Putting it together

Sophie was right. I had assumed without looking closely that there would be a run-off of the down-three folks, and the victors would advance. When we do something analogous to this with partials, maybe one or two more secure people have to fight for advancement. With as many 5-3s as will be at TOC, though, they’re really going to sear up through the ranks of the 6-2s, which seems extremely counter to the approach of TOC in the past. I wonder if people, like me, have not thought it through completely. If they have, then this is really a literal double-octos. That just doesn’t compute for 77 entrants.

Things are so much saner in PF land. We have 72, and 7 rounds. The only wrinkle, which also affected NDCA, was the partial obligation of judges. One team = 4 rounds. Without having MJP this shouldn’t hurt too much, but it is something different I don’t normally think about. Still, there’s plenty of judges. If it wasn’t for this, I would have set it up with single flights, but I don’t want the hassle of fighting with people to explain that 4 rounds of judging would mean 8 single flights; debate judges are notoriously suspicious when it comes to accepting my math. It was bad enough at NDCA when we went to the 8th round and told everyone that their obligation was now their obligation +1. Making it their obligation (a perceived) X2 sounds really dicey.

Last night was the first time I entered data manually in a while. Normally I just upload from tabroom or the Goy, but here I used an old-fashioned spreadsheet. I dug up my old registration sheet that has the formula for taking the name of the school and the kids’ names and concatenating it into Bronx Science OC, and then just pasted in the results. Reminded me of Bump in the good old days (if there are ever good old days when one is running a tournament). Maybe we should do the whole thing on index cards. Speaking of which, I may indeed toss cards for the random rounds. TRPC, with its randomization, does things that are mildly suspect, like the Bietz effect I’ve talked about in the past where single entries from a school are always paired against other single entries (meaning that if you have a round robin and some lone $ircuit kids, they always end up meeting in Round 1). At NDCA we broke the LD division into 4 groups and mixed and matched so that you never hit more than one person from any of the groups, which you can do when every student entered has a certain number of points. I mean, random needs to be random, but it shouldn’t be random violence. We save random violence for when we need it.