Resetting brackets

I’ve mentioned this before. Going from prelims to elims isn’t always a smooth journey. That’s why I suggest printing up a bracket as soon as you do make that journey. If things go kerplooey, that bracket will be your lifesaver. Printing up teams in order after the last elim is also not a bad idea, although that one won’t disappear on you if you have elim problems, since it’s already in the history books.

The thing is, kerplooey elims means that, for one reason or another, totally unknown and often irreproducible, your bracketing disappears. Tabroom no longer knows who’s supposed to be debating with whom. On the left side of the pairing screen, where the brackets are supposed to be, it’s all zeroes. The good news is, you can repair this manually.

Start with the pairing that you have. Make sure it’s correct; use your printed bracket and pair it all by hand. (Aha! you say: that’s what that printed bracket was all about.) Once you have it correct, go into what I call the click-and-pair screen, that is, the screen you enter by clicking a team on the pairing because you want to move that team to debate someone else. But instead of moving that team, look up at the right of the screen. There’s an option there to set the brackets. Click on it, and you can set away. Obviously, you’ll follow your printout, but there are rare occasions where people actually want to switch around a bracket. We usually talk them out of it, but it could be a real issue. This is how you would do it.

Unfortunately I can't show a screen shot because a tournament has to be live and the round not adjudicated for that click-and-pair screen to pop up, and I’m not in the middle of a tournament at the moment. I’ll try to remember next time I’m in a position to do a grab, because, as they say, one picture is worth a thousand jaw flaps.

One pool of judges for varsity and novice divisions (updated)

I always prefer to set tournaments up myself. I maintain that setting up a tournament in tabroom is both the most important thing to get right, and the most difficult thing to get right. I do it all the time and I still miss things, a little setting here or there that throws something off in the middle of a tournament. Hell, I’ve followed CP on tournaments he’s set up at Lexington, trusting blithely to his skills, and still run into some missed item that’s thrown something off in the middle of a tournament. So it goes.

Anyhow, one thing I always try to do, if there’s a novice and varsity division of the same activity, is keep the pools totally separate starting at the moment of registration. Separate pools, separate obligations. This is easy enough to do at tournaments when those divisions run completely separately, but at smaller local events that might not be the case. It’s also not necessarily the case when someone else sets up a tournament I end up tabbing. It might just be a mistake on their part, or maybe because of the way they're arranging the finances they don’t want separate pools, even though some judges will be novice-only. (Let's face it: tabroom isn’t very good at breaking down judge obligations that way. It’s good enough at all or nothing, but once it’s a little bit here and a little bit there, not so good. Partial judges, for instance, as of this writing still don’t work correctly, i.e., adding half a judge one day and half a judge the other day. Tabroom is supposed to charge you for missing halves, but it doesn’t. A school can get by with only half its obligated judges if you’re not paying attention to the invoices)

If a tournament does have only one pool, but some judges are novice-only, here’s how I’ve been handling it. I create a separate judge pool for the varsity division. I put all the varsity judges in there. Then I have a list on the side of the novice-only judges (although putting them into yet another pool won't hurt, because that way their status is noted on their judge page, but it's probably not necessary unless there's a boatload of them). Then for each round I tab the novice division first, using all judges. After that, I tab the varsity division using the varsity pool. That way tabroom keeps track of judge use, so available extra judges, if needed, are indeed available and not conflicted. I realize that it’s counterintuitive to tab the novices first if you’re used to TRPC, but that’s the way to do it. If you find that you don’t have enough judges for the varsity division because too many were used for the novices, you can pull at that point from the used judges to juggle things. The point is, you’re going to have to juggle things one way or the other. Juggling this way uses tabroom to the fullest, I think.

UPDATE: My doing the varsity after the novices was predicated on usually having a small number of varsity-only and a large number of novice-only. If the situation is reversed (as it was at Lakeland 2015), it makes sense to do the varsity first.

However you do it, it will lead to hassles in the break rounds if you don't create very specific pools for each division. Since tabroom keeps track of time slots, it will handle much of the heavy lifting if your schedule is accurate, but if you don't draw from the right places, you'll be bringing in either the wrong judges or judges who are no longer obligated. Taking care of pools in break rounds is a given, in any case. It's just more of a given in this situation.

