A small amount of self-righteousness. Speaking for myself, not out of anger, but out of bewilderment.

Three mistakes you've made:
1. They haven't run a tournament before.
2. They were asked to be a host by us.
3. This is all some sort of nefarious plan to separate NAQT from the rest of the circuit, and set ourselves up as evil clones of Chip.

As for the first, it's not like they haven't run tournaments down there before. They've run tournaments with our questions in past years.

As the guy who mans the phones, I can tell you that we didn't have to go beg them to let us host it there. They called us up, and came to us with a plan. It's not the first time that someone other than a college has come to us with a plan, and it probably won't be the last.

As for it being a "Chip location", well, yeah, if you mean it's a place people would want to go. Does that mean we won't be having people come to help out? No. Does it in any way reduce our committment to the quiz bowl circuit? No.

Is this a risky move? Sure. IF we fail, then you can deliver whatever level of spite and derision you want to fire off. Is the risk worth taking? Yes, and best of all, the risk doesn't fall on the circuit.

NAQT has always reserved the right to be innovative, from power tossups to partnerships in new markets. If we kept ourselves locked into the same old patterns, we'd have died off years ago. And those who told us we couldn't create a cheap IM set, an international college championship, a high school championship that teams want to come to, all those people would have had their hearty laugh. But the primary beneficiary of all our work has always been the circuit, college and high school.

As for the more obvious question of why don't we announce such things, well, I'd say that for the majority of us, we prefer action to discussion. That's probably why most of us don't post in the Yahoo club anymore, we know we'll be criticized whether we post there or not. So is it worth our time and aggravation, when we could be making things better?