Forensics: From the comments, more on MJP

This is from the comments to the last MJP post:

What about the real world aspect of debate? In life we don't get to choose our interviewer when looking for a job. We can't pick the favorable admission committee to get into the college of our choice. Why do it in debate? Also I think it's worth noting that speech does not get to pick judges either - and there are plenty of different styles across the ie world.

I like the idea of a hybrid- let every judge identify themselves as new traditional or circuit. Then give everyone an appropriate number of strikes. I think you would have quite a different activity. A much better one I think.....

The real world aspects of debate? In the real world, I very much do choose what jobs to interview for, and decide what colleges to apply for. If I have chosen wisely, one would imagine that I understand very well what the interviewers are looking for, I understand the nature of the place I'm interviewing to get into, and I am the sort of person they would look on favorably. I choose a job possibility because I like what they're doing; I choose a college because I know what kind of college it is and what that college is like. I could be wrong, of course, but I will prepare accordingly, with the belief that I know what the interviewer is looking for because I know what the interview is for in the first place. The better I know what the institution is for which I am interviewing, the better I will adapt. And I will certainly choose to apply to institutions compatible to me and my talents.

Anyhow, MJP is not about picking a sympathetic judge, which I have to admit was originally my reaction back when I first encountered it. There are two debaters, and they have mutually ranked that judge at the same level. That level can be from 1 to 4. The point is that the choice is mutual, not that it is favorable.

But stay with me here.

The thing is, speaking of the real world, there are plenty of tournaments that don't offer MJP. Probably most of them, if the truth were known. Events with MJP tend to be of the same stripe, working the universe of TOC bids and highly competitive programs and debaters. This is not to suggest that all highly competitive debaters are on a TOC trail, but for those for whom TOC is a possibility, then yes, they are. Why else are they doing all that work, preparing themselves to beat the circuit debaters? MJP is something you see at some, not all, tournaments.

In the real world, there is no question that debaters break down broadly into circuit and traditional. At a tournament with some level of TOC bid, there is going to be a contingent of circuit debaters, and a contingent of circuit judges. And if you are a traditional debater, up against a circuit debater and a circuit judge, all things being equal, you are going to lose. (And you may not even know why, given the speed, complexity and often blippiness of some circuit agruments.) I would like to be able to say that the opposite is true, that a trad debater will beat a circuit debater in front of a trad judge, all things being equal, but I have seen a marked tendency among judges who don't really understand what is going on to pick up the circuit debater based on the appearance of that debater having been better in the round. The judge doesn't want to look dumb, in other words.

So yes, there are times when MJP will put debaters of similar style in front of a judge inclined to favor that style. But if the two debaters are of dissimilar styles, they won't have mutual judges highly ranked. So they're going to get someone way down on their list. Both their lists. They will have to adjust to a newcomer, more likely than not, or someone neither of them knows well. Advantage? Beats me.

Keep in mind this, though, if we're in the real world. MJP will not be going away any time soon. Tournaments are a business, with sellers and customers. As a Tournament Director you design the tournament you want, to appeal to the customers you want to attract. Most people running a TOC tournament feel that MJP will bring in the circuit folks, so they use it. TOC and NDCA both use MJP, and from that example other tournaments flow. And here's the rub, that I was addressing in my original note: At tournaments where there is MJP, mostly only the circuit teams rank. As a result, that tournament becomes biased to the circuit. My core argument is that if everyone ranked, we would change that bias, and until everyone ranks, people like Anonymous here, who obviously is against MJP, is handing rounds to the people who like MJP. Total commitment to MJP would, in other words, minimize the harms (if any).

As for the rest of Anonymous's comment, sure, strikes eliminate a handful of judges, but what is the appropriate number of strikes? It's certainly not all the judges of a certain persuasion. And does anonymous really want tab to assign a random judge to the round at which a team will be eliminated from competition? I understand the arguments that answer yes, but given the number of judges I see who are completely untrained and thrown into tournaments as warm bodies at best by programs who are notorious for this practice, I think those arguments fail. How about other forensics activities? Well, go run your edgy same-sex piece in front of someone wearing a wimple. Yeah, sure, you get what you get in IEs, but I'd like a show of hands from IEers who are happy with preset biases among their judges, over which the speakers get no veto power. But more importantly, I'm not aware of a schism in speech like the one at present in LD, where numerous programs (including my own) have actually stopped doing it because of resistance to the direction the activity is taking.

Anyhow, the hybrid tournament Anonymous likes is certainly out there. In our region, there's probably enough of them to mostly fill up a debater's dance card, including one, Newark, with a TOC bid. No one forces anyone to go to any particular tournament. Programs can pick and choose as they may. If tournaments that run like this get very popular, people like me who run tournaments as fund-raisers will take notice. That's back to the tournament-as-a-business model. But even if we don't change, there's something for everybody. But don't argue the real world, please. In the real world we do make choices that are favorable to our ends all the time. And in the real world, MJP is what's going to determine how a lot of LD (and Policy) tournaments are run for the foreseeable future. In the real world, if we don't want circuit styles to virtually eliminate traditional styles because it's the circuit styles that are winning not because they're better but because their practitioners are better at working the system, then trad people must learn to do likewise. I do not know what the outcome will be (and honestly, anyone who knows me knows I prefer traditional LD), but at least we'll fight the good fight.
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Forensics: Menick v. Wexler on MJP (again)

As always, MJP’s Greatest Nonfan, Pajamas Wexler, has responded to my explanation. It was in a comment, so I’ll repeat it here, first in its entirety.

The explanation is fine or as fine as I can make out of this hour of the day. A few thoughts anyway.

1) I think specialization is bad in general. In theory, I don't want to have 'my' debaters being advantaged anymore than be disadvantaged by having only one debater participate in MJP. I recognize given my preferences MJP may be 2-2 or 3-3 but still. I also think that given the inevitable need to sometimes have a 1-2 or 2-3 in later rounds, someone will sometimes have an advantage anyway ( I have not run a MJP tournament myself, so I don't know how common that is admittedly, but it seems it w/b a challenge as the tournament drags on.

2) more importantly I believe that more national circuitry programs - larger ones anyway-will almost always have an advantage in ranking judges. Normally I don't think much of this as an argument but I do think it is valid here. These programs will 1) know more about the judges in the pool as they actually function, not just what is in the written paradigms, 2) be able to have someone read the paradigms and, most importantly, think through strategy for the MJP. It isn't just, or even mostly a paradigm question after all, but ' do I want judge X hearing me in a bump round against those people who I we might be debating in bump rounds'.

It is similar to expecting people to intelligently be able to make decisions about their retirement or health accounts. Sure, some can, but at a certain point there is too much information to intelligently process, especially during the few days rankings are open. For any number of reasons, larger programs will make intelligent rankings, Smaller ones will need to make choices between preparing the topic, ranking the judges, or doing school work, be it studying for tests or writing then.

That is why some opt out, it just isn't a priority given limited resources. Sure, we can say that is their own decision. That is the position some take regarding people who don't choose optimal retirement programs or health ones. I simply don't agree we should rely on the ideology of choice in either case.

