I spent way too much time last night and this morning not
getting into tabroom. I was halfway through clearing the Princeton waitlists
when the guillotine blade fell. I would log in and immediately my session would
expire. I’m trusting that this will be fixed by the time you read this.
Otherwise I’m quitting forensics and getting in competive checkers.
Meanwhile, back at Rather Large Bronx…
I talked plenty here about the leadup to the tournament. A big
one like that has leadup up the wazoo. Much time is spent going over entries,
massaging judge lists, that sort of thing. And then the day arrives, and you
get down to it and actually run the damned thing.
Tab was pretty much a five-star operation: Kaz and
Pennsylvania Jeff on Policy, myself and Catholic Charlie on LD, and the Paginator
and a new guy, Nathan from Orlando (who says he’s never been to Disney World
but he has been to Epcot, which I let pass because, well, otherwise he was a
fine fellow). This is the kind of group that can handle any contingency, and if
there isn’t any horrible problem, can create one in the blink of an eye. If I
hear one more joke on how your beloved LD team has perhaps in the past managed
to delete a round, I will [insert appropriate turn of phrase here; I don’t want
to stop and think of one at the moment]. For us, the complication was prefs and
partial obligations, which I had done once before at 2018’s Bigle X. But that
one had the dreaded 9 MJP tiers, in which mutual is defined as almost mutual
(and which I’m trying to talk Kaz out of for 2019). Here, we were sticking with
the norm. And stick we did. Those judge assignments were amazing. The best one,
as it turned out, was for the sexydecimal round, where it was pretty much
perfect when it was double-flighted, and when we did it as a single flight, it
was also pretty much perfect. A lot of people got home a lot earlier on Sunday
as a result.
There seemed to be fewer incidents overall this year. One LD
judge, all on his own, ate 45 minutes off one prelim round as he noodled to come up
with a decision. I called him into tab and suggested gently that he might want
to speed things up in the future. (Well, maybe gently isn’t the right word.) He
had a nice 0-4 round after that to help him resolve the path he would take
going forward. Afterwards he was the first to hit start and the first to come
to a decision. If you need me to gently suggest anything to someone, please let
me know.
In other news, the usual parent judges tried to weasel out
of Sunday morning, although we were nice enough to purge the worst of them and
post a standby list. We’re not totally evil. The Paginator, who at one point
looked at this blog’s recent entries and was disappointed to note his absence,
acquired the new nickname of Marty Meat. The most interesting discussion was
asking what the advantages of having independent entries might be, given all
the disadvantages (like the one out-of-state school that suddenly was revealed
as chaperoneless). We talked about with Rose JT about salvaging the Monticello
tournament next year; some good ideas were proposed. (I really missed that one
this year; it’s a sentimental favorite of mine.) There wasn’t, to my knowledge,
a single evidence-violation protest. Something tells me that this particular
strategy for winning rounds has made its stink pretty well-known around the
activity. Every single PF judge had a paradigm. And of course, every LD judge. Not
surprisingly, a few old hands were unaware that the wiki was kaputi. “Oh, no, I
have a paradigm. I’ve been judging since the Coolidge administration.” Keep up,
people! Coolidge is no longer in the White House.
By the way, think of that. Silent Cal. How much would you
give to have that be the present Chief Executive’s nickname. And Quite Flows the Don…
No comments:
Post a Comment