Debate: On to XLIII

Probably the most important thing to come out of this last weekend was the origin story. It turns out that there was once a beloved Irish math teacher at Bronx Science who spent all his spare time doing inappropriate things with his cellphone. To honor his memory (he was kicked off the faculty after being tarred and feathered, and was last seen working on Todd Akin’s reelection campaign), they named the double-octos round after him. And now you know the true story of Sext O’Decimals.

Anyhow, what you really want are the details. I got there early on Friday. Parking was atrocious, and I drove around forever, and finally found a spot on Staten Island. So it goes. At least it wasn’t pouring out at that point, as it was later, forcing people to arrive looking like the proverbial wet dogs. I sat at the registration table, and I had two jobs. First, I told people to move along down the table to someone else and stop bothering me, and second, I took all the changes and either entered them into tabroom (IEs and Policy, which O’C repeatedly and confusingly refers to as Team Debate, as if PF doesn’t exist), piled them into a neat stack of papers (PF) or put them into tabroom (LD). Then I trucked up to my great new tabroom, which put Grand Central Terminal to shame with all the noise and confusion of twenty-seven other tabbers jabbering and runners runnering confusedly and Brx Sci teachers with thick accents looking belligerent and swearing at us under their breath in their native languages. Bietz and I found different digs pretty quickly, the room I will henceforth refer to as the Menick Cave, and which will be the LD home henceforth and forever. Occasionally people would pop by and eat their hearts out, so you know it was the right choice.

Before heading off to Pupsville for the weekend, CP showed me how to use the new automated online system in tabroom for postings and emailing and whatnot. Five minutes later I was trying to demo it to everyone else, with mixed results. It turned out that there was one serious bug in the system with flights, that if you were in one flight, your alert told you you were in the other flight. The postings were also backwards from TRPC, so there was a little confusion there, easily fixed when you just alerted everyone to the problem and told them to stay calm and carry on, which they did. CP looked at the data and came back with the sage response that it was all screwed up, blaming sunspots and the Curse of the Bambino. It should be cleared up for the next tournament, he said, whatever that means, given that there’s a tournament every weekend. Of course, for it to really work, people need to get themselves connected to tabroom, students and judges both, and that will take a little time. But it is a great system, and we used the Goy equivalent at NDCA in Vegas with great success. Of course, at Bronx, there was Wifi access granted to the hearty of spirit (getting access was about as easy as cloning three-headed sheep), but once it was there, it was there. A lot of other schools won’t be so easy, including Sailorville. So be it.

There seemed to be a new bug in the transfer of MJP from tabroom to TRPC, one that affected only schools with lots of conflicts. We had set up MJP for 6 categories, 5 of them real and 6 a strike, with conflicts on the side. I’m not sure exactly what the problem was, but it seems that if you had too many conflicts, some of your strikes got lost. We ran a check of 25% of the teams and found no discrepancies, at which point we accepted the reality of statistics, so it only affected a tiny number of teams, but still, you don’t want that sort of thing to happen. So, over to CP, who sounds sanguine about fixing it easily. I also asked him for pref screens to stay live in tabroom after closing so that people can easily look at their prefs after they’re entered; most of people telling me something was wrong over the weekend with their prefs was their bad memory of whom they had ranked what, not anything wrong with the system, and this would solve that. It would help tab too, as now I have to dive into a very unwieldy text file to pull the original information. Of course, the real problem with a pref not taking is that everyone suddenly becomes suspicious of the prefs. This being the third year I’ve been doing MJP, with absolutely no pref issues, I find this rather paranoid of people, but then again, paranoia plays much better than confidence, so there you are. If there was a problem, there must be a million problems screwing over me and my teams, is a much easier concept to go with then that, if there was a problem, it was probably some minor thing that is under control and won’t affect anyone. The trouble with human nature is that so many humans seem to fall in line with it.

After that, the chief issue seemed to be people’s inability to look up the word mutual in the dictionary. MJP does not mean you always get your 1s. MJP means that you and your opponent always get a judge you’ve preffed identically. This could mean a 5-5 round, but needless to say, aside from a handful of 3-3s in prelims for down-and-outs, it was all better than that and, in fact, overwhelmingly 1-1. But in elims, it gets dicier, because as a general rule the teams that make it into elims have complicated druidical structures for preffing the judges that inevitably never gel with their opponents’ complicated druidical structures, and more than once I had to show people that they weren’t getting their 1s because they and their opponent had no mutual 1s to get. And often no mutual 2s. You’ve got to do the math, people. I don’t have some cache of 1s that I’m holding back on, although that’s what people seem to think. It’s like with my wife, who is a real estate agent. New customers always think, when she shows them around the first few times, that she’s holding back on the good houses in their price range, the ones that they would buy immediately. Can you say counterintuitive?

There is a dicier side to MJP in elims, where you simply get things to add up. The way this works is that, when there is little mutuality (which happens usually in one or two of the pairings of any elim round), you’ll put in a mutual, like a 2-2, and then a 1-2 and and 2-1, or maybe it will be a 1-1, a 2-3 and a 3-2. Obviously this is not your dream panel, but if you want a dream panel of all 1s, sleep with your opponent prior to prefs and dream together of the same people. Short of that, the math talks.

What I don’t like is when the math is, say, 1-5, 3-1, 3-1 or something along those lines. It adds up to 7-7, but is obviously biased toward the 5-1-1. The only time this ever happened and was uncorrectable was one year at Lex, but we were able to postpone the final to the next day at the RR, where we were able to put in an even panel because we had a lot more judges back in play. We almost ended up with a scenario like that this weekend, but a saintly couple of volunteers allowed us to set up a final panel that had not necessarily high prefs but a balance of this way, that way and neutral. Since the tournament concluded with a 3-0, at some point you just throw up your hands and say, go in and win those judges.

Three years ago, there were no prefs, and people debated in front of the panels they were given, excluding their strikes. As possibly the biggest proponent of MJP on the planet, I will not long for the good old days, and will simply continue to explain and explain and explain until the realities take seed. I am not actively working against your teams. I do not care about your teams. I barely care about my own teams. What I care about is getting out as quickly as possible, and the only way to make that happen is with the best prefs possible for the tournament. But best prefs possible is not the same as you get all your 1s; it’s you get all your best mutual judge preferences. Which is why we call it Mutual Judge Preferences and not Pick Your Own Judge. There’s a big difference there.

So it goes.