Every tournament seems to have its own situations that arise
and have to be dealt with. Since we had done a limited MJP at Byram Hills last
year, I set it up to happen again, with three equal tiers plus a strike or two.
I mean, it was a small tournament, but nevertheless, most people really like
prefs. Or let’s say that most people will use them, maybe out of self-defense
if nothing else. But that’s been my point since day one. Prefs allow you to put
some spin on the ball regardless of your style. Nevertheless, I knew that prefs
would be problematic with a small pool, and I asked people to be generous with
their rankings because there was only so much tab can do with that kind of pool. A
couple of schools cooperated and didn’t rank at all, considering that the
tournament was the first of the year and that people should be getting
experience in front of as many judges as possible, especially if they were at
the younger end of the spectrum. That’s one of the things about BH: it attracts
both the lightly and the heavily seasoned. I like that in a tournament.
We managed to do pretty well pref-wise overall, and if
nothing else we were mostly mutual. But when we got to elims, something came up
that’s worth sharing. In fact, I found it so worth sharing that I’ve added a
new page to the TD Toolkit, containing little extra notes on things that didn’t
fit elsewhere (or, maybe more to the point, that I’m too lazy to fit in
elsewhere). I’ll keep adding to it as things come up. Here’s what happened at
BH that I want to talk about; I’m simply pasting in what I put in the
Sidenotes.
---
A Complicated Wrinkle
regarding MJP Panels
This is what we might call a nice point, and it’s worth
knowing about.
When I was working with the Paginator at some point last
year, he noticed that debaters were getting judged in elims by people who had
voted against them in previous elim rounds. There is a button that prevents
being judged by someone who has voted against you, and we had selected that
option. But it was happening anyhow. So we went to tabroom and filed a
notification that the option wasn’t working. But, in fact, it was. The thing
is, the option was moot. The tournament we were running was using MJP, and if
you have prefs, they are prioritized over other issues. That is, if your judge
was ranked a 1 in the octafinals, and your judge votes against you, your 1
ranking does not magically become a strike in the quarterfinals.
I guess one could make an argument against this, but the
logic seems pretty strong to me. Once we accept and use prefs for a tournament,
those are the prefs for all of that tournament. Given how much we’re trying to
optimize panels in tab (and, presumably, how much the software is trying to
optimize panels), the idea that rankings are not fixed for the tournament is nightmarish.
Also, it really doesn’t make sense. The idea behind MJP, like it or hate it, is
that you rank a judge because that judge is the kind of judge you like to
debate in front of, not because that judge always picks you up. After all, the
judge you gave a 1 to is the same judge your opponent gave a 1 to. If the
rationales for those 1s was a guaranteed win, you have some learning to do. At
the point where rankings are mutual, they inherently become preferences for
style over an assumption of a victory. (Actually, the idea that MJP is a path
to guaranteed victory is an old one that came up back in the earliest days of
the option, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. We should be past that by
now.)
In a tournament where there are no prefs, on the other hand,
it does make sense to block judges who have voted against you, which tabroom
will do automatically. When there’s no prefs guiding the hand of tab, one judge
on a panel is presumably just as good as any other, until the point where that
judge has just voted against a student. Since it is no big deal to put in a
different judge, and not doing so can easily have a negative effect on the
debater who didn’t pick up that ballot last time, especially on the same side,
it makes sense to avoid this situation. Everyone is happier (who wants to judge
a kid you just voted against?) and no one is unhappier. But only in a pref-free universe. Otherwise, the prefs stand until the final round is over.
///
No comments:
Post a Comment