I offer, first, an overview. Much of what PJ is saying is an argument against MJP per se. He would prefer that it not be used at tournaments. This is not what I am arguing at the moment. What I’m saying is that, at a given tournament that does have MJP, not using it both disadvantages the nonuser and perpetuates the styles that nonusers do not like. Simply put, at a tournament where all the circuit folk rank and all the traditional folk don’t, that tournament, regardless of the makeup of the pool and the field and the percentage of people in either camp, de facto becomes circuit-oriented. One could, perhaps, use this as an argument against MJP in general, but I think it’s a stronger argument in favor of traditionals getting on board with it. Until tournaments are run with pretty much total MJP buy-in, any discussion of its effects remain theoretical. If a tournament that was 50/50 had full buy-in, what would that look like? I suggest that the answer would be favorable to multiple styles, but as I say, I’m just theorizing. I do have experience of one tournament where everyone ranked, by the way, but that was NDCA, which by definition would be mostly circuit types, or at the very least people well aware of the circuit. Therefore we can’t draw conclusions from that one. At every other tournament I’ve done, I have seen what I’ve been saying, the tendency toward favoring the circuit. Which is why I want everyone else to dive in. Let’s see what happens.

As for specifics, point one:

First, No debater is disadvantaged in MJP because their choice is mutual.

Second, assuming that debaters don’t specialize is a false assumption: all debaters favor a certain style that they develop over time, and it’s a realistic measure of a debater's style to put that style on a continuum ranging from traditional to circuit. In other words, specialization is built in to the humanity of the thing. We each specialize in our own style. The debater who doesn’t tend a certain way is nonexistent.

Third, I wonder how much of a difference there is in a 1-2 ranking, since the checks I’ve made on it demonstrate, without enough data for true statistical analysis and standing therefore merely as anecdotal data, that the bottom side of a 1-2 is every bit as likely to win as the top. More to the point, these 1-2s are very rare. At NDCA, where everyone ranked, I estimate they were 5% of the entire tournament roster of rounds, if that. When we say mutual, we mean mutual. Non-mutuals are one-offs that, as PJ suggests, occur in the later rounds if at all, and we try to push them into rounds out of contention for eliminations. Granted, for the people in those rounds, in contention or not, they’re real rounds, but one must face the fact that tournaments are designed for the sake of competition.

Point two:

First, advantage to the big schools. Well, that’s true, MJP or not, in my opinion. Or it’s not true, given my own experience with the Panivore. In any case, non-unique.

Second, nevertheless, even granting the obvious that anyone in the circuit will tend to know the circuit judges better through experience, it misses the point that at many if not most tournaments, e.g. the northeast college tournaments like Yale and Princeton, and even most of the high schools, the pool of judges has plenty of traditional judges who are not on the circuit much. That’s why my system of coaches setting definitions for the judges entered is either circuit, traditional or newcomer. These traditional judges, who are not being ranked, get leftover rounds by default. This means that schools who prefer traditional styles are not only being disadvantaged in rounds, but their judges are sitting around drinking a lot of coffee until the later rounds when we can finally find slots for them. This starts to equate traditional judges with bad judges, and I certainly don’t buy that, because I would call myself a traditional judge, and I may be good or I may be bad, but my quality is not predicated on my preference for traditional LD.

Third, as I say, it’s not too much information, because it’s three categories, circuit, traditional and newcomer. A tournament with, say, 30 or 40 judges? Not hard to sort out, considering that you inevitably do know some already. More to the point, however, CP is promising to work it so that the students themselves can do the ranking, with special accounts that can do only that. In other words, it becomes part of the students’ responsibilities, not the coaches’. If you put it that way, seriously, how many students won’t want to rank? They may not know all the judges, especially when starting out, but they’ll know themselves, and they’ll want what they want vis-à-vis style.

My bottom line is that, until we see how a fully committed system of MJP works, we can’t know its effects. Add to that the alternatives: community rankings (which only work in a small community), no rankings (which means that a judge who isn’t trained is as likely to judge a bubble round as the Coach of the Year), or tab room ranking. I was raised on the latter at invitationals and the random approach at local MHLs. We tried community and found that they were, inevitably, no different from tab rankings; at least they had more buy in than MJP. As for MJP, in my experience, debaters who have used it have inevitably reported back that at whatever tournament, big or small, where it’s been in effect, they had what they considered excellent judging. I’m not saying that the students should make decisions about how the activity should be defined, since that is the job of the teachers, but their experiences of tournaments must indeed inform the teachers doing their job.

Anyhow, I love that PJ responds, because I think his opinions are valid and need airing. Of course, I also think that he’s wrong, but since we’re both in the debate business, I’m sure neither he nor I is bothered by the belief of our individual positions being the correct ones, and the other person’s opinions being not so correct. In other words, he thinks I’m the one who is wrong. We air our thoughts in public so that everyone else can decide on an individual basis. Fun stuff.
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Forensics: MJP explained to the masses

As I said a while ago, I've pretty much decided to send a letter at tournaments with MJP explaining why it doesn't really work if everybody doesn't do it, and more to the point, since only the circuit folks do it, the traditional folks who hate circuit stuff are shooting themselves in the foot. (Feet? I mean, folks in the sentence is plural, but feet sounds wrong for some reason.)

(Feets?)

Here's a pdf of my first draft. Feel free to comment.
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Waiting to fly home

I just uploaded the results of the final round to Joy. My work here is done. Next year the event is in Nashville. I hope I'm invited to help out again; it's a fun tournament to run.

There's some explication in recent comments about cells; if you're curious, read CP's note.

One big difference between this tournament and the normal ones I run is that virtually everyone preffed. Granted there was a relative uniformity in the field, in that the majority is circuit-based, still, one does have one's preferences. I stuck to very strict assignments, and it was mutual probably for well over 90% of all the pairings. This doesn't mean it was all 1-1, because there were the occasional 3-3s, but if you're mostly getting your first or second choice of judge, that's not bad. One thing that always must be stressed is that the choice is mutual. You are not choosing the judge who will pick you up. You are choosing that judge that both you and your opponent rank identically. Big, big difference. What was amazing was that in the elims, we still had great mutuality, without a lot of hoo-ha. I mean, there was some hoo-ha, where you assign a judge here, and no one fits there, and you move that judge out of here and into there. It's a bit of a crap shoot, because you don't see in the main screen how the resulting ranking will work out. But it's do-able. And we did it. In the main, I'm quite satisfied with the tabbing. Nice work, if I do say so myself. And fun, as always, working with Kaz and Bietz, with occasional visits from Tim Mahoney and other special guest stars. I could have done with a little less "Great Moments in Star Trek Sound Effects" from O'C and the People's Champion, but I still liked hanging out with them.

More details to come. The biggest thing is that now, officially, my season is over. I will see one and all next year, starting at Yale.

I miss everybody already.

Except for some of them.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

Let’s get off this MJP kick for a while. I think I’ve made my point, right or wrong. I do not believe that MJP is the hand basket in which LD is being carried to hell. It is, at worse, neutral, and potentially it’s a tool for traditional teams to hold their place in the activity. Neither is bad.

