In which we debrief on Monticello

I really like the idea of getting a warm-up tournament or two under my belt before the main events start happening. Having laid off of tabroom since March, all I’d had before Monti was Byram Hills, working there with Kaz and the Paginator, where there were two divisions and nothing particularly complicated and everything worked out fine. Monti had three divisions, and had a couple of complications. I admit that it took me a while to reorient myself on the back alleys of the software.

First of all, with small divisions and few schools, we needed to maximize judge use. While people were signed up to judge this or that, I knew that a goodly number of them could also judge these and those, so I needed to set up pools or judges across the divisions. This is not hard to do, unless you’ve totally parked your brain in the auxiliary lot and you’ve hit every button known to science and decided that the software has gone south before the light bulb suddenly illuminates and you remember how to do the obvious. Admittedly I’ve never actually done this before, but that’s no excuse, especially since the process is self-evidently obvious. Oh, well. Live and learn. And, no doubt, forget it by the time I have to do it again.

We also had to manage some same-time contests. Surprisingly, tabroom paired them, albeit with warnings, so that worked out well. Then in one division, for round 5 I threw exclusions to the winds and paired all sorts of same schools, and the only problem there is remembering to turn it off for breaks, otherwise coachovers won’t happen. Then there was assigning the judging normally as long as possible, then switching to judging again on the opposite side, and then switching to threatening the lives of Montwegian grads with a railway share if they don’t get into that policy round ASAP and look like they know what they are doing.

Anyhow, it all came out fine. I was doing it alone, and no doubt would have saved a little aggro if I’d had a partner, but there were no terrible blunders, and there we were.

Of course, there was also another story from the event, which will provide us with content for the morrow.

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