In which we realize that a list of tournaments can be both amusing and useful

If you go to tabroom.com without being signed in, you’re sent to the page of upcoming tournaments. (It's also the home tab when you are logged in.) It’s an interesting display.

All the tournaments, regardless of circuit, are listed in chronological order. The first thing you note is that there are tournaments that last seemingly forever. There’s a couple on the top that started back in April and are still going on. There’s some ten-dayers on the agenda. There are tournaments where registration closing is set as the same time as the tournament ending. There are tournaments that are obviously limited to a certain locality that are noted as national. There’s a college demo tournament scheduled for November of 2018.

It’s quite the entertaining display.

People aren’t terribly careful about setting up their tournaments, or more to the point, some people aren’t terribly careful. There’s ways of keeping a demo off the list by clicking a button indicating that it’s a demo. There’s lots of fail-safes preventing scheduling a tournament in the past, or the ending before the beginning, but apparently nothing preventing it from lasting until the end of the millennium. Or maybe these tournaments really are month-long. I’ve been to tournaments that felt as if they were months long. Maybe they were.

I have commented on people opening registration at times that are out of whack with the logic of attending that particular tournament on the TournamentToolkit Facebook page. Registrations that are too far in advance of the events simply give you lots of fictional entries, endless TBAs that people are only using as space fillers, not real indications of their numbers. Schools with a total of 3 teams in one event will reserve 6 slots in every event, things like that. Timely registration dates are an inherent reality check.

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with putting a tournament on this page of tabroom.com, even if it’s practically a year from now. There are various calendars and schedules out there, but none are real as a listing on tabroom. Yale 2017, for instance, has been on there for quite some time. This has not stopped people from emailing me to ask when Yale will be happening in 2017. Which means that not only are they ignorant of the easiest lookup resource, but they actually think I’m still involved with the tournament. Didn’t the lack of my august presence register with them last September? I guess not. (I wonder if CP is still getting emails asking him when Yale is going to take place.)

Anyhow, people running a tournament might consider posting a skeleton setup on tabroom early, and people who attend tournaments might consider looking there first. Just don’t email me. I can’t be held responsible for the consequences of such an action.

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