Last weekend was the CFL Grands tournament. A few years ago we realized that putting in 3 judges in each round really wasn’t all that great if there were 20 or fewer debaters, so now we put in 2, which means that no one has to see the same people on the other side, which is good for the teams, and we can single-flight, which is good for everyone. We did double-flight one round for the purposes of lunch, though, so that everyone would get a break (except for two poor soul judges who got both flights, but didn’t look that hungry to us). In other words, not a hard gig, although we did it entirely with cards. Speaking of MJP, fans of random judging can rejoice at a tournament like this: all the judges have to have experience, and we just toss them where they fit. Which may explain why a lot of $ircuit debaters avoid CatNats. For that matter, it may explain why a lot of traditional debaters avoid CatNats. Judge adaptation is one thing. Adapting to a random panel of unknowns? Wow. Plus not all 4-1s break? On the bright side, you get to go to remote schools on the edges of random cities, bussing out at 5:30 a.m. and returning home before the next semester starts, and that’s always an attraction. Especially on a unique topic. Oh, well. Honestly, I’ve always sort of enjoyed CatNats. What can I say?

The tournament was on St. Patrick’s day, which meant that we felt we needed Irish music. I failed miserably to supply any. I have one Chieftains song on my iPod, and a CD at home (never ripped) of Celtic music that I don’t really like. It’s not the CD, it’s the whole genre. Lots of pipes and clodhopping, if you ask me. If this were a Hawaiian holiday, on the other hand, I would have been able to get us through for a couple of days. Brazilian? A couple of weeks. African? French? Spanish? Caribbean? No problem. But Irish music? That’s one of my much needed gaps. Fortunately (?) JV’s iPod was drowning in the stuff. We plugged it in at some point in the morning and it was still going strong when we took it off life support at the end of the day. How can somebody who likes that much Irish music also like Sondheim? Is a puzzlement.

My vow to quit golf remains unshaken. I suffered no adverse effects last weekend, and this week I moved all the paraphernalia that was sitting in the front of the basement to the middle of the basement, i.e., a bag of tees and this bizarre plastic hand that one uses to extend the life of one’s golf gloves. I do like the golf gloves. They should have debating gloves. Or at the very least, tabbing gloves.

And, of course, I’m up to my ears in Grinwout’s business. No doubt I’ll eventually kick that habit as well, but it is fun. It gives me incentive to keep up on stuff I want to keep up with, that I ordinarily would let slide in favor of reading a book. I read plenty of books already. When I was doing this in an early version to demonstrate to the DJ that it was viable, it turns out we got about 35M hits doing virtually nothing, no promotion, no nuthin’. That’s not bad. I don’t pay too much attention to stats (although the new version of Blogger tosses them in your face), except that I do know that, historically, I am not writing this blog for my own benefit. Well, all right, it is for my own benefit, but it is being well-read. People in debate want to know if I’m insulting them directly or indirectly, for instance. (Feel free to send me a sawbuck or two and I promise I’ll do it however you like.)

And finally, this week O'C and I tried to TVFT on a test basis, and it was a disaster. There is no volume control in the new Mac Skype. It’s not that we couldn’t find it; it’s not there. This is the dumbest thing since [insert metaphor here; I’ve written enough for one day]. We’re working on a work around. Or working around a work. Or rounding a work work. Or something.

No one understands MJP, alas

How about everyone gets three strikes, all judges publish a paradigm and no mjp. Oh wait we cant do that because that would force students to gasp!!! A-D-A-P-T

And if i have to slow down and make reasonable arguments all that money i spend on camp is wasted.

Well, I’ve already addressed paradigms. Read a few some day, preferably when you are suffering from insomnia…

But this comment falls into the realm of really not understanding debate. Does the writer really believe that there is a circuit world where debaters don’t adapt? First of all, how many debaters only argue at elite national events in front of elite national judges? Even if such a creature does exist, why would anyone assume that circuit judges are identical, in the same paragraph where it is assumed that paradigms are a good thing? At the level of argumentation about pre-emptive thises and off-case thatas, circuit judges are not all in complete agreement. If you can stay awake, read those paradigms. I don’t suggest that people stop writing paradigms if they want to, nor that debaters ignore them. Quite the contrary. I’m just saying that to get the great MJP unwashed into the fold, let’s simplify on a tournament-by-tournament basis. But the point here is that all debaters pretty much find themselves regularly in situations where they either adapt or lose, and smart debaters adapt. Circuit debaters do slow down and concentrate on resolutional rather than technical arguments. I see it all the time. In the average tournament, only a handful of the judges are really anyone’s 1s, which means you’re going to put in people who are not your style in the 1s and, of course, the 2s, and you’re going to get them. If a tournament has 70 debaters, it might have 20 judges. I mean, really, you’re going to have to adapt to someone sooner or later, MJP or no MJP, strikes or no strikes. MJP means that, especially on the bubbles, you’ll have your most preferred judges for both sides. It does not mean a circuit judge, it means agreement. If one debater is circuit and the other trad, it’s hello adaptation in front of a 2 or a 3! And when circuit debaters do a round robin, where a sizeable portion of the field is alums or coaches or even members of the school board? Well, my friend, they do A-D-A-P-T, and the good ones do it well.

There are ways of solving issues, and ways of demonizing those on the other side of the issue. Don’t fall into the trap of the demonizers. That’s what most people who don’t believe in MJP do, but by demonizing it (essentially by claiming that it is the death of LD by the promotion of homicidal judges) and ignoring it, they are doing way more to harm the activity than the people who are simply using the tool at hand. If all the nutjobs take up using iPhones, if you claim that iPhones are for nutjobs and refuse to use one, sooner or later that will be true. Understand logic before making your claims. My argument, which I’ve been making at great length, is that everyone using MJP is a better safeguard against a uniform (and highly technical, camp-driven) direction of LD than not. MJP is about 2 years old around here in LD; all the problems people are claiming about LD are way older.

I will grant that camps mostly promote highly technical, fast styles, however. Camps promote what wins; they make their money on their reputations, and their reputations on the successes of their graduates. If something else starts winning…

MJP continued

There were so many $ircuit judges that it seemed to me that in a round where the opposing coach preferred $ircuit judges that all that would happen is that my "3"s would be passed over in favor of another "1" which my opponent prefers and who is still likely to be a $ircuit judge.

First of all, as we said, let’s rename the categories under which folks register their judges. They’re either circuit style, traditional or new. That’s really all you need to know. The hair-splitters will find fault, but in general, everyone is one or another of the three, and you don’t need a Geiger counter to true them up.

Next there’s the issue of, what happens when you rank? Let’s say that you do have all the information you need to make educated decisions. Then what? There are people who attempt to game the system. There are all sorts of elaborate assumptions that these are the people who will be hit, and they’ll rank these folk real high, but that will favor them, but if I rank my 1s as 2s, blah blah blah. This is way over my head.

The first thing everyone needs to remember is the first word of the game: mutual. It is mutual judge preference. If you rank someone a 3, and your opponent has ranked that person a 1, that judge will not adjudicate. It has to be mutual. Now, granted, there are times where the best we can do is a one-off (i.e., a 1-2 or 2-3), but not for lack of trying, and for argument’s sake, it’s best to simply assume that, no matter how you rank someone in MJP, you opponent ranked the judge identically. (If only one person ranks, on the other hand, TRPC shows the rank of the one who did rank and a dash (-) for the one who didn’t; in those cases, we have no choice but to take the rankers highest pref.)

You opponent ranks all the circuit judges as 1s. You rank all the traditional judges as 1s. Contrariwise, you rank all the circuit judges as 3s and 4s, and your opponent ranks the trads as 3s and 4s. What happens? You’re going to meet in the middle with a 2-2, with the judge on the fence that you don’t hate but don’t love, that your opponent neither hates nor loves. You’ll talk paradigms in the round, but dollars to donuts this round will not transpire in a maximization of either side’s preferences. You’ll adjust. You’ll find common ground. The winner of this round is the smarter debater, not the one who picked the right judge.

