In which small is beautiful

There is something to be said for the joy of tabbing a small tournament, like Baby Bump. With a big tournament, lots of things just take care of themselves. If you set everything up correctly, all the judges are used fairly, all the pairings are in the same bracket, all the rooms are available, all the schedule slots are correct, and while you may do some slight tinkering improving prefs or pullups, most of your work is getting people to start and end on time. Personnel management rather than tab management. The tab management is in the setups. If you set everything up right, it will mostly play out correctly. We’re not ready to eliminate tab staffs yet, at least not as long as I’m one of them and I want to hang out with my friends and go to nice dinners at the end of the day, but the work is way less labor intensive. At the point where you stop entering paper ballot results, and sorting paper ballots, you’re halfway home—literally. 

Smaller tournaments can present difficulties, however. What do you do when one school dominates a division? When there’s no one for that school to debate? In one case, LD, I had four 3-0s from the same school, and the next contestant was a 1-2. It might have been possible to pair everyone, maybe, but there wasn’t much question that the 4-0 school was going to win, and it made much more sense for the kids looking for rounds for them to have those rounds be competitive. So I byed the top 4. Stuck a fork in them, because they were done. 

Another division was larger, so I had more room to maneuver. Here I would have a lot of single pullups if I didn’t have side restraints. Well, in that case, I just eliminated the side restraints for the 4^thround. You had to go on the same side again one too many times? Tough. But you got competition. And after all, a tournament for first and second years is all about getting rounds. The best way to get good is to get experience. If there’s some other way to get good, I’m not aware of it. 

Meanwhile, I had judge issues, as in, not enough for LD. Well, it’s young ‘uns, so any experienced PF judge ought to be able to handle them. I only had to do this for one round, and there wasn’t too much hoo-ha from the Peanut Gallery. The exigencies of making things work outweighed the “But I don’t know anything about LD” complaints. And after all, as far as LD in 2019 goes, who does know anything about it? At the highest levels it’s so fast and tediously arcane that whenever I read articles by active judges and coaches, I can’t make any sense out of them. Having been raised on debating the topic—talk about a dinosaur concept—I’m totally lost nowadays. So our poor poor pitiful PF judges can be similarly at sea for an hour or two. The world won’t end for anyone as a result.