Comments on: Daniel Moerner Wins Stanford

By: Jordan G

Jordan G — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 03:34:12 +0000

omg guyz i just thought of a delicious turn of phrase: StanFRAUD!!1OMG!111ONE!

By: dweeks

dweeks — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:20:28 +0000

You know, I’ve been a debate nerd and vb checker since like 2002 and I have never seen people complain so much about a single tourn. I think this is reflective of the degree to which this past weekend was so awful compared to other bad tourns.

nermin, I’m pretty sure berryhill is right here. I think the changes instituted by the tourn arent being addressed because you’re assuming that’s what we want to hear. They’re pissed off that they functionally got jacked 2-5 k worth of money that could have been spent at a tournament that was way better less this year. Also, the rudeness of Frasier and some of the utterly incompetant workers at the tourn only fuels this sense of ire. In short, we’re angry. Appoligizing the second after they do something bad doesnt make the person who got wronged less mad.

the origninal letter was a stupid idea. The admin should have posted something like
“Good god, we fu$ked up on so many levels, we need two days to process everyone’s input and answer them satisfactorily” instead of this stupid agenda stuff.
Im gonna go ahead and take what michelin said (i think it was him who initially mentioned it) up a notch. When Cherian Koshy left this tourn, it began to suck. Before i say any more, 1. I am not saying cherian is the only way out of this mess or that cherian had no reason to not do it anymore. 2. I am not saying Frasier, et al. are evil/incompetant/lame/gimp. I am saying that what they allowed to happen, compared to what cherian allowed, is really awful. Last year was a very overtly noticable drop-off from the two to three years previous in terms of judging, competition, administration, scheduling, etc. Plus the 1000 other things people have mentioned in terms far more articulate than my own. borrowing from cherians playbook might be a smart call.

How about you not obsess over compiling A/T: EVERYONE and just refund the schools that got especially ripped off from the absurd reg fee?

eh, whatever, until i hear better news next year, I will see yall at berkeley 09 instead.

By: Joe Vaughan

Joe Vaughan — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 01:59:59 +0000

Random comment and certainly not in defense of anything or in support of anything.

As someone who tabs tournaments fairly often, I would like to make an appeal for people to understand that round 1 schems are generally always late if the tournament starts on the same day as registration. Some tournaments like Greenhill and Glenbrooks (amazing amazing tournaments!) have the luxury of doing registration the day before they begin which is great.

The reason why round one is late often is that it always seems that a few teams miss registration and, for whatever reason, they are teams with a lot of entries and judges. Therefore you wait for them or do the pairing knowing that there will be a TON of changes and byes in the first round, which isn’t ideal. So round one being late is generally a function of people not registering on time (which I’m not blaming them for at all, because things happen, but just so people know the effect).

From this, round 2 is late. The reason is that at the larger tournaments, sometimes you don’t actually know who is IN the tournament until the middle to end of round 1. People might think “there is plenty of time during round 1 to pair round 2!.” My experience is that if you don’t wait, once again, you will assign judges that don’t actually exist and pair competitors that never left their homes. And, for some magical reason, many teams will register and then “forget” to tell you about their drops (some of this might be honest mistakes, especially for the huge teams with legions but for others, they think they can dodge paying drop fees at the table). So you schedule them and find out later they don’t exist. Fun. I’m glad that most tournaments I tab at now have very large unreported drop fines. It’s better to suck up the 10 dollars at the table than the 50 later on.

I just wanted to offer the community a bit of a insider’s view on why there is a slow start to most big tournaments. Usually though, after round 2, things stabilize and should run swimmingly.

I also must say that many of these college tournaments should farm their tabbing out to experienced tabbers who can create an institutional memory. Part of the problem with college tournaments is that the staff changes every year so they don’t know what works and what is horrific. Schools such as yale, columbia and harvard (I can only speak for the east coast but I’m sure there are others) have people brought in specifically to provide that stabilization and institutional memory.