Of course, that scenario only holds when trad debater hits circuit debater. What happens when trad hits trad? If you’ve both ranked accordingly, you get a mutual 1, a trad judge. If neither of you ranks, you get a random judge after all the other judges are assigned to the people who did rank. And that’s the rub. If you both don’t rank, you get the leftovers. If only one of you ranks, you that that person’s preference. If you both rank, you get an equal judge.

So, my theory is that, if everyone ranked, there would be all sorts of rounds among trad folks adjudicated by trad folks, and tournaments would look a lot different. The value of circuits learning to debate trad (and trads learning to debate circuit) would increase, not decrease. Since as a rule only the circuits tend to rank, of course things go to the circuit style. Get the trads to wake up and smell the obvious, and it will be a different ball game.

Joey goes maverick

From the comments:

Lets say that in september of next year, a kid joins the debate team. Lets call this mythical kid, Joey.

He a smart hard working kid, who is lets say a junior. His coach, is a brand new teacher who has just been assigned to coach the debate team, and is the sole coach. The kid, being new, did not go to an institute, and never will because his parents do not have the money. He certainly cant get a private coach. But otherwise, we have a talented kid. Joey is a well rounded kid who likes debate, but also is involved in other activties, say he plays on the baseball team.

In 1995, that kid could have gone as far as his talent and work ethic would have taken him. Yes, there would have been a learning curve but once he gained some experience, his sucess probably would have been dictated by his abilities. The lack of a summer institte, asst. coaches, and the fact that he does another activity outside of debate, would not necessarily preclude him from local or national success.

There is a Joey at every high school in this country.

Would someone under those fairly common circumstances succeed in the LD of today?

Define success.

One of the things that I’m not taking into consideration is the world of LD outside of the northeast and the $ircuit. I can’t speak to what happens in California or Nebraska or Iowa or Texas. For all I know, there may be a broad base of LDers debating like it’s 1995, and they all get together at NatNats to duke it out. (Although in recent memory, the debaters in late rounds at NatNats were mostly $ircuit folks, although they modified their styles for the more general judging pool.) If that’s true, little Joey is all set, unless he moves to the northeast or wants to win TOC.

In the northeast, though, there are few schools that don’t know about, and in LD, to some extent aim for, TOC (although there are some that, in fact, specifically bar it). At the point where, at any tournament, a sizeable number of the debaters are trained at institutes and in their competitive experience often come up against others of that ilk, and where the judges are preferring that style/content and those kids are winning, it is natural that this will be the content/style emulated and that it will eventually dominate. That always happens, no matter what, exactly, the content du jour might be.

And here’s where a lot (and I mean a LOT) of people make a big mistake. If a tournament were not to reward a specific behavior, that behavior would not rule. Look at NatNats. It is not TOC, and even the TOC debaters who attend do not debate as they would at TOC. At invitationals, especially at the colleges, where the field and pool are large, and we offer MJP, the coaches who do not wish to see $ircuit style debate dominate have an opportunity to do something about it. If they put in their preferences, then the judges who are not 19 years old might pick up some bubble rounds and make a difference. When only the $ircuit style is preffed, the $ircuit style will dominate. Simple math. As a general rule, the coaches who are most vocal about the demise of LD when it comes to cocktail party blather, so to speak, are the least likely to use MJP as the tool that it is to turn their opinions into action. Only the most $ircuit influenced schools pref. It’s a fact of life. As MJP extends to more and more tournaments, small and large, the longer coaches believe mistakenly that MJP is the tool of the devil, they will dig a deeper and deeper grave for the styles and content that they themselves prefer.

Next year, where I can, I’m going to send out a long screed on this to get these schmegeggies off their non-MJPing butts and stop blaming the tool that could get them what they want for getting them what they don’t want. I, for one, have often noticed that when I don’t use a spoon to eat my soup, a lot of it ends up in my lap. Non-MJPing coaches are spilling the soup of LD on their laps, with the obvious result that $ircuit styles dominate, and I am forced to resort to ridiculous metaphors to make my point.

Oh, the humanity.

It's not over till it's not over

In all my moping about over the end of the season, I forgot about NDCA, the weekend after Easter. That will be my swan song for the year.

This coming weekend is the CFL qualifier. This is potentially a nightmare. First, there’s the wrinkle that, if there’s over 20 entries in a division, we have to use 3 judges. A few years ago we changed the rules so that 20 or fewer we could use 2 judges. The result was a major headache turned into child’s play. Assigning 2 judges per round, when the judge/team ratio is 1-1, simply requires paying attention. Assigning 3 requires mind-numbing attention to detail, lots of room-switching, watching a team you've seen but on the other side, you name it, because the field is so small (but not small enough to lose a judge). We’ll know tomorrow, when registration closes. There will either be a happy tabroom or a glum tabroom. Time will tell.

I’ve gotten back into the swing of the link blog, which I trust you are visiting religiously (defined as faithfully, not as on your knees, you filthy heathen). I realize that, for instance, Facebookers can see all the links they want if they never leave home, but that’s merely one source, and, depending on the number of people you have befriended, a fairly hit-and-miss one at that. I go for long stretches barely visiting the site, although lately I’ve been religiously (i.e, faithfully) updating my status to point over to the link blog. I need to get some traction there. The last time I did this, prior to going official for the DJ, the number of hits was quite remarkable. I like to think that the enterprise is entertaining on its own. But I guess you’ll be the judge of that (you filthy heathen). The point is, please go try it out. There's some fine stuff there.

Ah, the joys of sleeping in on Monday

Penn was pretty straightforward. With all the registrations being done on tabroom, there wasn’t any point in going to the school Friday, so after our bus navigated the shoals of Philadelphian traffic, I just socialized with my team and, for a little while, with CP. The tournament hotel, the Crowne Plaza, once again did a fine job of settling us in and, what I like more than anything, supplying us with tokens for the trolley. One expects a trolley to be very Clang Clang Clang and Judy Garlandish, but this one is underground, sort of like Dostoevsky visits the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, if you get my drift. Climbing down a set of steep steps with my printer bag on Saturday was nothing compared to climbing up a double set of steep steps at the school stop. Normally I grab the first debatish person I can find to help me schlep, but I was so early I was on my own, wondering what the odds were that I would have a heart attack, and why I was going to have to die in Philadelphia, which just seems too W. C. Fields for words. But somehow I survived, and then things went normally, or at least normal enough. I can only run a tournament as fast as the ballots come in; if you’re ever sitting around, wondering what’s going on in tab and cursing us for not putting out the next batch of ballots, please understand that in tab we’re cursing you for not bringing in the last batch of ballots. And the answer to the question, When is the next round coming out, is, Right after the last one comes in. Although I’m pretty good at guessing results, most debaters prefer to go by their real record rather than the one I’ve imagined for them. We are not getting hot stone massages in the sauna lodge when we should be pairing rounds; we save that for after all the ballots are picked up.

