And what circles are those, you may well ask

There are just so many days off from the DJ, so I was unable to accept the invitation to go to the Newark RR and tab it. But I did volunteer to set it up for them.

The thing about RRs is that there’s never enough judges to simply run them straight. You always have to have people judge the same people twice, but on the other side. This means that you dig into some pieces of TRPC that you don’t ordinarily look at much. For instance, you print up the judge cards, to make sure that you haven’t repeated same-side judgings, because when you enter a judge, even on the other side, all TRPC tells you is that they’ve judged the person before, not telling you which side it was. Normally, that’s all you need to know, but not here. The judge cards become your bible. Because of the complexity of the RR animal, even with a small number of participants (8 at Newark), you plan the entire tournament out in advance because sometimes when you get to later rounds it just doesn’t work, but if you go back and switch a judge earlier, you can adjust things. Obviously, if the round has already happened, you can’t go back and have someone else judge it, so advance planning is the name of the game.

I like RR tabbing, because of this complexity. It’s rather satisfying to come up with schematics that represent truly magical back-end analysis. One is proud of oneself for pulling it off with minimal resources.

Which means that rule number one is that all the judges have to be there, as planned, and that the idea of a pushed ballot is comparable to the idea of a pet cobra at a daycare center. In a way, it was probably best that I wasn’t at the RR. It seemed to go off plan somewhere in the neighborhood of round 2…

So I solved it, and forwarded fixes. Grumble grumble grumble.

And solved it again later, and forwarded more fixes. Grumble grumble grumble again, but this time more profanely.

More fixes were still being made the crack of dawn this morning.

As a normally peaceful soul—in some circles I am referred to as Mr. Congeniality—I seldom explode in tabular rage, but as I say, it was probably best that I wasn’t phycially present at the RR…

Something tells me the first thing people will do when I arrive there this afternoon is run for cover.

This will be a wise move on their part.