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.