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.