Coach comes into tab and tells us that they want us to switch
a judge because the student had a bad experience with said judge in the past. Why, then, was this judge rated a 1, if that were the case? We explain, for the millionth time, that this is not a conflict and therefore
needs to be addressed in the preffing. The problem, in other words, is yours, not ours. Don’t
coaches talk to their teams? I can understand that coaches might want to
control the preffing for one reason or another, but how about a little
dialogue?
Needless to say, the kid picks up the horrible judge’s
ballot. Isn't that always the case?
Then there’s the kid who swears that the judge really did
not mean to vote for the opponent. The ballot is in, double-entered no less.
The judge, and the kid’s coach, are nowhere to be seen. But you expect to talk
us into reversing the decision? You’ve gotta love a kid who couldn’t possibly
have lost a round as the kid loses yet another round entitled "Resolved: Tab should overthrow a decision because I say so."
And, no, you can’t do online research during the round. If
you don’t already have a card on it, it’s too late now. Nice try, though. Those
among the tournament directors who were born yesterday might, perhaps, agree
with you. The rest of us, however, have been there and done that. Sorry.
In VLD we were doing MJP with 9 tiers, a CP decision. I’ve
talked about this in the past. While I believe that CP is right about the math
of 9 tiers working better for teams, the teams themselves, by virtue of every
other tournament they attend not being 9 tiers, just don’t get it. The general
population has only recently been trained for MJP overall, so much so that I
don’t have to explain it in my emails to the college registrants anymore. And
the pros have learned to use it to what they think is their advantage. The
boat, in other words, has just gotten steady. Why rock it? But it’s not my tournament, hence not my call. It’s only a marginal adjustment on our end in tab, but it is still an
adjustment. In any case, tabroom will pump out mutual assignments most of the
time, so it’s not a terrible back-end problem. And only once did anyone attempt
to storm the tab room, and JV shut that person down before said person even
opened the old mouth. The assumption that we’re doing nothing in
tab and that a better assignment was sitting right there and we missed it
insults our intelligence. And yours, if you stop and think about it. What do
you think we’re doing in there?
Speaking of which, the one thing I remain adamant about is
panel numbers. 1-1-7 and 3-3-3 both add up to 9, but the first debater has two
1s and the second debater has all 3s. It’s not just about adding up. Tabroom
doesn’t do this, but we will. Everyone is due the same number of the same pref,
if at all possible. If you have a 1, I should have a 1. If you have two 2s and
I only have one, it’s imbalanced. We did very well on that. Working with JV is
fun: he’d poke around in the assignments and ask me about what so-and-so was
doing, and I’d go there and see if we could pull out and sub in that one, then
he’d pull out and sub in his. We did some amazing work.
As I’ve said before, Bigle X is one of my favorite weekends,
and this one was no exception. Lots of fun, great conversations, great tabbing,
pretty good music (the implicit ban on Big Mike remains in effect). What more can you
ask for?
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