In which we see Big Bronx, and Bump, bubbling up again

Lots of debate business all of a sudden.

First of all, there’s Big Bronx. It turns out that Kirby Chin and Robert Levinson will be running the thing again, and Kaz and I spent a lot of time with KC yesterday going over this and that. One thing about tabroom.com: you can look at what you did last time and make that a starting point, and it makes life a whole lot easier. Need a schedule? Look it up from last year and see what really happened. Need numbers in events? Room lists? There they are. At the moment, unfortunately, tabroom is sort of going through some Bartleby refusals to respond (I need to look up the RR stuff), but otherwise, having a readily accessible history is a real boon.

Needless to say, Sheryl and I agree on most everything. The evolution of the tournament had been quite strong already, and there’s no need to change too much. A more equitable registration process, during daylight hours, is one thing. Finding the second building is an issue, but apparently there’s a neighbor that we used a long time ago that’s been updated. It’s a fine space, but it had felt a bit restrictive. Apparently everything we didn’t like is gone. Can’t complain about that, and it would put speech in the same borough as everything else. Most other things will be business as usual. It is so important to keep this great tournament strong, and not go through the conniptions that ate away at it not all that long ago.

Meanwhile, I’ve been talking to the Sailors, who seem to be game to give Bump a try next season, or at least they're game at the moment. I’m certainly all in favor of the team going on strong without me, and will offer to do a lot of things, short of actually doing it, if you know what I mean. I did retire for a reason, after all. If the DJ has absorbed me almost completely, it isn’t going to all of a sudden un-absorb me. I will stick to my guns on this. Still, going into the old Scarsdale slot ought not to be an issue for them, if the weather’s nice. I would guess that overall it would be the same tournament as it was in November, much as I believe that Scarsdale will be the same as it was in February. They’re not interchangeable events; they do things quite differently. For one thing, the Scarsdale 2-1 judge ratio in LD and Varsity judging novice is way different from Hen Hud's novices in a separate building altogether. What did make Bump different was when we moved to the November slot (which I think of as the Newburgh weekend), and we went from a quarters to a semis bid. We lost a handful of distant travelers, but we made up for it number-wise with more locals. There were other changes over the years, come to think of it. Dropping policy, adding PF, adding/subtracting/re-adding novice PF—you name it. Anyhow, we’ll see what happens. I hope they stick to their guns and try to pull it off. It would be a big loss to the region otherwise.