Monday, January 27, 2014

In which we (a) remark on a new recruit and (b) provide unsolicited documentation

We have conquered the maze that is room assignments on tabroom.

The obvious idea of creating what are called event pools from a single site was as leaky as some really leaky thing; you’d pick all the rooms for PF before the tournament, but when the round was paired it would grab a couple of the LD rooms and use them instead. Then there were sites, and I started creating separate sites for each event, which works well enough, but when you inherit a tournament that already has sites, and other tab people already grabbing at the rooms for their events, it’s the proverbial recipe for disaster leading to the Wrath of Vaughan, which is like the Wrath of Menick only I’m on the wrong end of it. Then there’s the recommended CP way of doing it, creating room pools, which also works fine, unless, again, it’s a legacy tournament, not to mention a legacy tournament that I’ve added more sites to to avoid the confusion of system A above, in which case, you can create pools but the program won’t necessarily draw from them, and panicky telephone calls to CP replace handing out the un-hand-out-able ballots. (The override, just inserting a room assignment, is arduous, although we ended up doing that for break rounds.) In other words, kicking off the Gem, 10,000 maniacs all doing something different stuffed into the pre-tab room, with no rooms on the pairing, while balancing two other tournaments (Bump and Lexington make-up rounds), got us off to a shaky start, into which we sent Aracelis, our new tabber, armed with nothing more than a computer and a quick lesson on how to substitute judges against an throng of PF people, although I think the correct word for any assembly of PF people is a confusion, as in, a murder of crows, a pod of whales, a confusion of Pfffters. I think some of us were surprised when she returned from the ballot table to announce that everything had been picked up. We thought we’d never see her alive again. She got a true baptism of fire, and survived admirably. She was born to tab. And it’s too late for her to turn back now.

Anyhow, there is no real handbook/help/instruction sheet for running tabroom, which I understand because you either write the program or you write the documentation, and for a while last year I had simply expected that, A) I’d be sunsetted at the DJ, and B) I’d just write said documentation to fill the empty hours. (I’ve written quite a bit of documentation for systems at the DJ, which I’m sure comes as a surprise to CP, who wishes that anyone other than me had been the one to say, Damn the tab-pedoes, full speed ahead with tabroom.com, way back at the Vassar MHL). Unfortunately, or fortunately, this scenario hasn’t arisen, but I will write this:

Rooms

Before doing your rooms, schedule all the rounds of the tournament. You can adjust the schedule later, but you need to have rounds scheduled before you create room pools.

Working from a spreadsheet for your planning of the rooms prior to entering them in tabroom is a very good idea. You can move rooms around easily in Excel to see what you’re using and when you're using it; tabroom is for after you’ve made your decisions.

The best way to handle rooms in tabroom for the average tournament is to, first, create a single site, and second, to divide that site into room pools. This is a fairly simple process at a tournament in one building with a handful of divisions, but it can get complicated as a tournament spreads out. It is advisable that one person oversee the room assignments at huge tournaments with multiple events in multiple buildings.

The first step in tabroom is to create the site. Under Settings/Sites & Rooms, go to Edit Tournament Site and create your site, e.g. Bump or Ridge or Horace Mann. Remove any other sites from the tournament.

Populate the site: You will see the site you’ve created under Room Lists. Click on your site, and you can simply type in the rooms. (Alternately, you can upload a pre-existing list using the Upload room lists feature, but this can be frustrating if your file isn’t formatted correctly. Correct formatting is roomname,#,#,#,#,¶. Save the file as text, ASCII Western or US, and then upload.)

You now have a full list of all your rooms. Go to Paneling/Room pools. You want to create new room pools. At most tournaments, you probably want a pool for each division, let’s say one each for VLD, NLD, PF, etc. So create a pool VLD and you’ll see a list of all the rooms at the site. Click on the rooms you want in this pool, and they will be the ones in your VLD pool. Assign which rounds will use this pool with the Use for Round drop-down. Refresh the screen, and you’ll see the list of the rooms in the pool. Repeat the process for each event.

Pools are not exclusive; that is, you can have the same room in different pools (which may seem counterintuive but which makes sense when you’re moving elims or sharing in different time slots). So you need to be careful that, as you create each pool, you are not using the same rooms at the same time. This is where your planning spreadsheet will come in handy.

Once pools are set and assigned to rounds, the tabulation will automatically draw from those pools. As a tournament progresses, you can adjust the pool if you want. For instance, as you enter elims, you may want all your VLD rooms available from prelims, but as the number of needed rooms lessens, you may want to close off a floor or centralize things or only use bigger rooms or whatever. Do this before pairing each elim. Alternately, of course, you could just have a pool for each elim, if you prefer to plan that way.

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