct answer, well, count me out.

Some people may say, "well, it's just a game, it doesn't really matter". But the crux of LL is (please forgive the shouting) WE'RE SUPPOSED TO PRETEND THAT IT MATTERS. Literally the first thing we do is promise not to cheat and not to forfeit, because we're suppose to take it seriously. But it's hard for me to take it seriously when the rules are so capricious. I'd rather enjoy the excellently-written trivia questions a day late and not bother with the scoring. It's well-established that I'm a C-rundler and I have nothing more to prove there.

Whew. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.
I have a problem with just how lenient he is on allowing answers that should never be allowed. Like you alluded to, how can you properly defend when it's impossible to know just which answers that should never be accepted end up being accepted.
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This Is Kirk!
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by This Is Kirk! »

jeff6286 wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 3:33 pm Certainly it would be ideal to never have a question that has to be thrown out but I don’t expect Thorsten to research every question submitted for a 1DS and ML. As long as there is user submitted content occasionally errors are going to happen, I think all he can do is try to make the best choice after the fact to make the contest as fair as possible, sometimes it’s just not going to be doable.
I think it's probably best to treat the One Days and Mini Leagues as sort of an added bonus to being a member and realize the content isn't going to be vetted like the "regular season" questions.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by alietr »

Does Thorsten even review the 1Ds or MLs? I figured that's what the testing jobs are for.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by Lefty »

I climbed into the promotion zone from fjordB on day 24, but to echo Tom Landry, the season ended at the wrong time. Yesterday, I figured "art" was out on the art question, since the word was in the clue, so I went with paintings. This wasn't entirely a joke answer, as it occurred to me that the guy who was designing apartments for public statues a few years ago was Japanese and he is indeed but his name is Tatzu Nishi. I also cherished some hope that there was just one April Fool's clue to close the season, but it seems Thorsten is strict about dates.

I didn't know the soccer team, so it came down to what Midwestern city is just about the 24th-most "big league" town, and I figured wrong. I knew just enough about 9 to 5 to think of it and not be put off by the character names.

I may have benefited from the 24 hour extension of day 24, but I prefer to think it was Parkinson's Law at work. I was though well into Wednesday before I remembered the chia pet, and switching from "mare" to "maria" was also late inspiration. I knew at one time a Ciapetta and also a Chiapetta, but neither on a gift-buying basis.

I generally liked the occasional audio and sheet music questions, though I didn't score very high on them. The ones I did get felt better than most gets.

I feel Thorsten does a good job overall. No one's perfect, and very few are even amazingly excellent, but I think he is very good. I'm more apt to be annoyed by overgenerosity toward borderline answers, but I try not to sweat them much. I may need that sweat later.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by trainman »

I just barely avoided relegation (pretty much needed to win on MD25, and did). I was a bit surprised to see that I only missed my personal TCA record by 1 -- but what I did set a personal record in is Correct Answers Allowed.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by econgator »

trainman wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 11:05 pm but what I did set a personal record in is Correct Answers Allowed.
Ditto (although I call the stat Correct Answers Against -- I had no choice in the amount). My previous high was 103; I shattered that with 119.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by MinnesotaMyron »

econgator wrote: Sat Mar 30, 2019 12:32 am
trainman wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 11:05 pm but what I did set a personal record in is Correct Answers Allowed.
Ditto (although I call the stat Correct Answers Against -- I had no choice in the amount). My previous high was 103; I shattered that with 119.
I also had my highest* CAA, which I didn't realize until just right now. I finished in 20th place, same as last season.

*save for my disastrous season in A Fro, in which pretty much everyone dropped a 9(6) against me. It was an outlier.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by Linear Gnome »