I ran the LDs; Kaz and La Coin ran PF and Policy. I wasn’t particularly strapped for judges until Sunday, although I soldiered through, while PF, because it single-flighted rounds 5 and 6, was beating the bushes big time. Policy, on the other hand, just didn’t have a lot of leftovers, but somehow they managed to find someone every time. As for numbers, with PF over a hundred, you’re talking some serious juju. LD was smaller, but not tiny. It gets a little bigger every year. We’re obviously not getting people chasing LD TOC bids, since there aren’t any, but the competition isn’t a pushover either. I think that as more people get tired of paying Harvard prices (especially considering that the lower prices at Penn go to PYDF rather than Penn’s own team’s coffers), this will change a little bit, but as long as Harvard has an octas bid and Penn has none, the dreamers among us will continue to believe that they really can win an enormous national tournament even though in the past the best they’ve done at a national tournament of any sort is finding a quarter under their seat in the auditorium while others have taken all the tin. You can see it in the eyes. Everyone at a tournament thinks, in some corner of their mind, that they could win it. Look at those 6 Speecho-American finalists on the stage at any award ceremony. They all think that someone else probably won it, but they hold on to that hope that, well, it might be them. Every time a name is announced that isn’t theirs sets that little forensic heart a’ beating…

I think the biggest problem with Harvard is sheer size. It’s too big to accommodate everyone comfortably, so it accommodates them uncomfortably. There’s long breaks between rounds, and it takes three days rather than two. One of the things we’ve insisted on at the tournaments I’ve been working is that we set limits and stick to them. At the point where you run out of rooms to move a tournament along, you’re done. I always used to enjoy the two hours up, two hours down business that we did this year at Princeton (where I first encountered it years ago) and Columbia. Just enough time to get food and relax a bit, keeping things easy on the judges, but at the same time, just enough time to dump one event and make room for the next, so you can run precisely on time. Penn is nearing its size limits, but there are things that can be done, for instance, staggering the speech rounds over a longer day: they had it easy. If push came to shove, I’d eliminate the novice LD division if Varsity expanded or if PF grows. I’m dubious about maintaining policy, but it needs to have a chance to take root. Anyhow, we talked a lot about next year, and how things would improve. I’m looking forward to it. It’s a fun tournament that I like quite a bit, and when it’s over, I’m home Sunday night and I get to sleep in and relax on Monday. Perfect way to spend a holiday weekend.

Jules, on the other hand, is fomenting revolution somewhere in Overthereistan

For all practical purposes, Scarsdale is a single-flighted LD tournament. We start with one division, then go on to the next; the wrinkle is that some of the varsity is in the novice judging pool. Numbers being what they were, we were able to limit rounds judged to two per person, which isn't bad. When the tournament first started, it was more like every round, and we had to carry the varsity debaters out on gurneys.

Those were the good old days.

In the tab room, this means that while we're regularly engaged, there's not a lot of pressure, because we have all of this round to get out the next round. Meanwhile, PF runs in a traditional double-flight mode. Kaz and I were doing LD; O'C and CP were doing PF. In other words, the tab room was quite entertaining, with just about all of the usual suspects. For the record, O'C, when he now wanders off, says he's going to X, which according to him, means that he's not wandering off. Right. Meanwhile, due to the Penal Colony aspects of the school, you can't use your phone and there's no access to Sporcle, but CP managed to bypass that and we found the best game ever, identifying movies by letters of the alphabet. There were only the first 5 or so, though. Sporcle! Get going! We're depending on you.

I'm not sure what possessed my to compile the dictionary, but I'm polishing it up now, adding a few missing pieces and improving what needs improving. I hope to publish a permanent version, in alphabetical order, by the end of the week. This is what happens when I have extra time on my hands. Speaking of which, some random Bronxwegian came up to me to tell me he likes Nostrum; why is he telling me this? The Nostrumite was actually at the tournament. Why not tell him? Jeesh.

Who’s in Charge Here? Or, what does E.G.G. stand for?

I’ve been working with AB lately in tab, trying to break in a little new blood. One of the big lessons is that the tab room is not in charge of anything. I point this out to the boringly named commenter John (thanks to whom I now know what H.A.M. means). (I will also point out one of my favorite Goldwynisms: When the legendary Hollywood producer was told about a new potential film, and what the name of the main character would be, he replied, “John? What kind of name is John? Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named John.”) He asked why there’s no MJP at Scarsdale. You’re asking the wrong person. I don’t run Scarsdale, or Newark, or most tournaments I tab. Instead, I tab those tournaments. There is a big difference.

Tournaments definitely have personalities, which is reflected in a lot of my commentary here. They are not all the same. Some of them are dreadful, but most of them are perfectly acceptable. Some are exceptional. But whatever makes them what they are all stems from the tournament directors; tab is just one piece of the machine that the tournament directors manage. When there are problems, it is the TD who solves them, not tab. One of the things I’ve been demonstrating to AB is what problems are not in our domain. If people don’t want to judge certain rounds, or in certain divisions, or whatever, this is not our business. Of course, we can technically make the switch, but the decision to make the switch comes from the TD, not us. When a round is in dispute, we can look at the ballots (which is the only guide we use in tab for determining a decision), but if there is something not on those ballots it is the TD who must listen to the arguments from both sides and make a determination. When someone wants to complain about a judge, they need to do so to the TD, not to us. (By the way, that person you’re complaining about has usually been complained about so many times before that you should just take a number: your real complaint in these cases should be to the coaches who drag inept people to tournaments to judge week after week, which is the only thing the TD can do, and it never really takes, to tell you the truth.)

The TD does everything. The TD decides what kind of food will be served (if any). The TD decides the nature and prices of the concessions. The TD decides if there’s housing, or special hotel arrangements or transportation. The TD hires (or doesn’t hire) judges. The TD sets fees. The TD decides how many rounds there are, what will determine team rankings, if judging will be preffed or random or ranked. The TD knows how to get the rooms unlocked. The TD secures tab staff. The TD staffs the ballot table and trains the runners. Et cetera, et cetera.

What makes a tournament good, bad or indifferent? How well the TD does all of these things. What gets prioritized? How organized are things? How friendly are things? I make a big issue of that one. I remember early in my career going to a tournament where I felt that the tournament director literally hated everyone in the place. I did not enjoy that tournament, and subsequently acted accordingly. I do not want to feel like an unwelcome guest.

To be honest, I feel that all the high school tournaments I go to get high marks on all of these counts. The TDs work to the best of their abilities to run a good show. Colleges, on the other hand, can be hit or miss, which is something that CP helped improved by taking on TD responsibilities himself at so many of them. As he’s slowed down, some of the rest of the traveling tabroom have filled in, so things have overall held firm (I’m especially pleased with how Columbia was revived this year).

So you can fault me as TD at Bump, the MHLs (unless O’C is in the vicinity, in which case, it’s his fault) or the couple of college tournaments I’ve stepped up to. As for the rest, talk to the TD. Tab is just a cog in the machine. We’re just following orders. As the saying goes, we’re not being paid to think.

How MJP Really Works

JA was pretty adamant last weekend against MJP and its effects on LD, as is Pajamas W. They are far from alone in this.

They are also wrong.

First of all, in theory, all MJP does is allow people to rank the judges. Then tab assigns judges based on those rankings. That is, we try to give you 1-1s, or else 2-2s or whatever, the best number we can, always equal. We are not giving you the judges you want as a debater; we are giving the judges you and your opponent both prefer at the same level of preference. Granted, this means a lot of 1-1s, but it also means 2-2s and 3-3s and even, occasionally, 4-4s. The point is mutuality, not guaranteed bests.

