O’C puts about 53 times more angst into his tournament than most everybody else. To be honest, I ratchet down the angst every year, as every year we do it again (barring the blizzard of ’05) and it all goes according to plan, and each year we introduce some improvements, and all hell never breaks loose, and that’s the end of it. What I worry most about this time out is adding the 6th TOC-mandated round, which means that we’re there all that much longer paying custodial fees. I’m sure we can single-flight doubles, so that should help. Then all we have to do is cook the results so that everything from quarters on is a close-out. A few more speaker points here, a few less there, a couple of elim ballots misread, and we can be out in time for a lovely alumni dinner. I mean, isn’t that what goes on in tab rooms anyhow?
Seriously, of course, that isn’t what goes on in tab rooms. I’ve occasionally heard tell of various sleazolas trying to cook results, and to be honest, I can’t imagine how they do it. I guess you could try to assign sympathetic judges to your own team, but if you work with a partner from another school, a necessity not merely for honesty purposes but for not making mistakes and judge-rating purposes, then so much for that, unless the two of you pool your evil resources, and something tells me that La Coin and JV—an evil pair if I ever saw one--are simply not going to agree to this at Bump, so the VCA can rest easy knowing that our tab room will be entirely neutral. As was Big Jake's. The first goal before even thinking about pairing rounds is making the best division possible of the pool into A, B and C judges (if we’re rating, and sometimes we don’t). O’C did the ratings for Big Jake; I’ll be using community ratings (a new wrinkle) for Bump. That’s another reason for multiple and disparate tabfolk: to wit, better understanding of the judge pool. After that, what you want to do is blindly monitor the computer as it automatically assigns the A judges to the down-ones. At a big enough tournament this will be a no-brainer, and at Big Jake, TRPC automatically assigned As to the down-ones in every single round, bless its little soul, and we didn’t have to touch it. The job of tabbing is not to mess around with the randomness of the machinery, but simply to oversee that the machinery is doing what it’s supposed to do. What we did have to touch, aside from the inevitable dropouts of suddenly sick participants and who’s on what subway coming in when (“So-and-so is on the phone and he says he’s just arrived at O’Hare. What do we tell him?”) and the constant appearance and disappearance of rooms a la Lewis Carroll, was the dreaded Driftarooni, where judges you thought were there (didn’t I just see that blatherskite in the judges’ lounge?) don’t pick up ballots, and you have to sub the first semi-sentient being that you stumble upon after learning the news. So much for As, Bs and Cs. (Which is, admittedly, nothing compared to the hunt of the Pffft Brigade. In an activity that thrives on lay judges, you can’t be lay enough. I think at one point at Big Jake the Rev BA, the Pffft tabber, was outside trying to convince the Mr. Softee guy to turn his bells off and come in and do a flight or two, and he was damned happy to get him. The rest of us were happy with a chocolate cone, the perfect soother for those high blood pressure moments.)
O’C and I talked about a cure for dreaded Drifterooni, which I mentioned yesterday is often a coach prepping a competitor. This is a policy disease that LD seems to have caught, and it’s not a good one. One can assign all sorts of fines and jailtime and community service and the like, but no one seems to care. Our idea was simply to set a time at which the rounds must begin. If a judge is not in the room by that time, that judge’s entire team forfeits all their strikes immediately for the remainder of the tournament. Holy MJP, Batman, but I’ve got Menick as a judge and I’ve been striking him since 1991. Yipes! That may be a price teams are simply not willing to pay in return for a coach making his or her kid even more nervous by throwing last minute instructions into the young forensic face. We’ll see if that still looks like a good idea next year. We don’t really get that much of it at Bump, but then again, Bump is a little less national $ircuit than Big Jake. And if you’re going to hire yourself a passel of private coaches, those sumbitches better prep you out every minute of the weekend. Aaaarrgghh! I look back at when Noah and I were doing it. I’d be playing Snood on my PC and he’d come up to me before a round and look over my shoulder, and I’d ask him where he thought he might like to go to dinner, and that was prep enough for both of us. He did okay, too, all things considered. So did I, for that matter. I cleared me a whole bunch o’ Snood screens. Which has to be the definition of a coaching job well done.
Take that, national $ircuit.
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