Debate: How to tab MJP

(Or at least, this is how I do it, after 2 or 3 years of learning.)

First, make sure all the prefs are correct. I’ve asked that they stay up on tabroom.com after they close, plus there’s already a way of printing them out of TRPC. Makes sense to me to let the teams themselves check things, and we can correct discrepancies. We're still working on this, but it will solve problems when people say they didn't get their prefs. We can either fix fast or demonstrate that it is not the case.

Next, if someone doesn’t pref, go in and blank out all their 1s. The default is a 1, not a blank, but when you’re tabbing, you can’t tell the difference between a real 1 and a didn’t pref 1, but a blank is a blank is a blank.

Do an automatic assignment of the judges. Nothing else. Then go down the pairing and erase (the E button) every judge that isn’t 1-1 or 1-blank.

Print out a list of judges, organized by judge. This will show you who only has one round.

Find a judge for each of the pairings that don’t have one. Try to use up the folks only judging one flight.

After everyone has a judge, auto assign rooms and then fix the flights (some will be AA or BB rather than AB).

In rounds where the brackets matter, start as above, erasing any non 1-1s. Then go to the brackets out of contention and erase the 1-1 judges that are highly preffed; it’s not that the out-of-contentions won’t get their 1s so much as, if there is any choice, they would go first to the in-contentions. (John Rawls would explain this as acceptable, needless to say.) Then start doing assignments by brackets, starting with the bubble and moving up to the undefeateds, then going to the out of contentions. Again, try to double up the judges as much as possible, but if you’ve been to an MJP tournament, you know that a lot of flights are split. This is why.

Hard-and-fast rule: TRPC always offers the prelim judges in a column. Always take the top judge from the column. You are not being paid to think. You are not trying to find the right judge that you think is the right judge, but a 1-1 pairing. That’s all.

Elims are a little different. You take the first judge and place wherever it has the first 1. That is, a judge automatically pops up, and the first pairing where it’s a mutual 1 is pairing 4, so you put the judge in 4. You try to fill up in order, going from pairing 1 to pairing 8 and then back down from 8 to 1 and finally back up again from 1 to 8. This removes any personalization of the pairing. Of course, you may run out of 1s before you run out of need, and you might move a highly preffed judge around when a less highly preffed judge can fill in, but as often as not this is a mug’s game of moving around people all over the map and getting nowhere. That’s why it’s mutual. We do a fair assignment, and when we run out of 1s, say hello to my little friends, the 2s. Still mutual. So are 3s. So is a 1-2, 2-1, 2-2. In the olden days, we put in anyone who hadn’t been struck. Which do you prefer?