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.

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.