In which we may or may not have been wearing pants

Another Big Bronx is in the books. And the takeaway is simple: the tabroom.com software now has a new feature, virtual rooms. No drama. No great revelations. Tabroom works, and thanks to the powers that program for NSDA (e.g., Palmer), this particular feature also works. 

End of story.

 

I’ve done a bunch of little virtual events before this one, which was simply an arithmetic increase in things to do. More rooms to check, of course, but at least in the LD/CX universe, everybody pretty much knows the drill. We only subbed out a handful of judges, inevitably for reasons not related to tech. In fact, the tech side of things makes the tournament move all that more quickly. If a judge isn’t in a room at start time, we know it. We immediately do a replace. For all practical purposes the new judge then immediately appears in the room, and the round begins. No walking to the other end of the campus, or getting lost in the west wing of the high school. (It is a fact universally acknowledged that most large high schools designate various areas in ways unfathomable to the logical mind, presumably to scare enough of the newbies away every year to have more mystery meat in the cafeteria for everyone else. Add to this that most large high schools have annexes, addenda, Quonsets and porta-potties built after the original brutalist main building that couldn’t fit into a normal numbering scheme even if they wanted. Best advice I can give anyone trying to find their way through a high school is to bring extra breadcrumbs.) 

 

One of the good things about large, robust divisions is that MJP is a breeze. 99% come out 1-1 without touching anything. After the 3^rd round, when we start having some down-and-outs, we can start using the poor judges at the bottoms of the prefs. Happily we could say that at the end of Saturday, with 5 rounds that day and 2 the day before, every judge had at least one round (and usually more), and every judge had at least one round off. I think that becomes a must for the tab room, to keep people working but not overworking. This of course means a little loss of all those 1-1 pairings, but in the upper brackets, they ought to be able to pick up their 2s. I mean, MJP isn’t a license to strike 80% of the field. (Although try to tell that to some coaches.)

 

The other thing we did that made the prefs a little less one-ish was gender-balancing in the elims. The Paginator was always a leader in this, and we honor his not-exactly-distant memory by continuing to do it. It’s something we do as a matter of course when there’s no prefs, but something we need to remind ourselves to do with MJP panels. Gender issues are always big in debate; anything we can do to balance things out has to put us at least a little on the side of the angels.

 

The down side of virtual Bronx was manifold: no great fresh sandwiches and homemade chips from the Little Sandwich Cabin, no Thursday night dinner at the chez with Kaz, no late night pairings with a nice port on Saturday, no brown bonnets from Mr. Softee… It’s tough, being home. On the other hand, I did have time to make some pasta Bolognese, some Spanish meatballs with sweet potato fritters, ham and eggs for breakfast, etc. Into each rainstorm a little sunlight must fall.