The team spent all afternoon touring the city rather than play brain ring. They took photos strategically across the city. They also proceed to eat cuisines they didn't have the opportunity to eat in Kansas City.
The following day, all 50 teams invited to compete check in along with their rosters so they can be entered properly into the IAMG's system. Once check-in is done:
"Despite our performance at tournaments such as the International League, the Slavyanka Grand Prix and the Ivy League, to the rest of the country, we are still the underdogs. Kansas shall take the ChGK world by storm!" Patricia harangues the team before taking up positions in the Haggett Cascade Room.
The Ivy League, as a ChGK conference, has 3 schools qualified for Nationals: Harvard, the Massachusetts state champions, Brown and Dartmouth, the latter being de facto the Rhode Island and New Hampshire state champions respectively. From what I heard, the latter two have erudition but no team chemistry, a Crimson player muses upon seeing the Brown and Dartmouth teams getting seated. He also realizes that there really is no such thing as intercollegiate ChGK in the US the way there is for quiz bowl.
When all 50 teams are seated in the room, the tournament director delivers his speech to the teams in attendance, standing on the lectern:
"Privet. On behalf of the organizing committee of the National Chto, gde, kogda Championship, I trust that you understand what the grand prize is: the United States berth at the ChGK World Cup, held in Saint Petersburg this November. And may the winner stick it to the Russians on their own turf, and the Chinese as well! I cannot stress enough just how far China and Russia will go in using intellectual games for political gain!" The tournament director harangues the players as if he was an electoral candidate on the campaign trail.
"Make no mistake. For far too long, our intellectual games circuit was propped up by players from Asian ethnicities. A fact that RT and Xinhua will remind us at every major international intellectual games tourney! Quiz Bowl World Cup, ChGK Worlds, and so on, so forth. So, whoever represents the US at the ChGK Worlds, you understand that you must play your best in St. Petersburg" the head of the appeals committee speaks, with a heavy Russian accent.
Once the speeches from the tournament organizers end, several first-timers at Nats are dumbfounded by just how politicized ChGK really is on the world stage. But the first game begins in earnest. After the first blitz question is asked in Russian:
"Blood, guess, party, wall, column, sense, heaven. The answer must be related to an eighth something, and that something is the answer" Vira then explains the reasoning behind the answer.
"I would say wonder" Patricia adds in while her mind races against the clock.
"That makes sense, and we're going with wonder" Yakiv then nods.
The other two blitz sub-questions still come fairly easily to them, with Patricia's mental speed serving them well. Much better: this is what I am accustomed to from my brain. I really hope I can function like this for all 4 games, Patricia muses while her state of mind is quite different between the svoya igra tournament and the ChGK one.
And, of course, the 3-column scoreboard is shown on one of the screens, showing where each team stands relative to each other. With the state flags next to the team names. Patricia's seat is angled in such a way that she can keep an eye on it at all times, while the other scoreboard has the current question as well as the timer on that question. Which is angled more for Bohdan, who is on Patricia's left. They seem to be on track to be in the top bracket, at least top-4.
So it seems that they fight tooth and nail to remain in contention for the national title and hence for the ChGK Worlds. No protests of any kind, at least for now. But for one of the questions during the second game, it appears they are stuck between multiple possibilities. And, as Patricia listens to both sides arguing about the role of local purchasing and supply chains in inflation...
"The main thing consumers could really do back then about inflation was about buying the cheaper alternatives possible, irrespective of where the merchandise came from, or of merchant ownership. Trying to create more jobs when existing jobs were already very difficult to fill was a recipe for disaster, pushing wages up and, with it, the prices of locally manufactured goods!" Yakiv argues that local purchasing was an inflation driver.
"In the long run, supply chains would be strained and, in more ways than one. There is a component that's inevitable and that's because of sources of raw materials that can't be offshored!" Bohdan argues about pursuing short-run inflation control beyond what monetary policy could achieve would have implied for inflation.
"Guys, this entire discussion turns around the role of supply chains, and there were a lot of weak links!" Sergei adds. "We've been focusing on only one piece of the inflationary puzzle!"
Shrinkflation (the tendency of goods to come in smaller formats as well as increasing in price) and greedflation (the exploitation of inflation to increase prices) are only two items that contributed to inflation; another umbrella item is considered highly controversial as a driver of inflation. Name this umbrella, Patricia, deep in thought, tries to break the impasse.
"Corporate social responsibility! CSR drove compliance costs, and, from there, overhead, so that certain requirements must be met, such as inclusivity, quotas of locally sourced goods and other ethical and social constraints on what can't be locally sourced..." Patricia retorts, but appears unwilling to engage in a cost-benefit analysis of CSR.