Doing this, the argument goes, somehow prefs certain judges who are detrimental to the practice of LD. Well, no. If people all want certain judges over other judges, that’s going to happen anyhow, MJP or no MJP, because tournaments wanting to succeed financially will hire those judges, and teams who only have experience of those judges will bring those judges as their adjudicators, and MJP has nothing to do with it. Beyond that, I really don’t see the link between MJP and the Decline and Fall of LD. I have rants about various in-round practices going back over a decade, and rants about college judges pushing sketchy agendas, way before MJP was even a twinkle in the tabroomian eye. The claim that MJP pushes those practices and agendas has to stand against the alternatives, which are either community ranking, tab personnel ranking, or no ranking. Let’s look at each one individually.

No ranking at all means that a tournament is judged at random by whoever is in the field. I know some people like this idea, but they are not at the tournaments I am at, where every week some new, totally untrained judge (actually, usually more than just one) wreaks all sorts of havoc. By untrained I don’t mean they haven’t sat in one of our training sessions; I mean they have no idea that their kids were even on the debate team until they got dragged into this this morning, they have no idea what will happen in the rounds, and they spend more time in tab trying to get out of their obligation than they do actually judging. If these judges didn’t exist (and believe me, they do, and they are in endless supply), and if all the judges were at least trained to some extent, the idea of dice-toss assignments would be acceptable according to a certain vision of LD. But kids who work hard on their cases and their presentation deserve better than some whiny parent who literally—in the correct sense of the word literally—knows nothing about the activity.

By the way, these untrained judges ruin it for the trained judges. I see it week after week. There are plenty of parent judges who are fine adjudicators, well-trained and capable. Good debaters can easily develop strategies to pick up their ballots. But no debater wants to be judged by parent judges because of the fear of those untrained ones. All parents get tarred with the same brush. It isn’t MJP that is tainting these capable parents; it’s the schools that repeatedly bring raw, worthless adjudicators (the blame for which can be either at the coach level or the student level, because there’s no reason why coachless teams like YouKnowWho can’t train their own damned parents, coach or no coach). (My favorite worthless adjudicator whine, by the way, is that somehow the tabroom is responsible for training them. Hello? The tabroom is responsible for tabbing the tournament along the lines set out by the tournament director. I’ve published all sorts of documents on how to judge; what do you want me to do? Stop tabbing and read them to you aloud, and then tuck you in with Teddy in your arms and a smile on your lips? Grow up.)

If we can’t go totally random, we can have some sort of rankings. The tabroom can rank everyone, or we can have the community rank everyone, from which rankings assignments are made of the highest ranks first on the bubbles. The thing is, tabroom rankings simply perpetrate the beliefs of the tabroom, however right or wrong they may be. I think that certain people are good judges, and that others aren’t. What gives me the right to assign on the basis of my personal beliefs? As for community rankings, they simply do the same thing on a grander scale in what is perceived as, but in fact isn’t, a more democratic fashion. I have a lot of experience with community rankings, and they inevitably worked out to give the highest rankings to the college/circuit judges. Why the mechanics of this worked out that way could be because a lot of schools didn’t vote, or maybe because familiar names always win. I’m not sure, but in any case, tabroom staff is biased and so is the community as a whole, which is democratic only insofar as voting is open to one and all, but closed in that the results are predictably parochial.

MJP theoretically removes the bias of both the tabroom and the community. The thing is, people who are against MJP often don’t rank. If you don’t rank, we put you in as a blank, and give you the highest ranked judge of the opponent. If neither of you rank, you get whoever is left over after all the preferences are adjudicated. When I say we I mean the software; there’s less hands-on in MJP than any other tabbing, at least in large fields. And that is the core of one of the best arguments in favor of MJP, that it is automatic and non-biased by outside influences.

Here’s the thing. People who don’t “like” MJP don’t rank. People who don’t rank get the judges of the people who do rank. The people who do rank tend to prefer college/circuit judges. Therefore, at most tournaments the college/circuit judges direct the results.

This can be changed. If everyone ranked, then every judge in the pool would be up against every other judge in every round, and tabbing really would find the judge that both debaters mutually prefer. There would be a lot fewer nix-1s and a lot more 3-3s. As it stands now, if two non-ranking schools hit, they get the leftovers, whereas what they might really want is a long-time coach or some really experienced parent. If you want those sort of judges to adjudicate your rounds, fine. Vote for them with your feet, so to speak. Sneering at MJP as the tool of the devil, on the other hand, simply relegates it to the position of the tool of your opponents. It is a useful control over practices you don’t like, whatever those practices may be.

So that’s the real issue here. At any given tournament, maybe a third to a half at most of the teams pref. MJP is better than all the alternatives in terms of the least biased and the most likely to favor competency. There is no inherency in MJP toward the Evils of Modern LD. But as long as most schools, through misguided philosophies, don’t pref, those who do will indeed call the shots, and move LD in whatever direction they prefer, with the judges they prefer. If you want to see LD go some other way, actively preffing judges that agree with you may be the most important thing you can do. (That, and getting your friends who agree with you who aren’t members of the VCA to do likewise.)

A Note to the Connoisseurs of Exquisite Differentiation

Ah, you aesthete, you. Your palate is so refined, I can only envy you. Whereas the average schlub on the street is lucky to know the difference between a link turn and a link sausage, you on the other hand can differentiate between a 26.2 and a 26.3 on the speaker scale using tenths of a point.

Do you extend your pinky when you are writing your ballot?

Okay, I may be wrong about this, but members of the VCA, knowing my track record of (admitted) wrongness, realize that I’m only saying that in case the Mayans were right and 2012 is the end of the world and I’m going to want to sing “Kumbaya” with people on the other side of the question as the earth falls into the sea and I won’t want this hanging over our heads in those last few moments. The thing is, I’ve seen too many studies that absolutely disprove that people could possibly rank speeches on a scale of 1 to 100. Or 1 to 50. 1 to 20 is out of reach. 1 to 10? Good luck.

Here’s the deal. The average person, given choices, is able to discriminate about 7 of them. There’s variation of course, but not much. If you give people too many choices, they balk. In marketing, either they don’t buy your product, or they default to the simplest option. Any wonder why vanilla is the top selling flavor at Baskin Robbins? Even been in a restaurant and someone looks at the menu and says, “There’s too many choices”? Ever felt that way yourself? Marketers use choice to set up a paradigm that their product offerings are diverse and full and rich, not because they expect to sell all those products. It’s the cost of doing business. But you don’t want to be overwhelming, so you provide defaults. Whole Foods has 17 kinds of tomatillos; most people just buy the basic cherry tomatoes.

Even if you don’t buy that (a phrase that, when uttered in debate, makes me want to throw a desk at the speaker), in LD we have a solid, time-honored history of inability to create a decent speaker point scale. Because we have no objective criteria on which to make the measurement, it becomes entirely subjective. This is why I like the breakdown of win the tournament / definitely break / might break / shouldn’t break / needs work. Those are fairly definitive gestalts of a performance that can be roughly agreed to. When I’m talking to PF parent judges before a tournament, I tell them to use a grading scale like they learned in school, A, B, C, D, F. Add maybe a tiny gradation, and there’s your 7. People can handle that.

But a hundred point scale? It’s hard enough to separate a 29 from a 28, but you want to tell me you can differentiate a 28.1, a 28.2, a 28.3, a 28.4, a 28.5, a 28.6, a 28.7, a 28.8 and a 29.9 as well? Not to mention 29.1, 27.9, 29.2, 27.8, etc., etc., etc.