jeff6286 wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 3:33 pm I wanted to address a couple of the issues you had here. One was the infinitesimal thing which I was also shocked by at the time, and sent a message to Thorsten about and his reply indicated that this was absolutely not intentional or regular practice and that there was some sort of a weird caching error with the site that caused an earlier draft of the question to appear as the live version for some period of time. He felt terrible about it and this was coming right on the heels of having to rebuild the entire site after the crash and backup failure so he was in a very down place the time. Suffice to say this is unlikely to happen again and he was quite mortified that it happened once.
I honestly wanted to quit LL over this, and I would have if there would have been a way to do it without messing up my rundle. Of course no one is perfect and people make mistakes, but, at the time, I felt as if there was a certain...how do I say it...lack of transparency in changing the question, not once but twice. My opinion is that, once the match day goes live, all players should play the same version of the question, no matter how egregiously flawed. Basically, be equally unfair to everyone.
jeff6286 wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 3:33 pm Secondly the Airplane mistake, I think he perhaps has come upon a new solution for a case where there is essentially a broken question. The finals of the rock and roll mini league contained a question that had a typo with a wrong date given, placing a 1987 U2 album in 1997. It was decided that this was such an egregious error that it would not be fair to expect people to figure out the correct album with the date being so far off, so everyone was given a correct answer for this and everyone had only their best four money choices count.

This would’ve been a fine solution to the Kareem Abdul-Jabber snafu on the Airplane quiz, to throw out the question and only count four money questions for every player so that anyone who moneyed this one would not be penalized. I suspect that if we have more examples of this in the future that this is the model we are likely to see.

Certainly it would be ideal to never have a question that has to be thrown out but I don’t expect Thorsten to research every question submitted for a 1DS and ML. As long as there is user submitted content occasionally errors are going to happen, I think all he can do is try to make the best choice after the fact to make the contest as fair as possible, sometimes it’s just not going to be doable.
I'm extremely interested to hear this. I was a strong advocate for this solution (count the best four moneys) in the Airplane! 1DS, both on the message board and privately with Thorsten. Although he doesn't personally vet the questions, one-days are still played under his rules (and my understanding is that he still does the scoring, though I think there's discussion of that changing). I felt that I could not play LL78 until I knew the nature of his reply to me, if any, and he didn't get back to me until it was too late to register. He was nice about it, but he basically told me that he had tried various creative solutions over the years and they had all worked out badly. It's so interesting to me that he has implemented this clever new idea.

I have the impression that Thorsten is a good guy, and I understand wanting to be supportive of him. Speaking only for myself, his handling of the Galois matter made me less favorably disposed towards his handling of other matters. I might change my mind and re-up later; for now, I prefer to enjoy the questions without dealing with the frustrations related to scoring rulings.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by badgerfellow »

alietr wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 5:17 pm Does Thorsten even review the 1Ds or MLs? I figured that's what the testing jobs are for.
My understanding is no. When you smith a 1DS, you can provide him notes on what should be accepted and what shouldn't, but ultimately, he is hands off until he runs the scoring machine.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by econgator »

badgerfellow wrote: Sat Mar 30, 2019 1:23 pm
alietr wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 5:17 pm Does Thorsten even review the 1Ds or MLs? I figured that's what the testing jobs are for.
My understanding is no. When you smith a 1DS, you can provide him notes on what should be accepted and what shouldn't, but ultimately, he is hands off until he runs the scoring machine.
That's what I remember from the one I ran, too.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by morbeedo »

My film score is the biggest outlier of LL80. 11/12 questions correct, or 91%, compared to my average of 55%. I’ve done no specific film prep- these questions were just more my speed. I’ve actually been surprised not to do better in film since I joined LL; then again, I’ve never seen Die Hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by RJRouge »

One of the VBWA nominees is tantalizingly close to one I submitted. Either somebody had the same idea with better wordplay to the tune of a single letter or Thorsten misread my answer in the same manner.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by MarkBarrett »

Nice to see multiple board members in the top 15 for the Backgammon 1DS: https://www.learnedleague.com/oneday.php?backgammon

I'm happy to have made top 100 (#99) considering I only had half right & 4/5 $ Qs correct.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by Bamaman »

I finished in 89th in the VP quiz. I would have been 47th if he had taken Bensten for Bentsen.
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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by morbeedo »

Bamaman wrote: Tue Apr 02, 2019 2:51 pm I finished in 89th in the VP quiz. I would have been 47th if he had taken Bensten for Bentsen.
Well done. I stayed away from that one but did take a look at the answers hoping to learn something

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Re: LL80: LearnedLeague

Post by Woof »

morbeedo wrote: Wed Apr 03, 2019 11:50 am
Bamaman wrote: Tue Apr 02, 2019 2:51 pm I finished in 89th in the VP quiz. I would have been 47th if he had taken Bensten for Bentsen.
Well done. I stayed away from that one but did take a look at the answers hoping to learn something

Visual Art: Group 67
Group 47 for me.
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