"We now have a better idea of what this umbrella is made of" Vira comments, while the team is calming down, and the clock is ticking.
The laschtok then frantically writes down the words corporate social responsibility on the card as the 60-second siren rings.
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When the second game ends, they glance at the scoreboard as the morning games end. The veteran players, especially those who pinned all their hopes on Patricia, pay more attention to the split at the 24-question mark compared to past years.
"Last year, we scored about fourteen points as of the halfway point, and we were in the middle of the pack. Now we are in a four-way tie for first place" Vira comments, while a mental image of before-after at Nats flashes in her mind.
"Exactly whom we expected to be fighting against for the national title: Quantum Computers, Saturday Thirteen and the Harvard Crimson" Bohdan comments on who they are up against.
"What annoyed me most about the head of the appeals committee was how he was implying that ChGK was a geopolitical hot potato. And the TD, too..." Mikhail rants, within earshot of them.
"There is no chance for ChGK to become politicized domestically here, though. This game is a complete unknown here outside of the Russian and Ukrainian diasporas" a Brown player overhears Mikhail's comment on the staffers talking about politicization of ChGK.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
"I remember you: you were the coach of the Big Green quiz bowl team when I was in high school!" Patricia exclaims after turning to face the Brown player-coach talking about the Russian and Ukrainian diasporas. "You're also another player not from these ethnicities..."
"You were a fantastic quiz bowler, but what made you pick Russian as a foreign language in college?" Brown's intellectual games coach asks Patricia.
Oh boy... a ghost from my high school days has resurfaced. The Green Wave of my time had perhaps the most systematic scouting for quiz bowl I have ever heard about. That guy was an undergraduate back then, now he must be in graduate school. In collegiate quiz bowl and in ChGK, the coach is often a player... Patricia reflects on her meeting with the former coach of the Dartmouth Big Green, now the Brown Bears' intellectual games coach.
"Let's say that a quiz bowl teammate pushed me to learn a non-Western language. Also, how does it feel to play and coach ChGK and quiz bowl at the same time?" Patricia asks the Bears' intellectual games coach.
"It's a lot of work. You must have realized that what works in quiz bowl doesn't always work in ChGK. That said, Brown isn't as cutthroat as the other Ivies, they are more willing to cooperate, and I have another player doing both quiz bowl and ChGK" Brown's coach answers Patricia's question.
"I would like to back-track a bit. You mentioned ChGK not being a political battlefield here; how did ChGK play out as a political battlefield in Russia?" Patricia asks, feeling she doesn't have a complete picture of the topic.
"I did my undergraduate thesis on the topic, limited in scope to the Ukraine war. But if you want to fully understand ChGK as a political battlefield in the Ukraine war, you must also understand ChGK in Syria, which happened six years before that" Brown's coach explains to her, before assembling his players as well as Patricia's for what's to come.
Essentially, VGTRK stopped airing games live, out of fear of certain players using air time to protest against the war or conscription. In turn, the IAMG banned openly pro-war players, the highest-profile of which were Maxim Potashev and Anatoly Wasserman, and stopped hosting the Worlds until the end of the war. Already that the competitive ChGK circuit voiced opposition to the usage of the game for propaganda purposes, it was anti-Putin since Syria happened in 2016, Patricia's mind effortlessly summarizes what made ChGK a political battlefield in Russia back then. Brown is just two points behind us. But we must not let these Rhode Island medvedi (bears) beat us!
Obviously, Yakiv and his relatives roll their eyes, but the sixth Kansas player, as well as Bohdan, seems open to know about the history of politicization of ChGK within Russia. As are the other Bears players, who apparently never talked about such things.
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But, after lunch, which they eat at a local Asian joint, the second half of the tournament is afoot. The tournament resumes and the third game proceeds exactly the same as the first two games. Everyone fights tooth and nail to either protect or gain positions. And, after the third game ends, all 4 teams at the top appear locked in a stalemate that doesn't seem to be willing to be broken. At the end of the third game, the team huddles together with some more remarks from Patricia:
"For the final game, we will need to play perfectly. We might be in the lead group now, but forget about the Worlds for now, just focus on the question, one question at a time!" a very tense Patricia then tells her teammates, also feeling some pressure.
"But they tend to keep the hardest questions for the end at Nats" Vira retorts. "I forgot to tell you that, believing it would be best kept for when we are close enough to the end of the tournament"
Over the course of the final game, after the first 11 questions are over, Patricia has one quick glance at the scoreboard. The Kansas State Team is trailing by one point, but they still scored 46 points. Yet, the team doesn't give up, but with one proviso:
"All we can do now is to answer this final question correctly and pray that the Quantum Computers won't. Then we can play in the shootout against them" Patricia explains to the team, while doing her prayer. Amen.
