Managing Tournament Staff
Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2018 6:57 am
As quizbowl proliferates, more and more teams host tournaments. This is, in general, a good thing. But it does mean that many tournaments are directed and moderated by people who are not aware of the many highly avoidable logistical snafus that occur, and how to avoid them. I am going to list a few here, all of these drawn from incidents that have occurred in the current season. More experienced teams and TD's take note: you may be committing one or more of these errors, in spite of your experience.
(1) Deliberately plan your bracket rhythms. There are two main schools of prelim bracket design. One says that the one seed in each bracket should play their opponents in strict order of ascending ranking (i.e. from easiest matches to hardest). The second says that one should more-or-less alternate between top seeds playing bottom seeds and top seeds playing other top seeds. I personally prefer the rhythm of the second: top teams get a little breather between their toughest rounds, and bottom teams get less demoralized when their worst losses don't come all in a clump at the beginning of the day. But either is viable; and no matter what, the 1 v 2 match should never be the first round of the tournament.
(2) Distribute your good and bad moderators correctly. In an ideal world, every reader can recite the ACF rules by heart; scorekeep, rub their head, and pat their belly at the same time; and enunciate Aztec deities and chemical compounds alike with diction that would make Henry Higgins beam. In reality, some of your staff will be kind souls who have donated their day, but have attended 0-1 practices and are easily defeated by words (a) in English, (b) containing consonants, or (c) both. First things first, distribute the inexperienced staff evenly among the brackets, otherwise one bracket will fall behind. If your rooms are mostly staffed by pairs, do not pair inexperienced moderators together. If the veteran moderator decides to switch off rounds with his or her novice scorekeeper--because the veteran's voice cannot withstand all the rounds, and/or the novice needs experience points before evolving--have the novice read the rounds that are least likely to affect team placement. A team's final standings should not be determined by who is better at parsing syllables that are transposed, swallowed, or accidentally translated into Pig Latin, while a competent reader sits mutely at the side, performing arithmetic.
As a corollary to the above, the 1 v 2 match in a prelim bracket should be read by one of the bracket's best moderators. So, for example, if this is your prelim structure, you might make Team 1 your 1 seed, Team 5 your 2 seed, and Team 8 your 3 seed. Then, Room 3 has the bracket's best moderator, and Room 2 has its second-best.
(3) Re-distribute your good and bad moderators correctly. The playoffs are the opposite of the prelims. Now, instead of distributing your less experienced moderators evenly among all brackets, you are purposely stacking the best moderators in the top bracket. If your brackets are split among buildings or levels, this may require re-assinging moderators to different rooms than those they occupied in the prelims. If your moderators avow attachment to their prelim room, ask them to please move on with their lives.
(4) Read to your players. Many of us need to draw closer to our laptop screens to read them clearly, but moderators should still be reminded to read into the room at large and not directly into their keyboards, as if attempting to perform CPR on them. Likewise, not covering one's mouth with one's hands is always ideal. The precept most commonly violated by even experienced readers is that after reading each bonus part, you should look up from your screen, so you can correctly judge whether a player is proffering an answer to teammates for consultation or is directing them at the moderator. While a TD should certainly brief staff on the last of these points, players should always feel free to politely remind moderators of any of these problems during a match, as they are usually easily remedied.
(5) The reality of time. Our experience of time may be highly subjective, but the actual duration of five seconds is not. You, as TD, may feel stupid explaining to a room of adults (or near-adults) how to count off five seconds. But your discomfort is outweighed by the distress of your players when they discover that one moderator measures five seconds by unfurling their fingers at the pace of a rosebud opening, while the next does so by karate chopping the air as rapidly as humanly possible. And while nothing requires one to count it off in the hair with one's fingers, it is almost always better practice than counting silently in one's head and then calling time out of seemingly nowhere.
(6) Real time means real cutoffs. Don't prompt for an answer on tossups. On bonuses, prompt exactly once and call time. Bless the generous hearts of those of you who do the whole "Answer, please...I need your answer...I really need your answer!" shtick. Thank you for willing us to pull the name of that hard part. But when our time is up, it's up.
