In which we parse some more of the Tournament Director's Toolkit

One of the things I did a long time ago, that I also included in the Tournament Director’s Toolkit, is a manual for tabroom.com. This was before there was any built-in help. Theoretically I could delete it now, but even though it’s a bit outdated, given that the program is regularly (albeit secretly) updated every eleven minutes or so, and the built-in help is more than adequate, I think there are some people who might appreciate having something that they can print out and keep handy. Yes, I realize that this is an old-fashioned concept—Oh, boy! A printout!—but the world I live in (i.e., the DJ, which is probably one beat behind a state-of-the-art media corporation) still includes people who don’t do everything on their device of choice. Or more to the point, it includes people whose device of choice is paper. Don’t kill me when you hear this: I’m only the messenger.

I didn’t update the manual for the NDCA presentation, and I probably never will. It served its purpose, and one moves on. It's just there for those just getting started. It can't hurt.

Another thing I did a while ago was a guide to setting up physical registration for tournaments using tabroom. I have given this to a number of people, and I’ve noted that when I have, they have religiously avoided following its advice. Everyone always seems to know better. My favorite thing that they all know better is not to use tabroom for monitoring payments and printing receipts. People find it much easier to create a whole new way of monitoring payments and printing receipts (when they do either), which inevitably leads to confusion over payments and receipts. I can appreciate folks wanting to put their own spin on the ball, but this one has to be the dumbest of the personal spins. Here, take this system that does everything one hundred percent perfectly well, and introduce a whole bunch of factors that will require copying over data and a bunch of other opportunities to almost guarantee errors. I have noticed, in my many years of computing (I bought my first Apple II in 1981) that computers have this amazing ability to do addition and subtraction. In fact, they do it better than most people. Yet most people don’t believe it. Go fig, as they say.

I do add one thing in my blurb about the registration instructions, that at least at high school tournaments, an adult should be in charge of the payments. Yes, it is lovely to invest that responsibility in your top students, but I have watched JV do it all by himself (which inspired me to do it all by myself in subsequent years), and compared it to when students—any students at any school—have done it, and the difference is amazing. No confusion. Money in, duly accounted, end of story, versus 17-year-olds all competing to enter the data wrong, twice, or not at all. Maybe it’s better advice just to have all tournaments have JV handle their payments. Couldn't hurt.

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