In which the 2017 Bigle goes into the record books

Bigle X was last weekend. Life went on.

This is one of the few tournaments that JV and I work together on LD. Usually when we’re together, he’s doing Speech. We kept things running on time by having him roam the halls with a lean and hungry look. It did the job.

I realized two things about the 9 vs 6 tiers this weekend, both of which should have been obvious earlier. Supporters of the idea say that when assignments aren’t mutual, they are nonetheless better than when assignments are not mutual in 6 tiers. I’ve always responded, yes, I understand the math, but that by the same token 9 has fewer mutuals to begin with. It occurred to me this weekend, after pairing all those rounds, how different it actually is. Going from 6 to 9 adds 50% more tiers (6 + 3). Further, from 6 to 9 adds a 33% likelihood (1 in 9 vs 1 in 6) that you will not rank any individual judge the same way. In other words, you have a 1 in 6 chance of rating the same way, whereas in 9 tiers you have a 1 in 9 chance. (Grant me the courtesy of accepting that I understand that these figures are slightly askew, and that some judges are more highly preffed than others in any pool. I know that. But the arguments here are reasonable.) I guess what we end up with is how you want to define mutual. If you define it as identical, go with 6. If you define it as closer than it would be if it isn’t identical in 6, go with 9. The thing is, most tournaments I do use 6, and all but a handful of pairings don’t get mutuality. That is not the case with 9.

Of course, since no one sees the prefs other than tab, that may not matter so much, and my main argument against it has always been that it asks the customer to do things a different way from normal, and nobody likes that. I also realized that most people, despite the different system, might in fact remain mentally moored to the old numbers. More than once coaches came into tab wondering why they were getting 5s. The thing is, they’re used to 5s being one short of a strike, whereas in fact a 5 out of 9 is analogous to a 3 in the 6-tier system. No one ever comes into tab to complain about 3s in 6 tiers. I think this buttresses my argument. The average coach doesn’t really grasp the math, is being asked to do something out of the ordinary, and perceives of the system as working against them because suddenly all their prefs are worse. The good news is that they don’t know how often those prefs aren’t mutual.

Still, Vaughan and I worked mightily hard to, on the one hand, improve prefs wherever possible (and it is possible more often than you would think), and to manage the limited judging obligations (the VCA knows well how I feel about that) so that highly preffed but occasional judges were where they were needed for all of the elims. Rather tiresome, to tell you the truth. But at least we earned our princely tabbing salaries for the weekend.

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