(7) Do not send out the whole set to the moderating staff and pray that nobody will read the wrong round. Somebody will. What's that you say? Your staff is too seasoned to make such a scrub mistake? No, they aren't. No. They aren't. There are two ways around this: (1) Have the TD send out the packets one round at a time, waiting until he/she receives the first scoresheet from the previous round before sending out the packets for the next. (2) Send out the whole set, but password protect the files, and send out the passwords one round at a time. I personally prefer the first method, but the second works better if the internet at your site is slow, and downloading packets as e-mail attachments will take forever. Don't send out the list of all the passwords in the morning, either. The state of mind that leads to reading the wrong round transfers easily onto typing the wrong round's password and then still reading the wrong round.
(8) Always assume that you will need more buzzers than there are game rooms. People who claim to be bringing buzzers often forget. Buzzers often choose tournaments as their appointed time to die. And owners who readily testify to the functionality of their buzzers are often clouded by fond remembrances of buzzes past, and blind to the disrepair in which their set actually molders. So, ensure there are extras. But your teammate may object: your other buzzer is in his/her apartment, in the annex half a mile away, and there's six inches of snow on the ground. Why lug it all the way to the tournament when there's already enough sets registered? Explain that the winter outside is nothing as compared to the winter in the hearts of those forced to play slap bowl or on a set that lights up for the player it likes, and not for the one who buzzed first.
(9) When you discover that a buzzer is not working, replace it as soon as possible. Ideally, this means between rounds, with the help of the teams about to play the imminent round. If, for some strange reason, this is simply not possible, then you should definitely be able to do it during the lunch break. If there is simply no way to replace the faulty buzzer, the moderator should determine the exact nature of the problem, clearly explain it to both teams, and determine before the match begins the best way to adjudicate issues. If you wait until a problem actually happens, you may be surprised by the partisanship of the solutions that are suggested. Also, do not place it / leave it in a top bracket room! I'll add that the final standings of a tournament I attended this season were greatly altered by a moderator misunderstanding how the system settled buzzer races, discovering the truth later, but then making no attempt to amend the record afterward, even though the game hinged on a single tossup. This is entirely unacceptable.
Lest my ire seem unduly directed at the inexperienced, let me add that all of us who are experienced have made these mistakes in past and may continue to do so when not reminded. No one expects this knowledge to be inborn, and there is no shame in lacking it while directing one's first tournament. But some schools do this year after year, which suggests that learning is not taking place.
I welcome the contribution of further advice by the many other seasoned TD's whom I know populate this forum.
(1) Deliberately plan your bracket rhythms. There are two main schools of prelim bracket design. One says that the one seed in each bracket should play their opponents in strict order of ascending ranking (i.e. from easiest matches to hardest). The second says that one should more-or-less alternate between top seeds playing bottom seeds and top seeds playing other top seeds. I personally prefer the rhythm of the second: top teams get a little breather between their toughest rounds, and bottom teams get less demoralized when their worst losses don't come all in a clump at the beginning of the day. But either is viable; and no matter what, the 1 v 2 match should never be the first round of the tournament.
(2) Distribute your good and bad moderators correctly. In an ideal world, every reader can recite the ACF rules by heart; scorekeep, rub their head, and pat their belly at the same time; and enunciate Aztec deities and chemical compounds alike with diction that would make Henry Higgins beam. In reality, some of your staff will be kind souls who have donated their day, but have attended 0-1 practices and are easily defeated by words (a) in English, (b) containing consonants, or (c) both. First things first, distribute the inexperienced staff evenly among the brackets, otherwise one bracket will fall behind. If your rooms are mostly staffed by pairs, do not pair inexperienced moderators together. If the veteran moderator decides to switch off rounds with his or her novice scorekeeper--because the veteran's voice cannot withstand all the rounds, and/or the novice needs experience points before evolving--have the novice read the rounds that are least likely to affect team placement. A team's final standings should not be determined by who is better at parsing syllables that are transposed, swallowed, or accidentally translated into Pig Latin, while a competent reader sits mutely at the side, performing arithmetic.
As a corollary to the above, the 1 v 2 match in a prelim bracket should be read by one of the bracket's best moderators. So, for example, if this is your prelim structure, you might make Team 1 your 1 seed, Team 5 your 2 seed, and Team 8 your 3 seed. Then, Room 3 has the bracket's best moderator, and Room 2 has its second-best.
