User Manual:Tab Menu

From ATab

Most major tab-related functions can be found in the Tab menu.

Contents

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Tournament Setup

This view lets you add and remove rooms and judges to the tournament. You can also specify the name of the tournament and add a logo which will be shown as a header on all printouts.

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Judges

  • Ranks start with 1 being the lowest, up to 5 being the highest. Higher ranked judges will be preferentially paired into up rounds during powerpairing.
  • Tab? specifies whether the judge is a "tab judge", meaning that judge should be back to tab as soon as possible once his or her round is complete. Indicating this for a given judge will cause that judge to be preferentially given a room which is also marked as Near Tab.
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Rooms

  • Large? will be later used for outrounds support, where outrounds will be held only in rooms marked as Large.
  • Near Tab? specifies that this room is close to the tab room and therefore should be given to judges who should be back to tab as soon as possible.
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Name and Logo

The tournament name can be anything you wish; however, line breaks are not automatically created in the printout headers so an excessively long name may run off the edge of the page.

The tournament logo should be a graphics file of type BMP, PNG, JPEG, GIF, PCX, PNM, TIFF, IFF, or XPM.

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Registration

This window is split into two panes with an adjustable splitter separating them (simply click and drag to resize). The rightmost pane is for School entry, and the rightmost pane is for Team entry.

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Schools

Simply add each new school in this view. Enter per-school Judge scratches in the appropriate column.

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Teams

Selecting a school in the right pane will bring up the Team entry pane on the left.

  • Team Name is the only name by which that team will be known during the tournament. Therefore, teams which are normally known by their school (for example, "Brandeis B") should have the school name included in this column. For editing ease, this is prefilled with the school name.
  • R'd specifies whether the team has completed registration and is actually present at the tournament. Only teams which have this box checked will be automatically paired.
  • Debater A and Nov should be the full name and novice status of the first debater.
  • Debater B and Nov should be the full name and novice status of the second debater.
  • Seed specifies the seed the team is given. More information about seed protection during first round pairing is given in the Pairings section.
  • Scratch allows judge scratches to be specified on a per-team basis. More about judge scratches can be found in Judge Cards.
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Hybrids

  • Hybrid team names (such as "Brown/Smith") are not automatically created and should be specified in the Team Name column as desired.
  • Hybrid can be used to specify the school from which the second debater comes. This school must exist in the rightmost pane.
  • Hybrids are protected against all teams which appear in the same Team entry grid. The entry in the Hybrid column is mostly used to ensure that this debater is recognized as being a member of the second school.
    • If desired, a tab policy variant could be created to allow for protection from both schools.
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Pairings

Select a round by clicking the appropriate button at the top of the screen. Creating pairings can be done with one of two methods: Automatic or Manual pairing.

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Automatic Pairing

Simply click the Pair! button to pair with standard tab policies. First round pairs are random pairs, while subsequent rounds are power pairs.

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Pairing Procedures

These are the exact pairing algorithms the program uses to pair rounds. One key note: The program is designed to always create pairs, no matter what. The program will prefer (as shown below by saying "preferentially choosing") to avoid tab policy violations, but it will make a pair if it must, even if that pair violates established tab policies. This is so that the tab director may exercise discretion when such a possible violation exists.

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Random Pairs
  • Collect a list of teams to be paired from all teams which have registered (which have the R'd checkbox checked)
  • Confirm that there are enough judges and rooms to complete pairing
  • Shuffle the teams randomly
  • If there are an odd number of teams, give a buy preferentially to a randomly chosen unseeded team
  • While there are teams left to be paired:
    • Pull one team from the list
      • If the team has a seed:
        • Find a random opponent by preferentially choosing a team with a seed less than its own seed
      • Otherwise:
        • Find a random opponent by preferentially choosing a team with a seed
    • Randomly choose a judge which has not scratched either team
    • Randomly choose a room which shares the Tab setting of the judge
    • Randomly assign Gov and Opp
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Power Pairs
  • Collect a list of teams to be paired from all teams which have registered (which have the R'd checkbox checked)
  • Confirm that there are enough judges and rooms to complete pairing
  • Sort the list of judges by rank
  • Place each team into a bracket based on its win-loss record
  • Sort each bracket based upon the following priorities:
    1. Speaker Points
    2. Ranks
    3. Adjusted Speaker Points
    4. Adjusted Ranks
    5. Double Adjusted Speaker Points
    6. Double Adjusted Ranks
    7. Win-Loss Record
    8. Opp Strength
    9. Coin toss
  • Balance each bracket by the following algorithm:
    • Consider each bracket, starting with the all-up bracket
      • If there are an uneven number of teams in this bracket:
        • Create a pullup by taking the middle-most team from the bracket directly below which has not already been the pullup in the past
        • Add the pullup into this bracket and resort the bracket
    • If there are an uneven number of teams in the bottom-most bracket:
      • Give the bye to the lowest team in the bottom-most bracket that has not previously been given the bye
  • Create power pairs with the following algorithm:
    • Consider each bracket
      • While there are teams left to be paired:
        • Pull one team from the top of the list
        • Choose the bottom-most team from the list with the following preferences:
          • Don't pair two teams which have hit previously
          • Don't pair within the same school
          • Don't pair a pullup against a previous pullup
        • Choose a judge from the sorted list of judges with the rank paired closest to the rank of the better team in the new pairing according to the following preferences:
          • Don't choose a judge which isn't currently at the tournament
          • Don't choose a judge which has scratched either team
          • Don't choose a judge which has judged either team previously
        • Randomly choose a room which shares the Tab setting of the judge
        • Assign Gov to the team with the fewest Govs
          • If both teams have the same number of Govs, assign randomly
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Manual Pairing

Rounds can also be paired or tweaked manually. This is especially important since the automatic pairing algorithms do not always create the best pairs.

To tweak a pairing, simply double-click on the cell to be changed and select the desired new team, judge or room. If that item has already been paired this round, the old item and new item will exchange places.

To create a new pairing, begin by filling in the blank row at the bottom of the Pairings grid. Once this row is completely filled in, the pairing is complete and no further action is necessary.

To aid in pairing, the Pairings view will highlight pairs which violate the tab policy by coloring the offending item in red. A more detailed explanation can be found by looking in the status bar while the appropriate row is highlighted. The system highlights most, but not all tab policy violations. It is imperative that the user always double-checks pairings before they are released to avoid errors.

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Lock Round

Whether pairing manually or automatically, once pairings are finalized the round must be locked. This action cannot be undone. Locking the round is necessary because retroactively changing pairings would significantly affect the consistency of the tournament. It also provides an important signal that ballots may now be entered.

Because of the indelibility of such an action, I recommend several precautions:

  • Don't lock the round until pairings are read. This allows for cases where Tab makes a mistake which is noticed by a debater after reading pairings. This works because the round does not need to be locked until the first ballot comes in.
  • Save the tournament file just before locking each round. I have seen cases where teams switch Gov/Opp on their own whims, just for example - something which is difficult to work around without a saved last-known-good point.
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Ballots

Sorry, this section isn't written yet! A little bit of information is in the Guide to running a tournament with ATab.

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Outrounds

Outrounds support should be coming soon...

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