In which we get all technical on the Tigs

There were some interesting moments in the tab room at the Tiggers.

First of all, for reasons no one seems to understand, somewhere in the middle of the tournament we were unable to double enter results the way we had been. That system, unique to tabroom, has been a real boon in getting accurate results. We were able to work around it, but of course when we reported it, we were immediately suspected of having had done something dicey to cause it. Blame the users, eh? Feh. Then later the system stopped printing. This one was way more dire, although the obvious work around of printing blank ballots downloaded from NSDA was how we kept the tournament moving. I put in a help ticket and then called the emergency number, which turns out to be NSDA HQ, where a recorded message tells you that someone will maybe return your call someday, the good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise. (They still haven’t, by the way.) Which gave me no choice but to actually leave a message on CP’s phone. Since the printing problem was apparently server-connected (meaning it was also hitting the tournament CP was attending), he was unable to blame the users for screwing it up and fixed it very quickly. In his defense, whenever anything goes wrong, including the stuff we totally screw up on our end, we nonetheless immediately blame him anyhow. Wouldn’t you?

Our best moment was eliminating the 4-2 screw in PF. We knew what needed to be done—have a small runoff during flight A of triples and have the winners debate in their bracket in flight B—so we did some brainstorming to figure out how it could be done in tabroom. It was one of those magic moments when ideas are flying in all directions and in about 5 minutes we’ve figured it out as a team, and you’re really happy to be a part of that team and that process. Then we presented it to Dario who looked at us like we were crazy, but it happened and it worked. (Nuts and bolts: we created a quadruples round of the handful of runoff teams, paired them and assigned judges and rooms, then we created the triples round, juggled the rooms and flights, assigned leftover judges clear on both sides of the runoffs to the extra rounds, hand-placed the winners of the quads, and somewhere in all of that presented the results to the teeming masses.) Whether we can do this regularly remains to be seen; we were so fast and furious that I’d really like to slow down next time and really watch what we’re doing. But if we can, it would be a real nice thing.

There was one truly unusual situation, where a DQ discovered after doubles were released in NLD forced us to call back the round; a pullup in the DQ round 6 meant that we couldn’t just sub in the other kid, which would be what would normally happen. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a round halted like that. I sort of watched that one from the sidelines as Fr. M and Kaz were on the ground with it while I was doing something else in VLD.

For semis in VLD we decided to go with strike cards. There were a couple of great judges who hadn’t been preffed, and it seemed like a fun thing to do. The only hard part was finding the button in tabroom that does it. We knew it was there, but so are 10 million other functions. But find it we did, and so it went. Ultimately the tournament was a closeout, which made me feel less guilty about leaving after semis were started.

Talk about your long weekends!

In which we debrief on the Tiggers

For those miserable human beings who complained about the schedule at the Tiggers, including the ones who had six hours of scheduled breaks on Saturday, I would like to point out that I arrived on campus about an hour before you did, and left about an hour after you did, so please explain to me a little more clearly why I shouldn’t assign you another round.

Needless to say, today I am zonked. So, probably, are a bunch of other people. Nevertheless, mostly, I think, it was one of the best Tiggers ever. If nothing else, the weather was amazing. Compared to the usual rain, sleet, snow, hail and dark of night, it was positively balmy all three days. What else do you need?

I arrived around noon on Friday. It took roughly the same amount of time to drive from Hudville as it did to find a parking space. According to Fr. M, that is deliberate on the town’s part. Princeton does not want you there. There is no way to get there, and if you do somehow manage to find yourself there, there’s no way to stay there. The university’s theoretical visitors’ parking lot was so full that Google was there taking pictures of it as the first image hit for “filled up.” The Paginator had suggested I park somewhere where I was unlikely to get a ticket, but we all know that he is very cavalier about the law in general, much less financial issues, so I ultimately ended up in the parking garage, the one that is usually as filled as that visitors’ lot and which charges you twenty bucks just to pass by without dropping in. I would suggest that next year the university find a different city in which to hold the event, a city that is unafraid to utter those magic words “ample parking.”