Dropping and deleting entries

There are times in a tournament when, for whatever reason, someone goes away and you don't want to see their name again anywhere. A whole team might leave early (as happened to us at Penn), or a judge walks out never to return, or a kid comes down with the yaws—the possibilities are endless.

To delete a whole school: DON'T. There is a function where you can delete a school, all the entries and judges in one fell swoop, but it's hard to imagine when this might be a good idea. Before a tournament starts, you might want to make note, permanently, of unpaid fees. Deleting a school destroys the record of their pre-tournament shenanigans. During a tournament, deleting competitors renders all the people they competed against incomplete. Inevitably there will come the day when you're working on a tournament and a school gets deleted in the middle of things. This is the day that you will rue.

To delete a student: Drop the student. That's simple enough. Fees owed for the student will remain, as will the count of students judges are theoretically covering. If you go further and delete the student, there's no record of that student's existence, and the people who debated that student are screwed.

If a dropped student comes back: Undrop the student. It happens that students reported as sick are miraculously healed. Next to any dropped student's name is an undrop button. If you undrop someone, you might have to force in a forfeit or two, but any rounds actually competed in will stand, and life can go on.

To delete a judge: Mark as inactive. You can delete a judge, probably without too much damage to an event, but this will leave no record of the judge, or of a team's coverage requirements and the like. On the other hand, you can toggle active and inactive till the cows come home with no damage to anyone whatsoever.

Byes

There is a flaw in the system that may keep the very bottom debater in the bottom bracket from getting the bye. You can determine if this has happened by looking at the teams in order under Results/Event Display.

There is one easy solution. If the bottom team was placed, trade them out with the assigned bye. Granted you won't have perfection in the pairing if you do this, but perfection in the pairing assumes, among other things, that speaker points are an objective measurement always applied equally. If you're truly anal, you can hand-pair the entire round, which only takes a couple of minutes in an average size field.

We have seen other problems with byes in the past. This one is easy to find and easy, on your end, to fix.

Automatic TOC bid reporting

I was putting in some tiebreaker sets somewhere a few days ago when I noticed a new tab for TOC bids under Rules and Results. I clicked on it a bit and it didn't work, but I went back in today and, lo and behold, it seems to be set up. This is a nice idea. As someone who tabs tournaments for other people who might not know how to report bids, i.e., colleges, and tending to forget it myself because, well, it's not my tournament, having the reporting done automatically is a nice touch. I'm not sure if this is actually functional yet, but if it isn't, it will be soon enough.

That's one of the things to keep an eye out for these days. The basic machine of tabroom's tabbing is working pretty well, and although no problem is completely bug-free (Word was driving me crazy today at my Day Job, for example), things usually go fine. Which means that they can start looking at some of the niceties, the little features that go a long way to making tournament directors happy. In other words, it's not just about sitting there during the tournament creating pairings. It's the set up and the aftermath as well. Points reporting to the NSDA is obviously another nicety that will be coming soon enough, no doubt, given that the program is now under their auspices.

There are still people afraid of tabroom, who insist on using TRPC, and as often as not, bouncing back and forth between tabroom and TRPC to try to milk what they can of the former while still holding on to the security blanket of the latter. Oh, well. Sooner or later, they'll make the leap.

Manipulating tough MJP panels

As a rule, tabroom's paneling of judges with MPJ is great. There are a couple of things, though.

First of all, make sure you're looking at the gestalt of the panels. If one side has a 1-1-4 and the other has a 1-2-3, they may both add up to 6 but the 1-1-4 side looks seriously advantaged. Having a higher total count but closer mutuality seems like a better approach. Tabroom, of course, will offer the lowest total count. So, double-check that.

