In which we are no longer obligated in PF

[Cross-posting to the Toolkit Fb page]

We tried partial obligations at Princeton for PF. With 7 rounds, the steps were 3/2/2/3/2/2. Or put another way, one team = 3 rounds, two teams = 5 rounds, etc.

It wasn’t worth the bother.

First of all, as a general rule, there are more PF judges than one can shake a stick at for most (if not all) tournaments. It’s the nature of the beast, where even in your worst-case scenario, you have a lot of parents. Additionally, at least at universities, you have a lot of student judges, because any Parli person will make a suitable PF adjudicator. So when all is said and done, if you’re paying attention and distributing your judges fairly (something that tabroom didn’t do, once upon a time, but which it seems fine at now), no one is really being worked to death. Add to this that since there are no prefs, it’s not like the highly preferred judges are being run ragged, because there are no highly preferred judges. All PF judges are created equal, until one of them comes into tab unable to speak English and starts asking you so many dumb questions in Khwarezmian that you immediately find the “inactive” button for the sake of all that is good and moral.

On top of that, people just didn’t understand it. I mean, it’s not that hard, and they got the gist after a while, but I spent a lot of time firing up the old gmail in the run-up to the tournament explaining what was what, plus I had to go in often and poke around the wrong numbers people had entered. There needs to be some serious warrant to go through all that trouble. 

So, you ask, what would have been the gain? Well, when we originally decided to do it, it was mostly for the sake of normalizing the back end. If you did it for LD, why not for PF. Plus, since there were strikes, it seemed better to know that you were striking someone with 7 rounds rather than someone with 2. But again, given the even distribution of rounds, nobody really has 7. So it’s more the appearance of making choices rather than true meaningful choices.

So we won’t try it at other universities. As I say, it wasn’t worth the bother. We’ll keep it for LD, of course, but that’s a different animal altogether.