Another thought…at Yale when we were spread all over the known universe, we instituted a “phone or text your results in” option which greatly sped things up, especially in outrounds. Granted, some poor kid whose phone number was given out for the tournament’s use was not a happy camper but man was that a great help to us tabbing. We’d get results back 20 to 30 minutes before we’d get ballots. free advice, yay

By: Daniel Khalessi

Daniel Khalessi — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:34:07 +0000

Here’s a pretty belated post, but I’d like to congratulate everyone on my team (MVLA) for an excellent weekend performance.

Also, special congrats to Rahul, who gave an awesome 1AR against me in our dubs round made it to semis of the tournament. Your hard work paid off here and will hopefully pay off even more at TOC :-).

By: Matthew Fraser Stanford Debate

Matthew Fraser Stanford Debate — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:45:57 +0000

Stanford Debate’s statement has been sent to Mike Bietz, who suggested that he’d like to start a new thread on this matter.

Matthew Fraser

By: Timeliness

Timeliness — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:48:39 +0000

Fittingly the formal statement seems to be late.

By: Michael Baer

Michael Baer — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:16:55 +0000

Two things:

First, comments like “Ms. Camel, or whatever” are pretty unhelpful.

Second, I had dinner with Rich Boltizar earlier today. He and Matt have literally been spending hours on this reply. It’s definitely coming, and they’re doing their best to make it as thoughtful and responsive as possible.

As a Stanford debater and former LDer (hopefully at least some people reading these boards remember me), I’ll be happy to offer my two cents once everyone has a chance to see what Matt and Rich have to say.

-Michael

By: Corbin

Corbin — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:45:14 +0000

Another issue:

Round one I informed Tab that I could not judge the team that I had coached last year, Lynbrook. So of course, round 2, 3, 5 and triples had me also judging Lynbrook. In triples it was even both flights. I feel like this could have easily been addressed because after each error I informed Tab. They were even very rude to me once.