On top of this, the norm is not to assign the same amount of points. No ties. But there can still be low point wins? My mind doesn’t boggle, it literally falls out of its resting spot and onto the floor, where the cat chases it around until it gets lost under the closet door.

Get real, people. You may like to stick out your pinky and explain in excruciating detail why you can tell the difference between a male and a female fly at 200 yards in the dark while blindfolded (you, not the fly), but I know better. Tenths of a point? You can barely handle showing up within half an hour of the posted round start time, and as often as not you have so little idea what happened in the round that you have to read the cases. And that, indeed, is a 28.8?

Jeesh.

Lexwegian Adventure

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, good old TRPC throws you screwball.

This last weekend was Bigle X. Normally I do novice LD, but to tell you the truth, that’s sort of a snoozer, and I managed to get myself seconded to PF instead. I was working with Sarah Donnelly, who is not terribly familiar with TRPC. In the beginning she read and I input, and then we switched things around so that she’d get a feel for things, especially setting up break rounds.

Life was going swimmingly until round 5. We entered the results, printed up the check sheet and paired round 6, and prepared to goof off during the subsequent double flight. But then our checker handed us a mistake. And then another. And another. For all practical purposes, while the winners and losers were all correct, and the points for each side we totaled correctly, each individual’s points had been switched. For every single team. (Fortunately, since the totals and wins were accurate, the 6th round pairing was unaffected.)

Well, sez I, I guess that can happen, although I’ve never seen it before. We had printed the “other” PF ballots, not the Harvard ballot, so the names were often switched, so maybe that was it. (And I'm pretty sure I was the culprit here, not my poor apprentice.) We entered them again, carefully, correctly. We printed up another check sheet. It was no different from the first sheet. Then we just started entering and checking ourselves. If you entered results, no matter what, they didn't take.

Could the choice of ballots have affected the results? I can’t imagine how, because ballots are an output function that shouldn’t have bearing on input, but maybe that’s it. At this point CP joined the fray and we looked for the data file with round 5 results, and lo and behold, it didn’t exist. Oh joy. Oh rapture. The good news was, we could go into the contestant cards—each and every one of them—and make the corrections, and this time, they took.

I would suggest that Sarah got her baptism by fire. So did I, for that matter. Needless to say, we doublechecked the round 6 ballots thoroughly, but these were fine, and everything went back to normal in the elims.

As I say, every now and then TRPC has a surprise for you, even in a version you’ve used many times. Tim Averill, who was chivvying up the parents in the judges' lounge for us, likes to update to new versions like an Apple fanboy chasing iPhones, but I prefer to stick with one that works unless there’s some wonderful feature we’re missing and have to have. I don’t believe that tenths of a point is that feature, but that’s a subject for another day.

In other Lexington news, there were no exciting events worth reporting. One judge fell asleep in a round and was reported to us, but we knew this judge well and explained to the teams involved that they were no more likely to get a good decision if the judge were awake, and that they shouldn’t worry about it. Otherwise, everyone showed up, we made nice panels in elims especially in the bid round, and there wasn’t a blizzard, an ice storm or a plague of locusts. What more could you ask of a tournament?

By the way, translation: "I'll be right back" = He wanders off for at least 10 minutes

I think I’m turning into an ogre. It used to be that when people annoyed me with idiotic nonsense, I simply ignored them. Now my instinctive reaction is to engage them. This serves no purpose. People whose ignorance expresses itself in hostility are hardly going to become enlightened and gentle upon encountering the brilliance and clarity of my ripostes. In fact, it just encourages them to develop their ignorance in that forge of their hostility, while I just get progressively more hostile myself. Not good. The solution is for me to remember to ignore things that need to be ignored, and let it go at that. I can’t fix them, so why bother? Sometimes it’s hard, though.

Yes, I am working behind the scenes on a tournament, the Gem of Harlem, and people are driving me crazy. I remain amazed at how self-insufficient people can be, and how coaches who have been attending tournaments since the Garfield administration (the President, not the cat) can be so obtuse on the subject of tournament attendance. Oh well. This is the last one of the year like that. College tournaments do tend to attract way too many people, a lot of whom seem to confuse it with a cruise on the Norwegian Princess Line. No, we don’t serve herring in bed. We get them out of bed and then we serve them.

Jeesh.

Last weekend was a small local event that went swimmingly enough. The most interesting thing was putting together a 12-team PF event. After 3 rounds 2 teams from the same school were undefeated, so we byed them in round 4, the first time in a while we’ve byed a team at the top, much less two. But they had already beaten everyone in the 2-1s, or were also from the same school. A double pull-up hardly seemed fair, as it was more than likely to result in a predictable defeat. Fairer rounds were to be found elsewhere, and that’s what we did. But then came the interesting part for tab geeks. After round 4 we had the 2 undefeateds, then 2 3-1s who had already met. One of the 3-1s could have debated an undefeated, but the same school situation literally guaranteed the other 3-1 an elim slot because there was nothing for it but double pull-ups. This didn't seem right. Plus we had a bunch of 2-2s. At first blush we wanted to shut it out and declare it over and go straight to elims because it was so neat, and since every possible fifth round contest was a pull-up. At this point we had to push O’C aside as he had a horse in the race, and Kaz and I sorted it out. With a little snip here and a little tuck there, we managed to get everyone to debate a new singly pulled-up opponent, with the exception of the top 2, who remained byed, and the bottom two, who had debated before and were hence locked on the other side (which makes some sense in the flip-crazy world of PF). I mean, people did come to debate, not to sit around (except for the poor saps who were too good for the room). Interestingly enough, in the fifth round, a 2-2 did rise up to supplant one of the 3-1s, and as a result we had two natural semi rounds that worked beautifully. This is the kind of thing that makes tabbing fun. Most of the time you just click the button and it happens. Here, we shuffled the cards a dozen times. And the result was most pleasing (except, presumably, for the 3-1 team that was pushed out of the running, but that’s hardly a new story in any contest).

On this week to Bigle X with a marvelously full contingent: 1 PF team and 1 novice LDer. We’re going to need a bigger bus!

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore

Normally I am the soul of tolerance. I pride myself on my ability to fight off whatever the community tries to throw at me, like a Jedi waving my lightsaber here and there and everywhere, parrying the blasts from the warring clones or whatever is blasting at me and never batting an eye. But this last Saturday, I was O Kenobi sliced up by D Vader, and I doubt if I’ll come back stronger than ever.

No, wait a minute. It was O Kenobi who never really came back stronger than ever. He took his money and went home and counted it and aside from a couple of quick cameos, he never had to do anything else for Lucas other than cash his checks. I, on the other hand, bereft of residual checks, will indeed come back stronger than ever. You can lightsaber me into little pieces, but those little pieces will never die. So there.

The CFL event was a bloody mess, for a simple reason. Too many teams had too few people in charge. We have all sorts of rules about adults registering and the like, not only here but everywhere else, but in the crush of the event, we just want to get registration over with. And besides, we tend to believe people when they tell us their teams or judges are here. We should know better by now.

What happened was that, because the information we were given was bogus, the tournament was bogus. There were people who got byes in every round, not because they deserved them for some bizarre reason, but because they kept getting paired against yet another non-existent team. Some teams came and went. Judges seemed to think that this was a part-time gig, little realizing that when debaters wish to debate all the rounds, someone actually has to judge them. Startling, eh? By the end of the day I had reamed out every coach who had crossed me during the day. They know who they are.

