In which we praise, damned faintly, the tabroom software

A tournament ends, a tournament begins.

Tabroom is working pretty well now, with quirks, but at least they’re known quirks. Phantom judges are the biggest one (a quirk compounded by the lack of the ability to print a list showing judging time availability). Most of the rest tend to be one-offs that one learns to solve by recalling the solutions to previous one-offs: unique problems but with similar solutions. This is no different from TRPC. You learn to solve problems rather than to expect no problems. This is complicated software that one has obtained for free. The entire Microsoft support system, in other words, is not there at your beck and call. Still, the benefits of tabroom over TRPC are indisputable. If nothing else, it does a hell of a better job with MJP assignments, giving us at least a 15 minute saving per round. That’s a big deal when you’re trying to stick to a schedule. Last Sunday, when we were running back-to-back, we sent off the last round about 45 minutes off the schedule; divide this up across 5 elims, and that’s about 10 minutes behind each. This was pretty good, and honestly, it was only the first double-flighted round that slowed us down. Or more to the point, the number of people who expected the Number 1 train to get them there on time were serious miscalculating the abilities of mass transit. I probably should have allowed more time on the schedule in the first place, just because the first round of the day, especially a break round with judges going to different rooms, is always problematic.

Another benefit of tabroom over TRPC is that multiple people can be working on different aspects of the same round. I was manually adding in rooms while Arcelis and Kaz were assigning judges. Ballot staff in another building were entering LD ballots while we were pairing PF. If one printer died, another printer on the other side of the room could do the job. We could bring iPads to the ballot table to push ballots (and mark the missing judge as having earned a nice juicy fine or, on Sunday, a nice juicy invitation not to darken our door again). By the way, we didn’t impose any fines on Friday. To be honest, the start of the most organized tournament in the universe is, by definition, disorganized. We’d have to fine ourselves just as much as the judges for getting caught in any starting-friction confusion. We’re very generous about fines. You’ve got to be the last person to show up, and as often as not, you’ve got to have not showed up once before. If you want to make fines go away after they’re imposed, come to tab quickly (the fines show on your invoice the second they’re levied) and do your mea culpas and it will probably work out. Disappear from the tournament and tell us the next day that you were there all the time, what are you talking about? Not so likely to get you off the hook. We’re not mean, nasty, horrible people who get off on collecting missed-judge fines. We’re mean, nasty, horrible people who just want judges to show up in the first place, and who believe that the demonstration of anything less than good debate citizenship, as we call it, is cause for removal from the debate community.

Anyhow, practically the second that I was off the Gem, I was on to this weekend’s MHL. The key to getting all the good benefits of tabroom is setting it up correctly in the first place. My issue with Gem rooms was, as I said earlier, because I bollixed up the setup. Learning from my mistakes (and thus poised to make new mistakes), I set up the MHL according to Hoyle (or, more accurately, according to CP, as Matt Hoyle has nothing to do with it). Piece of cake, following my own instructions I wrote out earlier this week. Room pools set up thus are perfectly easy to manage, as long as I have my master list in hand to keep track of things. The problem with setting up an MHL is that there are 3 judge groups and 6 divisions, 2 in each judge group. It takes a while to get the hang of judge groups, and then events, much less clicking all the right buttons in each. Any wrongly clicked button is a disaster waiting to happen. In some MHLs (fortunately not this one) we might want same teams to hit because of field domination, which is fine if you click it for the right division and a pain in the patoot if a) you don’t or b) you click it inadvertently for a different division. And so forth and so on.

Our problem with the Horace Mann MHL is relatively limited space, but when all was said and done, not all that limited. Everybody got, if they wanted them, 5 or 6 entries just about everywhere. I’m happy about that. With all the crappy weather this season, people are hungry to debate. We’ll be able to satisfy a lot of that hunger this weekend. And best of all, it’s a one-day tournament close to home. You’ve gotta love that.