And a process point. We were having a real go of assignments for one particular pairing last weekend at Columbia. We'd let tabroom do the assignments, and then we'd start moving people around until our heads were spinning. Then we had the bright idea to dump all the panels and do the problem panel ourselves by hand. We came up with a decent panel, made a note of it, did an auto assignment, went back in and reverted the problem panel to the one we had come up with, and had easy fixes of the couple we had scavenged from. This is the sort of thing that will probably only happen with tight panels, but it's good to know a way around it. I've put in a request for tabroom to be able to leave pairings with judges and only auto-assign the unassigned rounds, although I don't know if this is possible. It's certainly not an urgent need, just a nicety.

Room and judge pools

CP sets up a nice, neat tournament. I tabbed what he set up for Lexington, and pass along two things.

First, he set up rooms in advance, via room pools, for every round. With big college tournaments, where we’re switching buildings all the time, I also do that, but if I’m in one building all the time, i.e., the average high school, I do it the other way around. That is, I remove rooms from the pool when we get into elims, rather than setting them up first. His way is tidier, although a little more labor intensive. It might be a best practice, though. By the way, unless you have a very simple tournament without break rounds, room pools are a must. I think that’s one of the hardest things for people to figure out about tabroom.

Second, he set up a judge pool for each elim round after the first one, which of course uses all judges. You fill the next pool after the previous round goes off; this is all on the paneling/judges/pool-judges page. It will move in only the obligated schools and the hireds. I’ve just been making one pool of break-round judges and trimming it after each round. His way is definitely better, another best practice. One additional thing I do like to do, though it isn't necessary, is mark judges inactive so that they won’t show at all in any pool. Tabroom ignores time-struck judges, so it’s not as if they’ll be used, but if I see a lot of judges that look like they’re there, I want them to actually be there. We all have our anal moments.

Using multiple devices

Quick tip: Sometimes you work on a computer in the tab room, and during the tournament want to walk around using your tablet or phone to scare up a missing judge or whatever. Problem is, if you log in on a different device, you lose the log-in on the last device. Simple fix: Give yourself two different accesses to the tournament. Give admin rights to the tournament to a second email (create one if you need to). I generally log in with my gmail account but if I want a second access, I use my Yahoo account.

It's a small detail, but it can make things just that much more convenient.

MJP deadlines

This is probably worth passing along.

If you use MJP at your tournament, you will want to set it up so that teams can’t pref unless their judges are all in place. That’s easy enough. You’ll also want everyone’s teams to stay in place. That's not so easy, especially if you have, shall we say, inevitably disorganized loosey-goosey teams attending your tournament (and you probably do). There is only one thing more annoying than getting judge changes once MJP opens and having to tell everyone to go back and redo their prefs, and that's actually being the everyone constantly going in and redoing their prefs. That vague "everyone" isn't blaming the loose geese (leese geese? loose gooses) for the extra work: they're blaming you.

So, a piece of advice. Open prefs late. If the tournament starts on Friday afternoon, open them Thursday night. This reduces the likelihood of last minute changes. Of course, you don’t want that list of judges to be a surprise 24 hours before the tournament, so make sure that you have the list of judges public at least a week before the tournament starts.

Handling mandated judge preferences

We had a handful of “Blue Ribbon” judges at Newark. To wit, these were judges that the tournament had gone out of its way to bring in (with the exception of one judge who was accompanying a registered team). The idea was that, for whatever reason, these judges represented something that the tournament stood for, and that all the entrants ought to be prepared to debate in front of them.

I hedge on explaining the precise nature of these judges because, for one thing, they weren’t all the same. For another thing, a similar situation was discussed by the NDCA. In their case, the tournament had gone out of its way to bring in hired judges adding good diversity to the pool, and the problem was, after all that, should entrants be allowed to strike those judges? If I recollect correctly, it was determined that in the future they must be ranked either a 1 or a 2, but I could be wrong about whether this was actually agreed to.

The problem of forcing a ranking, i.e., forcing people to rank certain judges, is that if you have, say, 60 judges, with 10 for each category, and five of those judges are Blue Ribbon enforced 1s, that leaves you with only five 1s of your own choosing. I guess I could have set the percentages to reflect the five mandated 1s—it’s only one less of all the other categories—but I thought about it differently. I just marked the BRs as inactive during the ranking period. People got to rank all the judges except these.

