I seemed to sit in the Bronx library for three days straight. Occasionally I’d crawl down to the judges’ lounge, where Matt Dunay’s mother would look at me and ask if I needed to see a physician or, perhaps, a psychiatrist. I would reply that all tab people look like this, grab a box or two o’ joe or a garbage bag filled with bottled water and head on back to the library.
Everyone tabbing everything was in that library, which has been recently renovated but, I’m sorry to say, was not renovated with an eye for everyone tabbing everything. What happens in these situations is that inevitably when you want perfect silence to analyze A+ A pairings, somebody else wants to do a hula demonstration while yet another bunch of tabbers is being attacked by angry villagers with pitchforks. Plus a library is a basic people magnet, so there were easily three or four hundred people in there at any one time who found the accommodations preferable to those where they were supposed to be. They were not particularly rabble-like, but their very presence made a buzz in the room that could not be ignored. O’C took me on a building tour at one point and we found our cave for next year, up on the third floor where it will only be LD people who have a reason to be there, or our invited guests, or our usual suspects from the traveling tab room or the TVFT team. Everyone else? I’m putting Matt Dunay’s mother outside the door with a bazooka. Be scared. Be very, very scared.
One of the very good things that happened in the library was a discussion with Bietz about doing MJP. Not only had he earlier showed me the E (erase) button functionality, but we talked our way through optimizing each assignment until, in the end, I’m pretty sure we were doing it the absolute best way we can. Bietz, who also does it the absolute best way, does it differently, but that’s not a bad thing. We argued about a lot of issues. You can’t just concentrate on the bubble people, because every person on that schematic deserves their highest ranked pref. You can’t do it perfectly because it would take an hour a round and, well, still not be perfect. We discussed this all vigorously for a while and came to great conclusions, and I have to say, we all really enjoyed the discussion, and commented how great it was not to have to argue with civilians. When you argue with debaters, you get somewhere. Civilians? They just don’t know how to do it.
Still, MJP is extremely labor intensive, no matter what your approach. We found that at critical times it took three of us to see everything at once. You print a schem for tab that shows rankings and records. Then you go down the list, starting at the bubble (2 at Bronx) and find any non A+A+ and then you look for 1-1s that fit on the computer, then you look at the printed list to find which of these can be moved out of a round. (This only works after round 3, because in that round practically everyone is on a bubble, and for that matter, maybe not until after round 4.) Then you start juggling everybody, going up to undefeateds then down to the outs, and if you’re doing your job correctly, you have virtually all 1-1 pairings. Or maybe even literally 1-1s. In either case, you know you’ve done the best you can for everybody, starting with the bubble. I would have to say that everybody would grant that the bubble should get the first crack, because everybody behind the veil of ignorance would agree that it’s fairest. Anyhow, after all this you have to assign rooms and fix flights—Oy! That’s where those three pairs of eyes come in.
In all of this, we also discussed things like the max/min number of rankings that should be allowed when doing the prefs. Then we talked about factoring into this an approach going by the number of rounds rather than individual judges. And no matter how you slice it, if you are diametrically opposite to almost everyone else in the field, you are harder to find prefs for, and both you and your opponent may get lesser prefs. But since you’ll pop as a problem, you’ll also get first crack at being fixed. With all of this going on, as you can imagine MJP only makes sense with a very large pool of judges. I’ve talked about that before.
Anyhow, you can see why, whenever I crawled out of the library, I looked like death eating a fig newton. You would have too. Trust me on that.
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As always, there were high points and low points.
Music: I like music in the tab room. It helps set the mood, lively in the mornings when we need lively desperately, gentle in the stretches where only gentle will do, off completely when we have to concentrate. I can usually manage to find just about anything to soothe the various savage breasts in the vicinity. Sweeney Todd seemed appropriate Sunday morning for some reason or other, which got the Emperor of Hamiltonia to remark that Sondheim is for pseudo-sophisticate New Yorker readers only. So, we asked him, who do you like? His reply was Andrew Lloyd Webber. At this point, JV was forced to kill him.
Sporcle: Sporcle.com remains one of the essentials of tab life. I don’t know how people tab without it, especially on a long weekend like Jake.
Offspring: Kate came by to judge a few rounds. She and O’C had cooked this up on the DiDeAd. In her first flight, she texted me that if she ever had to judge again, she was moving to Hamiltonia. Shortly thereafter, she texted to ask if her paradigm could be that if you run a counterplan, you have to be exiled to Hamiltonia. Things have changed a lot in LD in the last couple of decades.
Raw fish: The thing is, you want to get invited to the Round Robin, either as a student or a judge or a coach, if for no other reason than dinner at Japonica, which is O’C’s home away from home. (I think his grandfather works there as a fry cook.) This year the starting time for the feast was too late for those of us retiring home to Sailorville and having to work/school the following morning, so O’C ordered some takeout for me and the P.C. (There was no need to order sushi for the Panivore, who spent most of the trip home extolling the virtues of macaroni and cheese, and explaining the differences among styles of the Kraft varieties.) We sat there scarfing down some of the best uncooked food ever, while others walked by with their eyes bulging, knowing that soon they’d be in our shoes. Absolute bliss.
Shopping: The RR was right around the corner from J&R’s, which is Mecca to tech people. I only went once, and only bought one thing. I was very well behaved.
The PJ Conundrum: The down side of MJP remains that some people, usually those who are unknown rather than disliked, don’t get many rounds. And sooner or later they come in and ask if they are even in the computer. I feel bad about that, but there’s not much I can do about it. It already takes forever to pair rounds; to pair with unused judges as a priority is well nigh impossible. If we happen to notice, we’ll act, but it’s more accident than anything else. Still, those people who did come in inevitably got paired automatically by the computer in the subsequent round. Somehow, TRPC seemed to know…
Print your own damned triples ballots: O’C calls the runoff a runoff, but it’s really a triple octos. And TRPC does not like printing ballots for triple octos. And once TRPC stops liking ballot printing, it won’t start liking it again until the next tournament. Which means blank ballots and handwritten assignments. Aaaarrrrgh!
No hoarding!: The third floor was hoarding ballots. At any tournament, some runner or ballot table is hoarding ballots. The punishment for this crime ought to be, of course, exile to Hamiltonia.
Cancer: There was a march to support cancer as the RR was winding down. People were wearing lymphomaniac shirts and carrying balloons with lights in them during a nor’easter. We decided at some point that they were actually against cancer. Give us time, and we can figure out anything. That is the brilliance of the forensics community.
Big guns: Jake was lousy with them. JW, the Rippin’s—you couldn’t swing a cat in tab without hitting someone with time on their forensic hands that weekend. Lots of chatter from the next tab pod in the library about committees and bids and all manner of things that make many of us long for next year’s summer vacation in Hamiltonia…
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