In which we mostly look back at the HMMHL

I’ve been wrapped up so much in thinking about MJP and all the ramifications of the thing that I haven’t talked much lately about the tournaments that have been taking place.

A couple of weeks ago O’C and I ran the penultimate MHL at Horace Mann in the Bronx. Actually, it’s in the private section of the Bronx. When you turn off the main drag onto the side street you are greeted by signs that say you are now on private property and watch your step you spalpeen because this is where the real money is and you’re never going to have any so get used to it. Even the streets around the school say that parking is for nabobs only. It made me wish I had brought a big bed sheet to cover my crappy CRV. Even the servants have better cars than that around there.

We had good wireless, so we did e-ballots, and that worked fine. As a rule, Policy and LD judges go electronic, while PF judges of the parental persuasion tend to stick to paper. Mostly this is because those PF judges aren’t confident of their judging yet, rather than their being too old to be able to operate a computer. Given the eternal turnaround in parental judging, this will probably remain the case for some time, if not all time, if PF manages to keep the wolves from the door. What was bothersome was not the new judges, although one school had way more than its shares of the same breaking down our door to tell us that everything we were doing was wrong and to explain to us how we could do it better in the future. What was bothersome was the policy judges who disappeared with their round 4 ballots, never to return. Three judges went totally AWOL. By me, that is unheard of. They left behind, in addition to no ballots, no email addresses or phone numbers. Obviously we’ll have to do better in the future getting data on everyone. Which unfortunately, at least off the top, contradicts an apparently new feature in tabroom that allows schools to check themselves in, which is a very useful thing at an MHL. Oh, well. We’ll sort it out. No pick-up of ballots if we don’t have your info, I guess. Not a great way to start a tournament, but what else is there? Ballots that go home with the judges? That's even worse.

The next and final MHL is next week, the Blowout. More on that as the time nears.

This last weekend was Scarsdale, which is worth an entry all its own. I will point out, though, in marginal conclusion to the MJP discussion, that the idea of ordinals went over with a resounding thud. No one wants to figure out the difference between #82 and #83 at Jake, or for that matter, #38 and #39 most other places. The only voice I hear begging for more categories in LD is CP himself. We discussed it at great length last weekend, as a matter of fact. Of course, this is a group of tabbers, but they all run LDers and are happy not to have to spend their lives preffing. I’ll go back to my summing up in a few days. I still need to present what I’m calling best practices on the NDCA site. Another thing we discussed is conflicts per se, as well as conflicts vs. strikes, another interesting subject. More on that as an email conversation continues: the VCA knows that there are no private conversations where I come from, unless we’re just sitting around randomly insulting people. And sometimes, not even then.