The 550 Frankfurter Invitational

Holy cannoli! This weekend we tabbed two divisions of the (thankfully small) Vassar invitational and six divisions of the (unusually large) November MHL. Normally this would be par for the course, but to spice things up, we used CP’s new tabbing software. As I put it in a debriefing to CP after the fact, “Doing a live tournament is, I think, the only way to really learn. Doing two live tournaments simultaneously, one of which has 6 divisions spread out over a campus the size of Peoria, on the other hand, is idiotic. I'm glad it was me who decided to do it, because I wouldn't want to be the person who suggested it if it were someone else, because I would have to cut off their private parts and feed them to the muskrats.”

I went on, “The real problem was that having so much going on at once curtailed our ability to dig in and solve problems calmly.” And that was it indeed. MHLs are always a crapshoot to begin with, but we’ve learned to manage them with TRPC even when they’re completely imbalanced with same-team pairings and all kinds of kerplooey. Imagine this. There were on 6 JV LDers, 4 from one school and 2 from another. To give them a reasonable tournament, for their first round we put them into a single flight debating the down-3s from the invitational (which, as it turned out, was quite fair, as the young ’uns won half of them). Try to do this in any program! Great googly moogly! And that was just one division. So for the entire day Saturday we were tabbing like little Beavers, with at one point 4 computers running something or other, all of us doing our best to keep things moving.

On the front end, nobody thought much about us because they were in a different world altogether. The invitational moved like any invitational (although it took CP until today to unravel the LD elims). And the MHL moved like six pairs of 47 man squamish teams with food poisoning rolling down a hill toward the single available one-holer outhouse. Until now, all MHLs have been held in a single building. It never occurred to us that there was a reason for this, but at Vassar, the only university I know of with its own cemetery on campus, we used multiple buildings at a radius of about 7 miles from home base. We had round 1 paired by 9:30 and distributed by 10:00, and still hadn’t gotten back all the ballots at 2:00. That, my friend, is the reason to keep things in one building. Can you say, “Eek!”? Still, we managed to send them off with a normal 6:30 award ceremony, albeit after only 3 rounds, so go figure. Not our finest hour, but somehow it all came off. At least there was that.

And, admittedly, we did learn a lot about the software. And one can only truly learn in the heat of battle. I had played with data in the comfort of my office for hours, but that’s not the same as working the data as people are flying all around you with a smelly carload of frankfurters (yes, there were 550 of them, thanks to the People’s Champion, who no doubt will think twice about his wiener order next time out) and Baby Cakes tart orders and missing judges and befuddled looking Vassarian Section judges asking the P’s C to explain novice LD between now and the start of the round a minute from now, and parents coming in to be trained, and enough people asking “When” questions to make JV’s brain spontaneously combust. At one point O’C barred the door when I wanted to venture out, telling me that I didn’t want to see what was happening out there, and to just trust him that I was better off staying put. Then again, we had the only bathroom in Poughkeepsie in our building, so it made sense to stick close to home. At one point O’C and I needed to use said facility and found a line stretching all the way to Albany. O’C, a Vassarian Sectioner himself, explained that there were plenty of bathrooms where they were going so get out of his way because he was going to the head of the line. (And yes, it was a one-holer. I stopped making this stuff up when I stopped writing Nostrum.)

I won’t be tabbing this coming week, since only someone who’s never tried it tabs his own tournament, but I’ll be looking over CP’s shoulders, especially during the break rounds, as he’ll be using it with JV on both PF and LD, the latter with MJP. O’C and Kaz will be using it down at the Novice LD division, but that has no break rounds, so it should be more straightforward.

So the march to the new software has begun. If one remembers back to one’s first baptisms of fire with TRPC, it’s pretty much just more of the same. And one can easily see the benefits of the new software. But it will be a while before we can enjoy them to the fullest.