(3) Re-distribute your good and bad moderators correctly. The playoffs are the opposite of the prelims. Now, instead of distributing your less experienced moderators evenly among all brackets, you are purposely stacking the best moderators in the top bracket. If your brackets are split among buildings or levels, this may require re-assinging moderators to different rooms than those they occupied in the prelims. If your moderators avow attachment to their prelim room, ask them to please move on with their lives.
(4) Read to your players. Many of us need to draw closer to our laptop screens to read them clearly, but moderators should still be reminded to read into the room at large and not directly into their keyboards, as if attempting to perform CPR on them. Likewise, not covering one's mouth with one's hands is always ideal. The precept most commonly violated by even experienced readers is that after reading each bonus part, you should look up from your screen, so you can correctly judge whether a player is proffering an answer to teammates for consultation or is directing them at the moderator. While a TD should certainly brief staff on the last of these points, players should always feel free to politely remind moderators of any of these problems during a match, as they are usually easily remedied.
(5) The reality of time. Our experience of time may be highly subjective, but the actual duration of five seconds is not. You, as TD, may feel stupid explaining to a room of adults (or near-adults) how to count off five seconds. But your discomfort is outweighed by the distress of your players when they discover that one moderator measures five seconds by unfurling their fingers at the pace of a rosebud opening, while the next does so by karate chopping the air as rapidly as humanly possible. And while nothing requires one to count it off in the hair with one's fingers, it is almost always better practice than counting silently in one's head and then calling time out of seemingly nowhere.
(6) Real time means real cutoffs. Don't prompt for an answer on tossups. On bonuses, prompt exactly once and call time. Bless the generous hearts of those of you who do the whole "Answer, please...I need your answer...I really need your answer!" shtick. Thank you for willing us to pull the name of that hard part. But when our time is up, it's up.
(7) Do not send out the whole set to the moderating staff and pray that nobody will read the wrong round. Somebody will. What's that you say? Your staff is too seasoned to make such a scrub mistake? No, they aren't. No. They aren't. There are two ways around this: (1) Have the TD send out the packets one round at a time, waiting until he/she receives the first scoresheet from the previous round before sending out the packets for the next. (2) Send out the whole set, but password protect the files, and send out the passwords one round at a time. I personally prefer the first method, but the second works better if the internet at your site is slow, and downloading packets as e-mail attachments will take forever. Don't send out the list of all the passwords in the morning, either. The state of mind that leads to reading the wrong round transfers easily onto typing the wrong round's password and then still reading the wrong round.
(8) Always assume that you will need more buzzers than there are game rooms. People who claim to be bringing buzzers often forget. Buzzers often choose tournaments as their appointed time to die. And owners who readily testify to the functionality of their buzzers are often clouded by fond remembrances of buzzes past, and blind to the disrepair in which their set actually molders. So, ensure there are extras. But your teammate may object: your other buzzer is in his/her apartment, in the annex half a mile away, and there's six inches of snow on the ground. Why lug it all the way to the tournament when there's already enough sets registered? Explain that the winter outside is nothing as compared to the winter in the hearts of those forced to play slap bowl or on a set that lights up for the player it likes, and not for the one who buzzed first.
(9) When you discover that a buzzer is not working, replace it as soon as possible. Ideally, this means between rounds, with the help of the teams about to play the imminent round. If, for some strange reason, this is simply not possible, then you should definitely be able to do it during the lunch break. If there is simply no way to replace the faulty buzzer, the moderator should determine the exact nature of the problem, clearly explain it to both teams, and determine before the match begins the best way to adjudicate issues. If you wait until a problem actually happens, you may be surprised by the partisanship of the solutions that are suggested. Also, do not place it / leave it in a top bracket room! I'll add that the final standings of a tournament I attended this season were greatly altered by a moderator misunderstanding how the system settled buzzer races, discovering the truth later, but then making no attempt to amend the record afterward, even though the game hinged on a single tossup. This is entirely unacceptable.
Lest my ire seem unduly directed at the inexperienced, let me add that all of us who are experienced have made these mistakes in past and may continue to do so when not reminded. No one expects this knowledge to be inborn, and there is no shame in lacking it while directing one's first tournament. But some schools do this year after year, which suggests that learning is not taking place.
I welcome the contribution of further advice by the many other seasoned TD's whom I know populate this forum.