More SOTLSEGB

There’s nothing terribly SOTLSEGBian about my judge complaints yesterday. I had similar complaints about Yale. Short of using techniques that would make Dick Cheney shudder, I don’t know what we could do about it. At both these venues it wasn’t as if there was anywhere to wander off to, as one of them was in the wilds of New Haven and the other in the wilds of the Bronx, neither surrounded by anything even remotely seductive. No Starbucks (Starbuckses? Starbuxes?), no gin mills, penny arcades, pool halls, cock fights, abattoirs, etc., the things that usually draw away one’s judging pool. Just irresponsibility, which has no limits.

Meanwhile, as expected, the vast majority of the pool did pref. On the one hand, the tournament is more circuity than Yale, but there is little question in my mind that preffing is just becoming standard in LD. I did have a kick-off argument with one coach, telling him that I wasn’t going to strike 60% of the field for him; you know that argument, because I’ve already conducted it here. After that, there were a couple of verifications requested, that this particular crappy judge was, at least, mutually crappy. They were. One thing I noticed was that, even with the less-preferred judges, there were rounds for them—decent, top-bracket rounds—or at least more than there were at Yale. I’ll be watching this to see if it’s an accident or a function of pool size. Intuitively I would imagine that at a smaller tournament more judges would get less usage in top-bracket rounds, and vice versa at big tournaments, simply because a bigger field insures someone who sooner or later matches someone else, even with judges who are hard to place. Gather enough people, in other words, and even the saddest Joe McDoakes, the world’s most popular strike, will find some supporters.

While tabbing prefs in TRPC is very time-consuming, period, it’s hardest in the first three rounds where everyone is, theoretically, worthy of 1s. There’s nobody out of it, literally, and in the first two preset rounds, nobody even closer than anyone else to being out of it. Finding 1s for everyone all around is virtually impossible; 1s and 2s (keeping in mind that we’re divvying up the pool evenly) pretty doable, with the odd 3-3 here and there. One thing about presets is that you are less likely to get pairings where strong schools with odd prefs hit other strong schools with dissimilar odd prefs. That helps. As the tournament goes on, of course, there are fewer teams still in contention for prelims, and if we go by the Rawlsian just distribution of the best judges to the “in it” rounds, things get easier, or at least it’s easier to give all the in-its 1s, unless they have simply impossibly clashing paradigm analyses. There are always the paired teams who have literally no matches in the entire pool (there’s a button to press to see that), but usually they just have less-preferred matches. So it goes. Learn how to debate in front of a more diverse pool, and this shouldn’t bother you. (The success of the two debaters in the final round, both of whom can, if my understanding is correct, persuade a wide diversity of judges, may be indicative that learning how to do this would be wise for other debaters as well.)

As I said, regardless of the number of matches, tabbing prefs in TRPC is time-consuming. I’ll go over it in a separate post, but the bottom line is that it takes about a half hour of intense busywork to make it happen with a tournament the size of SOTLSEGB. Right before pairing the 7th round, we were listening to my iPod, which was on the table behind us out of reach, and which has lately been going through all my songs alphabetically. “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” came on, and CP remarked how he actually knew this show tune, a rarity indeed for him, and we talked about how easy it was to sing, and how even Marlon Brando had been able to conquer it. Then the last ballot came in, and we dove into the maelstrom. Meanwhile, “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” from the original production ended, and the Nathan Lane version of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” came on. “I’ve got a couple of these on my iPod,” I explained, and we went back to tabbing. The song ended, and then Frank Sinatra came on and sang “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.”

We kept tabbing, the Sinatra version ended, and the Sinatra live at the Sands version of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” came on.

The Tony Bennett version of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” came on.

The Michael Feinstein version of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” came on.

The John Pizzarelli version version “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” came on.

I think it was during the Milli Vanilli version of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” that CP pulled out his light sabre and bisected my iPod.

For all of us in tab, this was the worst half hour of our lives, including the time spent getting dental surgery. In the future, if anyone wants to send me or Palmer into a state of permanent depression, you only have to hum a few bars of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” and the job will be done.