Tuesday, September 24, 2013

More on MJP, or, Judges Mostly Suck

Actually, let me clarify that further. That is, the comments I made to the last post.

First of all, it took three of us to do the assignments in Yale tab. Six eyes are better than two at seeing solutions to mismatches and, simply speaking, getting the time-consuming job done. Anyhow, I don’t have my tabbing computer with me during the day, so I haven’t been able to dig into the past to get statistics, but I did look at some data on tabroom which is available to me as CP creates the new tabbing software. There are some cases of non-matched judges, but these were not our doing. And this is extremely important to keep in mind, so much so that I’ll put it into a new paragraph.

The biggest problem with MJP is judges who don’t show up for their rounds.

As much as we would like to put our feet up after all but two of the ballots are handed out and the rounds have started, we tend more often to telephone the judge or the judge’s immediate friends and family, asking politely where the &^^*##$ the judge is and why the #&^%%$ the judge hasn’t picked up the ballot. As a general rule, judges who disappear off the face of the earth tend to not respond to our gentle reminders that they should be in their room, so we are now faced with the situation of pushing the ballot to the best possible person we do have available, the handful of people who wait by the ballot table until all the ballots are picked up and they are released. We call those people saints, and we worship the ground they walk on. Unfortunately, all saints do not fit perfectly into all rounds, but a half hour after the posted time, anyone other than a strike is handed the ballot. Fines are levied and all sorts of hootin’ and hollerin’ transpires, but there is no other solution to the problem. Of course, most judges do show up and pick up their ballots, but there are some who don’t. While a lot of people might, after the fact, complain that they got a substitute judge, I will add that if every unused judge was a saint, and every unused judge was standing by, it would ameliorate the situation of the missing judge somewhat. But trust me on this, most judges, the minute they learn they are not on the pairing, teleport immediately to the nearest Starbucks. They will be the first to complain, of course (and I’ve documented this to my personal satisfaction in the past) but they will be the last to pick up an extra ballot. Saints in this activity are few. In fact, this is one of my main worries about the new system of notifying people online that they have rounds, as this similarly notifies them that they don't have rounds.

Of course, there are marginal ways this situation can be improved, and one of them is that the tab room, the ballot table and the judges’ hangout all be within spitting distance of one another, which we will do next year at the Pups, as we do, for instance, at Princeton. But that proximity only marginally solves, as the number of people who remain in the judges’ lounge after they learn they are not judging is maddeningly small. It’s always the same ones, of course. The saints. As a rule they’re no one’s top preferences (a handful of whom are out getting potted at the nearest gin mill or equivalent), but they’re the good old reliables who believe in fulfilling their obligations not only to the letter but beyond. They know who they are, and I know who they are.

I’ve always wondered why people duck ballots. Yes, if you’ve judged every round you deserve a break, and when we can, we try to accommodate. (At Big Bronx we systemically assign rounds off before the competition begins, for instance.) But for the most part, if you’re judging at a tournament, your job at the tournament is to judge. If you have something else to do, don’t come. If you’re a highly preferred judge from a serious team, that inevitably means that sooner or later someone from your staff will be in the tab room whining about some assignment or other, and if you want that whine to get a hearing, don’t also whine that you’re judging all the time, and why not even go the extra step of standing by for us? No doubt what you’re whining about in tab is that you haven’t gotten an equivalent judge like yourself to judge your team, because that judge disappeared like a shot when the pairings were announced. (And I don’t mean they went to coach a kid, which is acceptable, and can be done in such a way that you remain available for a pushed ballot.)

Here’s the thing. While there may be systemic problems in any operation, those problems tend to be clear and addressable, and those of us in tab (same old same old most of the time) do work to fix them. I think that’s pretty clear to anyone who follows this blog. But there are cultural problems in the activity that we can’t fix. All judges should be on call for every round until told otherwise. Do that, and all the meticulous work that goes into your making your prefs and our pairing according to those prefs won’t be tossed into the junk heap when the preferred judge disappears, and all the best substitutes have also disappeared. This is a matter of personal responsibility. Each team should demand that all its judges act like saints. Until they do, and until the culture becomes one of rising to the occasion rather than acting like a smartass college kid who would rather sleep or drink or do anything rather than judge a round, tournaments are going to remain problematic in the execution.

In other words, be available. Or shut up.

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