"We might be dark horses now, but if we make it to Worlds somehow, no one will expect anything from us" Bohdan adds to this chorus of comments.
"Final question!" The tournament director then shouts into the mic, making everyone's ears tremble.
"Quiet!" Patricia hollers around, while the question is displayed on the screen.
This is something you may learn at school, and it's something useful when fishing. However, it's not useful when operating a trawler, Patricia then muses after the TD read the question in Russian.
"Something useful that you learn in school and that's useful for fishing?" We don't learn to fish in school... Sergei starts questioning the question.
"Does it have something to do with water or with ecology?" Vira asks, in turn.
"I think not. Because if it had to do with water or ecology, I think it would be useful irrespective of whether you're fishing with a trawler or not. Trawlers have massive nets designed to catch schools of fish in one go, but each round of usage can take hours" Bohdan eliminates one possible area the answer could belong to.
Not water, not ecology, but you can learn it in school nonetheless, Patricia's mind races against the clock as it has done so many times in the past day or two. Her thoughts then turn to another aspect of the question. What level of schooling is meant by school anyway, for the purposes of this question? Often people feel like good ChGK questions should be answerable with knowledge up to 12th grade, in honors track coursework perhaps, so I'm going to go with high school level.
"It might seem a little strange, but Poisson distribution. Trawlers typically come equipped with sonars, allowing their occupants to know where the fish are before they cast the net into the water, hence its uselessness when used for trawling" Patricia explains herself.
"Remind me what the Poisson distribution is, and how it could be used to fish with a rod, please..." Yakiv pleads with Patricia, almost like a beggar.
"For fishing with a rod, a Poisson distribution is about the probability of catching a specific number of fish per hour or per day" Patricia then answers his teammate's question in an attempt to defuse tensions.
"Poisson distribution it is, I guess..." the sixth player sighs, clueless about statistics beyond mean, median, range and mode.
With a newfound confidence in their answer, the laschtok writes down "Poisson distribution" on the final regulation card allotted to them. In the dying seconds of the allotted time. Other teams seemed to go the ecology or chemistry routes, and when the final result arrives a minute later...
"Ladies and gentlemen, after the end of the regulation questions, we have a tie for first place between the Kansas State Team and the Quantum Computers" the tournament director makes a solemn announcement.
"Protest on the last question! Poisson distributions can be used to determine how many times one can cast a trawler's net per day" Mikhail then argues with the TD, and his face turns red.
"Fine; while sonars are used to detect schools of fish, where and at what depth, you could make a case that Poisson distributions may be used for that purpose. However, in practice, models for fishing yields are much more complex than just a Poisson distribution of how many net castings you can do daily" The TD then turns to the crowd of players. "This question is therefore declared null and void!"
Maybe the question writer had no clue about that aspect of the mathematics of fishing. Yes, vector geometry comes into play. Yes, Poisson distributions do. But we lost a shot at ChGK Worlds because of... a protest? Patricia starts crying on the floor of the room when the revised final standings are released.
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When the awards ceremony gets underway a few moments later, Patricia is still crying, after Saturday 13 stood to be recognized. The team then stands on the opposite side of the third-place team, with the middle spot taken up by the Quantum Computers:
"In third place, from New York, Saturday Thirteen! In second place, from Kansas, the Kansas State Team! And our new national champions, who will represent the United States at the ChGK Worlds in St. Petersburg, from California, the Quantum Computers!"
"If we want to participate at the ChGK Worlds, we will need to put in the work under the form of increased tournament entry, so that we can get a sufficiently high MAK rating or win a major international tournament. The latter I believe is not realistic if we can't win at the Slavyanka Grand Prix or the ChGK-Ivy League" Patricia turns to her teammates after receipt of the silver medal, when she cries again.
"How could they do this to us? After all the effort we all put in to go to the ChGK Nats, we all hoped you were enough to push us over the edge! And an entire season of work is ruined because of one protest?" a confused Vira starts questioning Patricia while her own face is going red upon seeing the team captain cry.
"It could have been... us!" Patricia keeps crying, a little disappointed by this result. "For months we played our best at all these tournaments, only to come to a screeching halt here at Nats?"
"Patricia, when you go from middle of the pack to vice-champion at Nats, it's a lot of progress for us to make. You never lived the years of mediocrity we endured on the national ChGK stage!" Bohdan harangues Patricia, while she is about to collapse.
"No ChGK Worlds for us all the same!"