We got off to a good start. As I’ve said, tabroom doesn’t require a lot of elaborate business on the day of the event (although it is murder to set up before that), so you can go quickly from last sign-in to ballot printing. We arrived right on time with a pile of ballots and did judge call, which is something we only do at Princeton. But it works there. All the judges showed up, with a few exceptions, and ballots were out in ten minutes, tops. The exceptions learned very quickly that there were fines, and they were paying them or else. And we were unscrupulous about assessing those fines. You didn’t show up, you were out 25 or 50 bucks, and the contact/coach got an email immediately demanding payment. By the end of the tournament, people were showing up in droves. There were rounds where literally no ballots were pushed. Hallelujah!

Of course, there were some who just couldn’t get the message. A couple of schools’ ineptitude at knowing who was judging for them entered immediately into legend. One school had to negotiate a settlement because they were carrying fines for, literally, every round. I would like to give them some quarter as a rudderless ship, since they are between coaches, except once upon a time I was a parent volunteer coach thrust into the lion’s jaws, and if I knew nothing else, I knew who I was sending to tournaments. It was about the only thing I did know. Come to think of it, I continued to know that throughout my coaching career,  from when I took over for real until I retired. Even when my team was quite large, I had a list of them in my pocket for handy reference. In other words, being a parent is not quite an acceptable excuse for being an idiot. Sorry about that. I have been both a parent and, at times, an idiot, but there was no cause and effect there. And I was able ab ovo to do that simplest thing that you are incapable of, so I have no sympathy whatsoever.

Surprisingly (?) I was mostly nice for the event, even in the earliest moments of registration way back when, but I was sorely tested once and finally lost my temper. This was the Mysterious Affair of Schrödinger's Judge. She arrived in the tab room complaining that she should not be fined for not picking up her ballot. Why not? Because she was in the room for ballot call. But why didn’t you pick up your ballot when we called your name? Because she was not in the room. Then you weren’t there. No, I was in the room, except when I wasn’t in the room. Et cetera. I won’t go any further with the conversation because it kept repeating along those lines until I finally get het up and she complained that she didn’t like being yelled at and I told her to Just. Go. Away. Then again, since she was Schrödinger's Judge, she may not have been there in the first place. I have, to my recollection, never treated anyone so nastily. At least, not this season, anyhow.

More tomorrow.

In which we pack up our troubles in our old kit bag and go to New Jersey

Prefs opened this morning for the Tiggers.

In the past, I would open prefs on Tuesday and close them on Thursday. The reason I changed is because I would update the judge list on Tuesday an hour after prefs opened. I would update the judge list twice on Wednesday. And then I would update the list again Thursday morning. And each time I would send out a general message, and everyone’s prefs would be all screwy and need adjusting. And then on Friday morning some lone lorn creetur’ would come to me explaining how sun spots had affect their brain all week and they only got access now and could they get in and I would reopen them one more time for a few minutes so the LLC could get ‘em in quickly. To say that all of this happened every time would not be an exaggeration. In fact, often there were multiple LLCs. Quelle pain, as the Frenchies don’t exactly say. My solution to this was to open prefs the day before, when the judge flu had by now done its damnedest, and leave ‘em open the morning of the event, as it would make no difference to me one way or the other if we were using tabroom. This was not true of old TRPC, where it benefitted you to enter data early and change it along the way. Tabroom, being live online, is always up to date. There’s a big difference, to everyone’s benefit. It just takes a while to adjust.

Another adjustment is that I no longer send out a long essay explaining MJP to the teeming masses. I did get one request for info, and sent that person the old long essay, but by now, most people know what it is, and for better or worse, they get it. I can’t say that I’ve seen anyone whining about it on social media lately, but whether that indicates that they’re simply tired of whining about it or they’ve actually come to accept it as a good thing, I do not know. For that matter, I don’t whine about it anymore either, although my whining was against folks who thought that a low ranking equals a strike, and that getting a mutual 4 or 5 was a crime against humanity. Maybe it’s because we’re better now at not giving 4s and 5s to in-contention teams, or maybe it’s because the storming of the tab room has quieted down almost completely. For a while I was thinking of hiring on some muscle for protection, but I seem to have settled instead for Father M and the Paginator, the former of which has spiritual muscle and the latter of which has a deceptive glow of likeability, both of which I lack and which seem to quell the waters when they roil. (I can imagine the P muttering, What do you mean “deceptive glow,” but as I’ve gotten to know him, well, what can I say?)

