In which Nf3 (or N-KB3 for you dinosaurs)

The last few days of run-up to a big tournament is all busy work. Sorting out the latecomers nicely when you really want to boot them off permanently into the chess club, discovering that Rather Large Bronx has decided to rename and/or redesign half its rooms, explaining to people that the reason such-and-such doesn’t seem to be working is not because they’re a blooming idiot but because, I don’t know, sunspots.

I did have an interesting puzzlement. We managed to get paradigms from all the PF judges. Of course, lots of these aren’t much of anything, mainly words to the effect that they’re a relatively (or completely) inexperienced parent. The thing is, this should hardly be a surprise. If you want to be judged only by college students still seeking to get more TOC bids, PF is not the activity for you. And with luck, it never will be. I’ve gone into this in the past. What keeps PF so dominant is its entry level, both for debaters and judges. It has a wider appeal to students, and it is more manageable for schools because parents can be dragooned into handling much of the heavy lifting. The whining of some teams that they can’t get tiptop experienced judging is a bad miscalculation on their part. The spread of adjudication skills in PF is probably the greatest in forensics. A strong team adjusts to their adjudicators; an adolescent team whines when its adjudicators don’t adjust to them. We had a long history of this back in the earlier days of LD. There were plenty of judges who had strong antediluvian ideas about the activity, or just didn’t exactly grasp what was going on all the time. If you knew who these people were, and played to their personalities, you had a great chance of picking up their ballot. Judge adaptation was number one of our fifteen top ten requirements for being a good debater.

Allowing strikes and publishing prefs to assist in that striking is not a bad idea. But I think some people in PF misunderstand the whole point of prefs. Yes, they’re good at sorting out some true stinkers for sorting purposes—this is true in all the divisions—but they are more important as a guide, going into a round, of how to plan your strategy. So you get a judge who says they’ve just fallen off the cabbage truck? Debate accordingly, slow and clear and big picture. You get a judge who won TOC PF eleven years in a row? Haul out the big guns. The point is, adjust. Or, to but it more clearly, ADJUST. Use the paradigms to your advantage. If you can’t do that, as I say, the chess club is always looking for new recruits.