Montwegia Redux!

In other news…

This previous weekend was the Kaiser, AKA Monticello. Compared to last year, pre-Academy (and pre-Menick browbeating), 23 in Policy (similar to last year), doubled numbers in LD and from 0 entries to 23 in PF. So, we pretty much doubled last year’s attendance, and so we shall live to debate—and run the tournament—another day. Or at least another year. One of the things that made it work was the whole seniors-can-judge thing, which allowed us to place the Montwegians all over the place as needed. Relying on graduates would have been a bust. (One of the few available graduates was late because she was on a Stud bus, but it later turned out that this was a misreading and that she was on a Stuck bus, but there wasn’t a person in the place who didn’t prefer the misreading.)

The Academy events were, I will concede, iffy. People just didn’t seem to know about them, so while one PF workshop that E Sanon and I ran was packed, the second one that I passed to Kaz was very small. One bus of policians preferred sustenance/digestive versus sustenance/intellectual, and blew off their idea session in favor of lunch. LD, according to the People’s Champion, actually went off well, probably because of the greater numbers of loose humans as compared to teams. The lesson here is, simply, better planning in advance and better publicity. We got screwed by late arrivals and the like, and there’s just so many work-arounds. Still, the idea of a Sophomore-Junior event judged by seniors seems to be working. We’ll do it again at Byram Hills in January (which I confirmed with their new coach).

For PF, the Chino Brigade was dominant, and closed down the elims straight out of the gate. Yep, they took all the quarters positions. (We had already had to bye in 4 of them from round 4 because there was no one for them to debate aside form double pull-ups.) In LD, The Chetanic Brigade was having trouble dropping rounds in prelims and almost repeated the Chino feat, but a Scarswegian runner broke off from the back of the back heading into the turn and made it just over the wire.. Policy was the most evenly spread of the fields, until the Mallian Brigade closed out in Finals. All in all it was quite entertaining. For the record, we did it all in TRPC; tabroom.com wasn’t reading our XML data, not to mention that the wireless was completely restrictive (if I remember correctly it even blocked tabroom, and certainly anything else you might want to access), so, well, there you are.

As always, Monticello held on to its nickname as the Venice of upstate New York, except without boats, water, or anything remotely Venetian. We did find a good gyro place for lunch on the way in, across the street from the local Wendy’s which—as I had learned in the past and which was reaffirmed by the Newark team this year—thinks that the term “fast food” means that you should have to fast for a really long time before you get anything to eat. The Montwegian Ritz, AKA the Sorta Good Western, was, as always, sorta good compared to anywhere else in town one might stay. I’m used to it by now, and even almost slept a couple of hours.

And up next, some tournament or other in the Bronx.