In which we explain why e-tournaments are here, now and forever

Facebook likes to show you photos from the past every day, asking if you want to repost them. I never do, but I almost did this morning. The photo was a shot of a whole bunch of adult forensicians relaxing at the end of the Friday of the Ridge tournament three or four years ago. CP was up front and center, back in the days when tabroom was still toddling and he might show up to hold its hand and walk it to the bathroom and try to potty train it. The Golden Age…

Tabroom now has its own account on Facebook, which I only tend to see by accident, but that’s Fb for you. It seems to provide CP with a place to explain what he’s doing, although I think a lot of people really don’t understand one important aspect of it. By far the most far-reaching benefit of the program is the ability to run e-tournaments. E-ballots speed things up enormously. Unless you have the luxury of two-hour lead times, as we do on Princeton Saturdays, you are always waiting for the last ballot to come in and then waiting for the last ballot to go out. Unless you have an army of runners posted at every door, you are at the mercy of your slowest judges. Add to this the usual scenario of judges offering critiques longer than the rounds, and you’ve got trouble, right here in debate city. E-ballots eliminate all of that. My experience launching new systems has always led me to caution as far as users are concerned, but this year’s Tiggers demonstrated to me that the users are ready for complicated situations. I mean, any tournament can handle 30 rooms on one floor, but 100 rooms in 10 buildings? Tabroom, and its users, and for that matter its administrative staff (i.e., the tab room people), are now up to it. We have now instructed everyone on the meaning of the start button, and get pretty good compliance. We’re learning about high-level blasting. We’re getting good at it. And the end result is that each round—each round!—takes about a half hour less time to run, start to finish. Multiply that by the number of rounds, and, in the immortal words of some hifalutin Greek, QED.

Still, on that Fb page, someone complains about the problems that have occurred with tabroom, all of which, aside from minor bugs which one can work around, have resulted from issues of access. A couple of times this year, the servers have gone kablooey. And here’s the thing: if you want e-tournaments, you sort of have to accept the fact that they require an e-environment. You can’t put it on your machine locally and have e-ballots, because even if that made sense, you would still be subject to the limits of your local computers accessibility, its drive failure potential, et cetera, just like with the servers off in cloudland that we use now. By the same token, you can’t have e-ballots without great connectivity. Princeton had amazing wireless everywhere, no doubt including the ladies’ room everyone got locked in. Some of the high schools we work? Not so good, but they’ll get there eventually. The point is, tournaments will become electronic, period, end of story. We are on our way there. We need to embrace it and accept the limitations along the way.

CP often accused me of hiding a luddite in the back of my head, but that is not the case. I’ve worked too many systems over the years not to know two things: change is the one thing users hate, and systems that change the user’s life for the better are the only ones that make that change acceptable. We are at the point in technology where that betterment of the user’s life (no trekking back and forth to pick up ballots, accessible public postings vs. printed schematics, personal notifications, etc.) is manifest, meaning that now is the time to change things over. I’ll be doing it again at Columbia and Penn. I figure PF and LD both, mandated in the latter and preferred in the former (that is, we will keep paper ballots for the most befuddled of the PF judges, a category that seems to be a constant although applied to different people at every tournament).

Yes, you can use other systems if you like. Hell, you can probably continue to use TRPC, if you’re so inclined. But tournaments are businesses, and everyone attending is your customer (or, even better, your guest). As all those customers/guests become acquainted with and used to the benefits of e-tournaments, if you’re offering a luddite tournament, they will just not be that happy. Neither will you, in the long run.

That’s the way change works.