The next thing was that I didn’t want to burn these folks out. Newark was single-flighted, and did we really want our Blue Ribbon judges in every single round (especially the ones who had just come off two back-to-back final rounds, one for the Round Robin and the other for the postponed Ridge tournament)? Kaz was also one of the BRs, and she still hasn’t stopped mumbling about judging every round at Apple Valley. I can sympathize with the desire for a round off, and if I have the luxury of enough judges to do so, I try to insure at least one for everybody in normal double-flighted tournaments (which was, admittedly, a lot easier in TRPC where you just click a judge on or off for a given round). Our BR judges deserved the same treatment.

My solution was to keep the Blue Ribbons as inactive when I paired the rounds and made the initial judge assignments. Then I went in and turned them on (if I wasn’t giving them the round off). Then I went back to the pairing and looked for bad assignments, starting at the bubble. The logic (which Alston agreed with) of putting BR judges on the bubble seemed intuitive: if these are the mandated judges, it presumes that the tournament respects their decisions without qualification, and who best should be handling your toughest rounds? If a pairing already had a good mutuality, I left it alone. I wasn't there to make a statement, just to use the BRs most wisely.

Doing it this way had a side benefit for tab. Instead of each person having ten 1s, they had fifteen, and five of those were guaranteed mutual. I mean, there are plenty of times when there isn’t a single mutual agreement on a judge between two debaters in the entire pool (and usually this happens to the same schools over and over, who have unique opinions on the pool from the norm as well as unique opinions from a handful of others, whom they always seem to hit). Having a mandated-1 wild card to pop into a down-two round to replace a 1-3 pairing (!!!) was a godsend.

Granted, this sort of Blue Ribbon or mandated ranking of any sort is a rarity, and I’m not offering an opinion on whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing (I haven’t given it much thought), but it is interesting, and it’s something to think about as a general practice, and certainly something that you might have to hack out if you’re the one in the tabroom.

Bracketing issues

At the Newark tournament this weekend we had various issues with this and that. We were running a totally e-ballot tournament, with NLD, VLD, NPF and VPF (plus they were running a couple of policy divisions in another building, and we had preceded the invitational with a round robin, but that’s all beside the point). There were two of us in tab, me and Cruz, until we pulled Sheryl in. Which means pretty serious firepower behind the machines.

For not the first time, we had issues with the debaters advancing in the break rounds. Things did not work the way they were supposed to work. I have no idea why, but this has happened before. You have, say, an octos round that goes perfectly normally, you enter all the results correctly (or in the case of an e-tournament, the judges do it, so by definition the results are correct), and then you go to pair the quarters, and a wrong team has advanced, totally misbracketed. There’s ways of surviving this (which we’re still learning, unfortunately). What we do is pair the round by hand, which is easy enough except for one thing. If the bracketing has gone haywire, the system may not spit out the correct teams in order or resulting bracket anymore. In other words, you can’t rely on any part of the system to know who’s debating whom, if any other part breaks down. It’s all connected.

So this is imperative. I don’t print too many things in tab these days, but one thing I always print is the bracket. When you move to elims, the bracket will magically appear under Results/Web Publish. It won’t be visible to the assembled masses, but you’ll have access to it in tab. PRINT THIS UP BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING!!! It’s your safety net. The North Koreans can take over tabroom completely as far as you’re concerned as long as you have this printout. For one thing, you’ll know who should advance over whom in closeouts when a coach pops by to advance someone. Of course, I believe that you should make the bracket public from the beginning. If a tab room is transparent, that’s one of the things people ought to be able to see. Regardless, when the problems hit us at Newark, they hit the brackets, which stopped updating (which they normally do with each progressive break round). At the point where we were hand-pairing both the PF division break rounds, having this first bracket printed and in hand was a godsend.

If everything is working well—and everything does usually work well—you can pull and print an updated bracket after each round, and I recommend that too. You can’t be too careful, and it’s nice to watch the tournament work its way along. By the way, be careful with those brackets. As of this writing, if you delete it, you can't get it back. (I've put in a request to fix that.)