By: Christian

Christian — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:36:30 +0000

Brent: Thank you! Your post was exactly the sort of thing that I’ve been waiting to see since the tournament ended: An acknowledgment that something when seriously wrong, a detailed explanation of how it happened, and an acceptance of responsibility for its happening. Whether Matt’s statement tomorrow follows suit will play a big role in helping us decide whether to return to the tournament next year. Even from my meager experience of running a single dinky local tournament, I know how exhausting it can be, so I can’t imagine how burnt out all the people involved in the administration of the tournament must be at this point, and having to deal with this flood of criticism after putting in so much effort has to be fairly dispiriting. Based on my limited interaction with Matt over the course of the weekend, he seems like a great guy who works very hard with the best of intentions to put on a great tournament and try out new things to make the tournament better. So even though I think the substance of the criticisms being leveled on this thread by myself and others is accurate, I think the tone’s become somewhat over-personal in places, especially after Matt’s initial post, and I would also suggest that people at least suspend judgment on the insinuation that the tournament’s problems resulted from ulterior financial motives on the part of the directors or general indifference or malice towards the competitors. While I certainly think that Stanford’s bid status should receive some scrutiny this year, I also think that status should remain unchanged if Matt et al take responsibility for what happened and outline a real plan for fixing things next year.
.
In terms of what the content of that plan should be: First off, I’m not sure that I like the seeding system for presets. The biggest problem, at least with how the system was implemented this year, was that everyone whose coach didn’t enter their record ended up as a 6 by default, which ended up punishing some of the top kids in the pool with difficult presets draws. In particular, I know Lynbrook’s records didn’t get entered, meaning that, e.g., Rohit and Narayan, who should almost certainly be 1’s, ended up being dropped to the bottom (which we found out when Catherine hit Narayan round 2). Beyond that, I don’t know what it accomplishes. If the tournament clears down-2’s anyway, the biggest risk of not having the system in place is in the very unlikely event that one of the top people in the pool hits two others in presets, loses both rounds, and has to submarine with good speaks to clear. The top people are going to end up hitting each other anyway, so I don’t see why it matters whether it’s in the 5-0 round or the 0-0 round. Either way, one wins and the other loses. More to the point, I have never heard anyone complain about random pairings in presets. Maybe there’s a silent majority out there that’s not making itself heard, but as far as I can tell it’s not really an issue.
.
Second, strikes should be taken way more seriously. Strikes were due around 1:30 on Friday but weren’t used for round 1 at 5:00 or round 2 at 7:30. We got two struck judges in those rounds between our two debaters. And then there were no strikes in the bid round or beyond. Part of having “top-quality judging” is giving the competitors some say who their judges are–the quality of a judge is partly debater-relative, e.g. I’m a much better judge for debaters who like spewing dumb a prioris than for debaters who like spewing dumb Spanos cards. Ideally, I’d also say there should be MJP’s instead of communal prefs. But I don’t know how hard that would be to implement.
.
Third, the overall quality of the judging pool is a worry. Signs all over campus advertising $25 a round to anyone who will show up and take a ballot are not the best way to encourage confidence in the judging pool on the part of coaches and debaters. Meaning, DON’T HIRE STANFORD STUDENTS!!! I’m sure they’re smart, hardworking, ambitious little grade-grubbers (sorry), but odds are they have no clue how to adjudicate a debate round. And I know that at least one of them ended up on a bid round panel. It defeats the purpose of strikes if you give each debater 10 and then hire 20 judges whom no one’s ever heard of. Judge assignment is also an issue, though maybe that was just a product of the software meltdown. No-experience judges in bump rounds should not happen. At that point, it’s no longer the fault of the school that brought them, even excluding the possibility that they were hired. Community prefs (this judge can’t have gotten anything but C’s, given that there was no way for anyone to know who he was) coupled with the judgment of the tab staff should by that point be either keeping him out of the pool entirely or putting him in the 0-5 round.
.
Fourth, barring a really radical revamping of the JOT software and successful tests at other large tournaments beforehand, I would strongly recommend switching back to TRPC. In several years of attending tournaments that use it, I’ve only ever heard one complaint about that software (namely that in fields where a lot of schools have only one or two entries, it pairs the schools with more entries against each other excessively) which wouldn’t be an issue at Stanford. Early adoption is fine, but it should happen at smaller tournaments that (a) aren’t so important for so many people (at this point in the season, getting a bid at Stanford is a very, very important goal for a lot of people) and (b) can more easily switch back to cards or some other backup system.
.
Fifth, break to full trips, or even ideally break all 4-2’s (partial quadruples would just be really, really fun to say). 4-2 screws suck, especially with speaks as wildly variant and arbitrary as they were here (see below). The rationale this year was that there weren’t enough rooms, but given that trips were being flighted anyway, full trips would have required barely 2/3’s as many rooms as prelims did, so either someone in tab sucks at math or speech was stealing our rooms. Maybe the solution is to cap, but I sort of like the idea of letting whoever wants to compete compete. Either way, the screw was brutal this year.
.
Fifth, get a better ballot. The lay judging problem was exacerbated by instructions on the ballot to award the “average” debater 16-19 speaks, and an “excellent” debater 20-23. I remember Adam mentioning that Harker got one judge three times who gave all three students 17’s. That’s annoying.
.
Sixth, I’d renew my suggestion to compartmentalize the tournament more. Have an LD tab in one corner of campus, keep all the LD rounds in that corner, and eliminate the 30 minutes per round of drag on the schedule caused by having to walk half a mile to find your room.
.
Seventh and finally, to man said LD tab room, BRING BACK CHERIAN AND SETH!! I mean, assuming they’re available and interested and such, but that alone strikes me as the single quickest fix for everything that went wrong this year.

By: quinn olivarez

quinn olivarez — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:15:03 +0000

babb speaks so much truth, it’s ridiculous.

accusing me, or anyone else, of an agenda is beyond ridiculous. never mind, i take that back, everyone here has an agenda: make the stanford tournament not suck in terms of its scheduling, out-round judging, and treatment of students who invest a lot of money to travel to said tournament. ms. camel, or whatever, are downright rude to assert that those of us remaining critical are doing so for the sake of being critical.

also, where is this alleged post from the stanford tournament people that was supposed to be posted today?