In which we get all technical on the Tigs

There were some interesting moments in the tab room at the Tiggers.

First of all, for reasons no one seems to understand, somewhere in the middle of the tournament we were unable to double enter results the way we had been. That system, unique to tabroom, has been a real boon in getting accurate results. We were able to work around it, but of course when we reported it, we were immediately suspected of having had done something dicey to cause it. Blame the users, eh? Feh. Then later the system stopped printing. This one was way more dire, although the obvious work around of printing blank ballots downloaded from NSDA was how we kept the tournament moving. I put in a help ticket and then called the emergency number, which turns out to be NSDA HQ, where a recorded message tells you that someone will maybe return your call someday, the good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise. (They still haven’t, by the way.) Which gave me no choice but to actually leave a message on CP’s phone. Since the printing problem was apparently server-connected (meaning it was also hitting the tournament CP was attending), he was unable to blame the users for screwing it up and fixed it very quickly. In his defense, whenever anything goes wrong, including the stuff we totally screw up on our end, we nonetheless immediately blame him anyhow. Wouldn’t you?

Our best moment was eliminating the 4-2 screw in PF. We knew what needed to be done—have a small runoff during flight A of triples and have the winners debate in their bracket in flight B—so we did some brainstorming to figure out how it could be done in tabroom. It was one of those magic moments when ideas are flying in all directions and in about 5 minutes we’ve figured it out as a team, and you’re really happy to be a part of that team and that process. Then we presented it to Dario who looked at us like we were crazy, but it happened and it worked. (Nuts and bolts: we created a quadruples round of the handful of runoff teams, paired them and assigned judges and rooms, then we created the triples round, juggled the rooms and flights, assigned leftover judges clear on both sides of the runoffs to the extra rounds, hand-placed the winners of the quads, and somewhere in all of that presented the results to the teeming masses.) Whether we can do this regularly remains to be seen; we were so fast and furious that I’d really like to slow down next time and really watch what we’re doing. But if we can, it would be a real nice thing.

There was one truly unusual situation, where a DQ discovered after doubles were released in NLD forced us to call back the round; a pullup in the DQ round 6 meant that we couldn’t just sub in the other kid, which would be what would normally happen. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a round halted like that. I sort of watched that one from the sidelines as Fr. M and Kaz were on the ground with it while I was doing something else in VLD.

For semis in VLD we decided to go with strike cards. There were a couple of great judges who hadn’t been preffed, and it seemed like a fun thing to do. The only hard part was finding the button in tabroom that does it. We knew it was there, but so are 10 million other functions. But find it we did, and so it went. Ultimately the tournament was a closeout, which made me feel less guilty about leaving after semis were started.

Talk about your long weekends!