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.