Having not attended the meeting at Woodward, and only going by the reports of some of the attendees, after I wrote up yesterday’s post I was charged with misunderstanding the tenor of the discussion. Yeah, well. I stand by my assertion that most coaches want 1-2s way before anything 3-3 or worse, because that’s why they keep coming into the tab room, and it’s the way a lot of so-called MJP tournaments are run. At the same time, if MJP is working according to my best practices suggestions, mostly everything is already 1-1 and 2-2, so all the harms of MJP that I declaim are a part of not accepting it are also a part of accepting it. Which is why I think we need to look at everything we do and evaluate it with a cool eye. I do stand behind the idea that MJP makes competitive sense in the light of the way we’ve defined LD and policy, and if you’re running a competition, competitive sense has a certain… je ne sais quoi. There may be other ideas afloat, but the one I’ve merely heard about, a Gaul is divided into three parts solution (acceptable, neutral, unacceptable), is nothing more than MJP with only 3 divisions. That may not be a bad idea, but it still will have all the negatives of MJP with 6 divisions, or for that matter ordinals with no divisions. Imagine the judge pool as a pizza with pepperoni on one area, anchovies on another area, and mushrooms on another area. Any pref system is still cutting up the finite pizza into slices with preferences for certain areas. If everyone prefers pepperoni, mushroom slices are going to bring complaints to the tab room. Needless to say, I admire the simplicity of the Gallic system, as it seems easier for the preffers and certainly it would be easier to tab. But Palmer has already explained that preffing is no big deal for circuit teams no matter how it’s done, and I believe him. Anyhow, the problem with proposing any big changes in running a tournament is getting a tournament to run with those changes. Who’s going to suggest no prefs, or 3 tiers, and take it on? I was sort of thinking of ordinals for Bump, but my going over some recent tournaments that were using this system demonstrated nothing to me in the way of improving over an appropriate number of tiers because the matches were more often than not 20 to 30 spots apart. If that’s mutual, I’m a monkey’s father’s brother.
As the VCA knows, I recommend that we look at the pools of judges and find something useful for the folks who are lower preffed. That at least solves the immediate frustration of going to a tournament and doing nothing for a couple of days. At a more core level, I recommend that people get out of LD and into PF, where there’s random judging and a tendency to argue the resolutions, but that’s another thing altogether. We’re assembling a list of issues facing the community as an aid to organizing our thoughts for NDCA, and a lot of the problems—but not all—hinge on the acceptability of not so much that anything goes in a debate round, but that anything goes up to and including doing nothing even remotely resembling a debate round. Tabula rasa has a lot to answer for. As I always maintain, the constant need to win the ballots from a floating pool of parent judges who have brains in their heads but little interest in the orthodoxies or styles of rhetoric aside from the intuitive is what will keep PF popular for the long term. If the event ever does get taken over by college judges and tricky argumentation and off-case analysis and prima facie arguments that take out the resolutions, it will as far as I’m concerned become another fatality of our worst tendencies. Anyhow, the proverbial train has already left the station with policy and LD, and the problem there is to at least keep things civil.
Interesting times.
We’re in the throes of the final setups for the State finals at Bronx Sci this weekend. We’ve got good diverse fields in just about every event, and it looks a lot bigger than previous tournaments, a very good thing. In fact, there’s only one division that we need to sort out somehow because of the dominance of one school. The rest will run fine. There’s also a bunch of middle school divisions, where we’re bringing in some new folks to work tabroom.com. This should all be fun, and I gather it’s my last time behind the computer this season unless I get pulled in to help Kaz at NDCA. I wouldn’t mind that, but I also wouldn’t mind a serious program of PF judging either, which is what I’m there to do. And working a panel on the night before the rounds (hence putting together that list of issues). I just hope it’s warm. Hell, I’d let everyone have 1-2 pairings if I could put away my winter coat.
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