In which we return from the frigid north

Another Monticello Kaiser tournament goes into the record books.

This was one of our “Academy” tournaments, aimed at younger students who might get shut out from events like Big Bronx. So can someone explain to me why people aren’t breaking down the doors? An awful lot of schools didn’t sign up, and they are the schools who would seem to benefit most from such an event. Are they too hoity-toity for such things? “TOC bids only, please, before we wear out any of our precious shoe leather.” Whatever. A few schools blew off their entry and dropped after the fee deadline. This could be problematic for their entry at, say, Bump. Why do people forget that the handful of people in tab are the same people week after week? Do they just think that we’ll forget they stuck a school with extra food and extra trophies that proved unnecessary? Oh, well. There’s good debate citizenry and bad debate citizenry, and the usual suspects always seem to be the usual suspects, and what can you do? I support the good citizens as I become progressively less interested in the bad ones. Do what you want, folks. But don’t be surprised when I do what I want on my end.

We did have some tabbing problems. One of them, a soupcon of mis-flighting, CP says he was able to correct. The other one, the wrong people advancing, was entirely my fault, because of a bad setting that I put in. The problem is that when something like that happens, after about a minute of panic, one sets about moving the tournament along come hell or high water, which we did (I was working with Kaz), first by hand and then by recalling a workaround for this from past experience. We never did realize the root cause until CP pointed it out after the fact. As I told him, thank God it was user error. That I can learn from and fix. I just worry about people who aren’t us, using this program week after week. I’ve been wondering if it would make sense to put out a default set of tournaments that people can copy and work from, rather than always starting from scratch (or from what’s input from the last iteration of the tournament, which is moot if there was none in tabroom). Isn’t it better to adjust defaults than to have to always fill in everything? Anyhow, I’ve often said that most of tabroom success is based on setting things up right, because there’s so bloody much to set up. That has proven true once again.

Still, I got home for dinner, and on the bright side, our PFers managed to get a winning record and break to octos. Very nice. I’ve got to remember to put in their NSDA points. (There’s a new one for the Sailors!)

And finally, prefs opened today for Big Jake. Things seems to be working fine, aside from the fact that there were two Ryan Hamiltons listed as LD judges, and popular opinion is that one Ryan Hamilton is more than enough to do the job. I fixed that, and then I went in and conflicted The People’s Champion and my daughter, neither of which should probably judge Hen Hud. As for PF strikes and LD prefs, I’ve set it up so that the Sailors can handle that themselves, another nice feature of tabroom.

Meanwhile, O’C is floating on an uncharacteristic sea of calm for these last few days before the event. Obviously he’s in denial.