Wednesday, February 19, 2014

In which we finish up reporting on the Quakers

UPenn has a really nice campus feel to it, but honestly, we didn’t get to explore as much as I would have liked. At least not in the daylight. We were staying at the tournament hotel, which is right there by the campus, with not one but two Starbucks between it and the central tournament hub a couple of blocks away. For that matter, there’s also a Starbucks in the building where tab is. No one has ever complained at the Quakers about not getting enough coffee. The tournament hub building also has a fine crepe restaurant open early in the morning, not to mention a full-blooded food court later in the day, including a great ice cream shop. If the weather outside is frightful, at least one is warm and cozy and well-seen-to inside.

The prelims of any tournament are about the same. If you’re running double flights, things go off at roughly the same time, and you’ve got a bit of a break before the next round. Elims, on the other hand, are one damned thing after the other as you move the rooms closer to the hub and eliminate judges no longer obligated and enter results and chase judges and whatnot. So Saturday was fairly easy and Sunday was fairly non-stop. We juggled the schedule a bit, primarily because, first, we were able to single-flight some of the PF rounds and, second, because the PF rounds, as at every tournament, take forever. We theorize about this a lot, because as far as the clock is concerned, the rounds are significantly shorter than LD, but inevitably take longer. It’s not just the coin flip, although that’s a part of it. Noob judges being the rule factors into it, and we suspect that there are teams out there who take advantage of the noobs to grab more time than the clock normally allows. Mostly I think it’s because, when it comes time to make a decision and write a ballot, the average new judge, while probably making a very good decision, does not have much confidence in that decision, however clear it might be. Frankly, that self-questioning is probably the sign of a good, concerned judge, but it is also a slowing-down factor. The only solution to this is to allow plenty of time for PF on the schedule, and don’t expect it all of a sudden to take wing and fly. It won’t.

As I said yesterday, though, the e-balloting for VLD worked like a charm, and I’m seriously thinking that e-VLD can work just about anywhere, provided there’s wifi available. Certainly at colleges. Of course, there is no substitute for tournament workers beating the bushes to get decisions in, either by e- or paper ballot, and no excuse for not employing enough workers to do so. Runners, in other words, make a tournament move. Lack of runners turns a tournament inert. It will ever be so.

For some reason the Penn tab room, which is a lot of people all crammed together running all the divisions at once, is absolutely the most pleasant around. I can’t figure this out, because usually I prefer a more quiet and calm tab room, where I can actually hear my music. Maybe it’s the good company? Maybe it’s also because we don’t read ballots anymore, so I don’t have to listen to any of the noise if I don’t want to. (And about my music in the tabroom? Well, as I said to the guy running Parli, “I don’t have to defend my exquisite musical taste to the likes of you!”)

Kaz and I had a perfectly nice ride home Sunday night, after thanking the gods of PF for closing out finals, and after I changed the nom-de-tournament of Montwegia from The Dump Formerly Known as Monticello to Monti-Cello, in honor of local favorite son taking the whole thing for his second TOC bid.

And now it’s on to the Blowout. And to DisAd14, where we already have most of our reservations set. We have tripped the 180-day mark. Let the excitement mount!

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