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.)