But I rise from those little lightsabered pieces. I have new rules. I’m thinking to myself, why do we have everyone register electronically, then turn it off so that they have to do it manually? Why not just keep it electronic until the point where I’m going to download the data. Rather than them give me 50 changes (all of which, btw, are theoretically not acceptable, but I don’t want to screw the kids just because the coaches are disorganized), let them make 50 changes in tabroom. No wireless? Use a smartphone. It’s not a big deal. Then at 9:00, after a perfunctory check-in of the coaches at the table, I download the data and do it. That has to be better than screwing around trying to be accommodating to disorganized teams whose disorganization always inevitably penalizes the poor kids from the teams who were organized.

I’m circulating these new rules now, and will publish them here once everyone has signed off on them. If you run tournaments and you pull out your hair over last minute changes, and worse, changes after the last minute, perhaps help is on the way. Then again, perhaps not, but the $25 fine per, payable immediately or you're disinvited from the league might have some effect. It’s worked at Bump. This year I banked a paltry $120 into Grameen, down about a third from last year. People don’t like paying fines, and they don’t like it when I demand the published fine now, in person, put the money in the box. They find that, when push comes to shove, it’s better to get their information right.

I was admittedly as pissed off as I get this last weekend. I really have had enough. Get your act together, people. I’m not going to do your job for you, and I’m not going to let you get away with not doing it yourself. It’s just not that hard.

Jeesh.

Breaking wood

If you graduated from school about three hundred years ago, you still get this thing toward the end of August when you start thinking about buying new composition books and wondering what the new year will be like. I get something similar around Bump weekend, except now it’s Ridge weekend, and they’re welcome to it. I’ve been over for a month now, and there is no greater satisfaction than having this year’s tournament already in the history books.

Ridge was normal, as far as the tournament went. MJP really does work fine for smaller events. (Come to think of it, the very first time we tested it was a Ridge 2 years ago.) We did learn this time out that you have to isolate the MJP event, i.e., don’t load up two divisions of LD when one of them is MJP because TRPC will just look at you funny and wave its finger at you. Also, it pays to blank out the A+s that automatically come in when no ranking was done, to distinguish them from real A+s. Other than that, it’s becoming rote.

The Sailors went full-bore into PF with an astounding record that would make weaker teams pale, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and this was a learning experience. So, what was learned? We’ll find out tomorrow night at the meeting, but for one thing, don’t dress in your furry mules and look as if you’re one bowl of popcorn short of a Twilight home video marathon. There may be more, but that may be the most crucial.

On the coaching side, we learned never to go to that horrible place on Friday night again, because they’re so loud that the only way we could communicate was by texting. We ended up in CP’s room watching people break wood with their heads, which is about the only thing that happened that I can mention in polite company or, for that matter, impolite company. Some things you just can’t blog.

The Tiggers

Princeton has come and gone. Some thoughts.

First of all, we made a conscious decision upfront that we would feature the PF division. It had the biggest TOC bid, and at colleges these days, it’s a big draw. This was absolutely the right decision, I think. We opened 160 slots, and never really had much of a falloff. The field was well-balanced, and geographically diverse, with a lot of Florida folk adding a little sunlight to the proceedings. Dario was handed the data and sent forth, and managed to run everything on time in the expected transparent fashion, and we realized once again that Florida’s gain was our loss, but he loves it down there so what can you do? One thing about transplanted northerners: they know better than to show up in New Jersey in December in short pants. This may be how you can separate the nuts from the coconuts, so to speak.

The second big decision was, rather than trimming the fields, running the LD divisions back to back. I think this went well too. We had to move into PF rooms on Saturday night and got slightly hung up, but not for more than 10 minutes in one or two cases, so that wasn’t a problem, and the word on the street was that having a couple of hours off between rounds makes the day a joy. I remember when Pton used to do that, and I was judging, and that’s exactly how I felt. Throwing in some nice weather (albeit not enough for short pants) didn’t hurt. Even if we can get the HS back next year for PF, I think I’d still stagger the LDs. It just makes for a nice weekend.

Inside LD tab, there were a few things I would change. I thought there would be more interplay between the divisions, so I put everything on one machine, but that proved to be unnecessary, and a bit of a burden in the crunch times. Also, watching O’C balance the tournament on two computers because one is at death’s door and the other must be kept clear from the evil influence of Windows, was like watching a drunk tightrope walker crossing Niagara in a hurricane. Also also, I forgot my new little speaker system, meaning there was a noticeable lack of hula music during the weekend, although Abdul did manfully try to fill in the gap with some of his more obscure material; problem is, computer speakers just don’t do the job, even when you turn them up to 11.

MJP went well, although we discovered that you have to doublecheck that all the prefs do travel from tabroom to trpc. Most do, some don’t. Go figure. We also offered strikes in PF, as it turns out to resounding disinterest. A couple of schools took advantage, but not many. One school that I know about objected. Dario’s conclusion was that they’re okay because those who wanted them, had them, and those who didn’t have them weren’t harmed. We had thought long and hard about this before the tournament, and I’d say that the results are that the jury is still out. I’m not going to do it again for a while, although I did strongly recommend that they do it at the PF snake pit TOC. We’ll see.

Anyhow, overall Princeton has, I think, kicked itself into the top ranks of college tournaments. The students running it are committed, and they’ve got a good system that keeps them in it over the years to oversee that it’s working well. They did a great job, and rule number one of any college tournament is that the host must be totally committed. They were, and the results were clear.

The Debutante Ball

The 2011 First-Timers’ (and Some Old-Timers’) event now joins a billion other tournaments in the annals of forgotten history, except by O’C, who memorizes all the results just in case there’s a pop quiz some day. Somehow we didn’t get the policy results posted; Kaz gave me empty files, so she’s poking around her computer and should come up with something shortly. Perish the thought that the results not enter history. It’s small things like this that send the O’Cs of life over the edge.

We had not one but two schools trying to put sophomores in as judges. This has never been allowed, and it’s clear on the website, and now I’ve asked CP to help us incorporate something into tabroom.com as well. Meanwhile I’ll have to choice but to check all the judges against team rosters: quelle pain, as they say in France (although when they do, they’re probably talking about bread, which is a comment that proves that, once again, if you were smarter, I’d be funnier). I tend to take a mean view of shenanigans, as the VCA well knows. I have no compunctions about tossing people out of tournaments, and I intend to continue that practice. The good news is that the violators are always the same people, over and over again. Recidivism runs high in debate circles. Go figure.

We had the tournament at Bronx Scientology, which looks exactly the same as it did last week for Big Jake. Even the postings and announcements were still taped to the various walls. I would suggest that if the custodians expect to get trophies for cleaning up after the tournament, they might want to get on the stick.

The tournament itself was nonstop busy work. JV and Abdul did some training while Kaz and I data’d it up, then Abdul came by to help enter and JV went to California to try to break into the movies or something. O’C was shocked that I managed to pull off a 6:30 award ceremony and four rounds. Actually it was 6:35 but You Know Who was, as always, the last ballot in. (Yeah, we had Voldemort in the PF pool.) A splendid time was had by all, and then, wonder of wonders, we announced that we would roughly do it again this coming week at Regis.

The fun never ends.