So, off to New Jersey tomorrow morning. No doubt we’ll have to fight our way through the anti-Woody contingent, life on campuses being what it is today. I would comment on this sort of thing if I had something intelligent to say, but I don’t, and there you are. You probably have nothing intelligent to say either, and since neither of us is running for President, both of us don’t have to say it. If that’s not a blessed relief, I don’t know what is.

If this is Wednesday it must be insane debate resolutions, or, Nostrum was never quite this bizarre

Wait a minute. What?

I have to admit that there are times when I am really happy not to be coaching anymore, as compared to those times when I might even miss it a little bit. As often as not, those really happy times are when new topics are released. This December 1 ranked highly among those times.

First of all, in LD, we have a topic that is, for most people, an article of faith, one way or the other. You either believe people should have handguns or you don’t, and more to the point, you believe it at a core level. You believe that the founders of this country absolutely wanted you to be armed, or you believe that they wanted no such thing. An article of faith. I am probably not going to change your mind in a debate round, so arguing the resolution here, unless you know your various judges’ position on gun control, is a mug’s game. The good news, of course, is that no one around here ever argues the resolutions anymore, but starting off with a question of potential violence will mean that, for the next four months, judges will be listening to radical arguments marginally related to gun violence that will make their heads spin. I honestly can’t understand why people voted in great numbers for this topic as the TOC resolution, except that it does provide such a perfect launching pad for arguing about whatever you damn well please.

On the other hand, the PF topic totally baffles me. We are asked to evaluate a dubious double hypothesis as fact, that sanctions against Russia (quick: name three) are having an effect, and that the effect is good/bad on unspecified Russian threats to unspecified “Western” “interests.” Talk about judges’ heads spinning. I would not begin to know where to coach on this topic, beyond looking for historical precedents and, maybe, calling up Putin and asking him if he’s feeling more or less aggressively threatening to Western interests these days. Maybe he can tell us exactly which Western interests those might be. I can see our young researchers never getting past the NATO website. Into the Valley of Death ride the bazillion PFers…

At least the PF topic has the dubious distinction of edging in on only 51% of the votes. I’m curious who voted for the LD topic, especially for this month, and why. Am I missing something? Then again, maybe I’m just being hyper cynical. As I said, thanks to topics like these, I’m really happy not to be coaching anymore. Enjoy your January (or, in LD, your January, February, March and April).

In which we breathe for a minute

There is a moment in the pre-life of a tournament when it all just stops. That is the moment set in the invitation, and on tabroom, as the one where fees are set. Up to that moment, anything can happen. And then it can’t anymore. The tournament enters the WYSIWYG mode. It is what it is. A few people will come down with plague or the vapors or whatnot, but mostly everyone will be showing up, and registrations don’t matter until you hand over the check.

Over the last week, leading up to fee-setting, the Tiggers was a constant flipping of PF teams from waitlist to real as formerly reals were dropped without penalty. In one of the great feats of unexpected magic, although everyone started with 4 entries, when all was said and done, and sticking to the hard limit of 201 (50 rooms), everyone who wanted them ended up with 5 entries. If you ask me, that’s a real bloodbath for large programs, but no one has ever come up with a solution to the problem of handling large programs at limited tournaments. I don’t know if anyone ever will. The other events didn’t have this problem. They’re suitably large, but their limits were never stretched. 153 VLD isn’t exactly chickenfeed, plus there’s 105 NLD, which means plenty for us to do over the weekend. But ultimately everybody got in. Not so with PF. Expect to see even more of that in the future.

Prefs open Thursday. Before then I’ll send out instructions on how we’ll do the judge call, and how you’re obligated until the cows come home, and how we’ll cut off your firstborn’s nose if you’re not there to pick up your ballot, but I’ll do it nicely, as if I know it would never occur to you not to be on time and rarin’ to go, but just in case…

There’s not much else for me to think about, other than finding the visitor parking lot on Friday, which I’ve never found in the past. I usually end up feeding the meters every five minutes, which is far from the best way to spend one’s tabbing time. I’m hoping this weekend to get a chance to see the Tigger’s art museum, which I haven’t done in ages, predating my debate existence, in fact. Otherwise, for a couple of days, it will be peace and quiet. 

Nothing wrong with that.