I review the observational evidence for stream-fed accretion in intermediate
polars. Recent work on the discless system V2400 Oph confirms the pole-flipping
model of stream-fed accretion, but this applies only to a minority of the flow.
The bulk of the flow is in the form of blobs circling the white dwarf, a state
which might have been a precursor to disc formation in other IPs. I also
discuss work on the systems with anomalously long spin periods, V1025 Cen and
EX Hya. There are arguments both for and against stream-fed accretion in V1025
Cen, and further work is necessary before reaching a conclusion about this
system.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, To appear in 'The Physics of Cataclysmic
Variables and Related Objects', Goettingen, August 5-10, 2001; includes
low-res figures to reduce siz
