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.

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.

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.)