More than 140 words

I'll try to keep up the tweets, as appropriate, but for those, follow the #NDCA2012 hashtag (and I"ll keep the widget with the tweets here for another couple of days, over on the right). It’s back to business here.

Anyhow, I’d forgotten the complications of pairing NDCA.

The original plan for Friday night had been to get together with O’C and The People’s Champion and the Emperor of Hamiltonia and go watch jousting, but at some point it occurred to me that I had a job to do and I probably should do it. Jousting with O’C would have to wait.

I got into the hotel in the afternoon and started playing with the data and setting up TRPC. The first thing one remembers is that we rank all the debaters and put them into cells. We create four levels, one through four descending, and we set it up so that none of the ones hit in random rounds. CP had the rankings and emailed them to me, and then I entered them, and Bietz showed me how to do the pairings, since I’ve only done it the once before, at last year’s NDCA. It does the presets for both the random rounds at the same time. This does make sense to me, and it also doesn’t. While not knocking out your top debaters by the top seeds hitting each other in the random pairings, it does sort of insure that the lower seeds will have rough draws. But then again, it is a championship. It’s supposed to be hard, and the competition is supposed to be designed so that the best competitors fight it out to the end. Sometimes I have trouble getting used to that.

Next, there’s the whole thing about judges not being in every round. Each judge has a certain number of rounds committed, and that’s it (although, apparently, we have a small purse of bribe money if things get a little too dicey). I went through and allocated to get enough judges for each round, so that we don’t use up people early on. Which meant that when we assigned the judges, if someone was available for round one but didn’t get placed, I removed their availability and put them in round two instead (I had set up that you were either one or the other). Of course, I had to move some twos into round one to get prefs. Then the couple of people who got nuttin’ got moved to three. It’s a pain in the butt, but if you don’t do it, the pain later is even stronger. I remember it from last year, when people would tell us they were no longer obligated, and they were right. I’m just not used to that. Normally you’re obligated for the whole shooting match. There’s some of this at Big Bronx, but the pool is so large it hardly matters, as long as you have a wealth of judges for round 3, where you have your first bubble at the down twos.

There’s four rounds today, with the longest lunch break known to man, so things should go swimmingly. We set up the Warm Room on my computer, so we’ll be doing that again. It looks like it’s working; I’ll post the first info as soon as I arrive on the UNLV campus.