Wednesday, January 22, 2014

In which we further debrief on Bigle X

I need a good night’s sleep. Any good night’s sleep. I’m getting ditzy.

So, let’s go back to Bigle X. As I said yesterday, and as CP responded, I’m not a fan of how they did the 9 tiers of MJP, since I’m a strict constructionist vis-à-vis mutuality. But everybody gets to run their own tournament, and Palmer makes important points. We'll get back to MJP in separate posts.

Other than that, there were interesting discussions, as always. As I said yesterday, the expectation of scientific precision is what amazes me the most, as if you’ll always lose a 2-1 in your opponent’s favor and always win a 1-2. The arithmetic is simply a guide to your own ideas about the judges, not a read of the judges inviolable vote-o-meter. If you think a judge should be hanged by the neck until dead, strike ’im, otherwise, shaddup. It’s mutual. Deal with it.

I was doing PF, which was pretty straightforward, as might be expected. You assign the judges at random, send them into the world, and there you are. Lex always has a flood of lay judges in PF, so while everyone else was gleefully doing e-ballots, I was virtually doing index cards, but so it goes. No major issues, nor really any minor issues. Everything worked as advertised. There was some hoo-ha over some perceived problem, but my thoughts on that were that the problem was human error, and that never counts. As soon as you stop making mistakes, the rest of us will too. No big deal.

The Sailors mostly made a botch of things, aside from our lone, lorn novice LD creetur’ who managed to break into a Cap Bad case that had him reeling. Sigh. A K on the aff, no less, whatever that is. Or at least that was what was reported to me. Any wonder why I’ve been pushing people to PF? As for our actual PFers, I think they were a little blindsided by all that lay judging, as in, practically everybody is a first-timer. Which makes this a good learning experience, since it’s not unreasonable to expect that while at college tournaments one might get experienced judges, at homier events one might get lots of local volunteers helping out. You’ve got to learn to pick ‘em all up, not just one or that other. We’ll work on that.

It snowed while we were there, of course, but when it comes to Lexington, that’s like saying that each hour was made up of sixty minutes. It didn’t amount to much, though, and we got in and out without a hitch. I have to admit that I don’t miss the RR. Getting back late Saturday meant that Sunday I was home for the DisAd14 planning session (which made some major changes in things, which I’ll report on eventually), and that I did catch up on a little sleep both of the days off. Just in time for the deep freeze we’re in now. No meeting last night because of the storm, which fortunately didn’t add up to much in our neck of the woods, so I’ve postponed to tomorrow, just to keep my hand in. At least it looks decent, if cold, for the Gem of Harlem this weekend.

Emory is also this weekend. The question everyone is asking is, where will O’C’s flight go wrong this time?




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