In which we debrief on our CFL weekend

Last weekend we did the CFL qualifier. Which means we got to beat up tabroom on pure card ability. The reason not to use tabroom directly is a belief, perhaps wrong, that the program might have algorithms in place for handling very small divisions (14 and 12) that are not the way we want to handle it. I know that tossing cards is random; on the other hand, the software might place schools with multiple entries against other schools with multiple entries, or something like that. It’s hardly a big deal to flip cards instead.

Things went fine, for the most part. The cards that tabroom prints (buried so deep that I had to show JV a couple of times where they are) aren’t perfect: no seeding, for one thing, and it shows you points that a judge gives (we were using 2, and bracketing by ballot count) but not whether it was a win. Not a big problem (and one that, presumably, can be easily fixed in the program’s next upgrade). What was more troublesome was the disappearing assignments of hand-paired judges. I don’t do this much, because pulling judges from the list in a given pairing is a better way of handling judges, so I only vaguely remembered way late in the game advice from CP to reload the screen to make set what I’d done. The hand-pairing screen is clever, but not exactly stable. Like many debate coaches I know.

The only disaster was unpredictable. We paired the last round and assigned all the judges we could, and ran out of judges. Or more to the point, judges who could judge those teams on those sides. So I went and clicked on the ability to judge the same team on different sides; I didn’t want this on earlier because it’s a last-ditch sort of thing. What happened is that about half the pairings flipped sides (I think, the ones already fully paired with two judges). Since one wouldn’t ever look for such a thing, we ended up releasing the pairing, and pandemonium ensued. It took about three seconds to fix things, but it was one of those magical moments that make people at a debate tournament decide that the tab room is either totally insane or totally incompetent, or both, and it’s hard for us to disagree with them.

In the end, we had our 6 qualifiers. The LD teams-in-order report didn’t tally hi/lo ballot dropping correctly but the speakers in order did. Go figure. PF made more sense in not tallying either correctly, but maybe that’s because of the two speakers instead of one. In any case, I put in a string of bugs and requests during the day, but let’s face it: this is pretty unexplored territory. It will matter for Round Robins, though, where two ballots per round is the order of the day.

Since I didn’t qualify anyone for Chicago, I have only one more event coming up, the State tournament a week after this one. And I will be skying out to Utah for NDCA, camouflaged as a Bronxian. And that’s it.

But not really. As I’ll let you know soon enough.