Introduction
Now that many tournaments are online, some things have changed, and others have not. Competing has become far more affordable, since one does not need to worry about affording transportation and housing for tournaments. Still, though, tournaments with higher bid-levels typically attract more debaters and better judges than tournaments with lower bid-levels. Attending tournaments has become far easier, though, since one does not need to worry about the location. The norms of LD, as a result, have become slightly more spread out. While in the in-person era, nearly all rounds in the West Coast would involve policy, in the online era, it wouldn't be as rare to find a round involving kritiks, for example.
Almost all National Circuit tournaments follow a similar structure. They will take place during some weekend, and feature both prelimination and elimination rounds. Tournaments typically have around 6 prelimination rounds. During the first two prelimination rounds, you will be matched with a random opponent and assigned a random side with one judge. During the remaining four rounds, you will be matched with an opponent whose record (wins-losses) is equal to yours, and assigned a random side. By the end of the 6 prelimination rounds, you will have affirmed 3 times and negated 3 times. If you have won at least 4 of your prelimination rounds, you will have qualified for the elimination rounds. Depending on the size of the tournament, elimination rounds will start either at triple-octafinals (top 64), double octa-finals (top 32), or octa-finanls (top 16). During the elimination rounds, you will have a panel of 3 judges, and the side will be determined by a coin flip at the beginning of the round. If you lose an elimination round, you are out of the tournament. To attain a bid, you will need to reach a certain elimination round depending on the "bid level" of the tournament.
At the conclusion of the tournament, awards are typically given out for the top speakers of the tournaments (determined by your speaker points) and for the elimination round that you have reached.
What are prefs?
Most national circuit tournaments offer "prefs", or the ability to rank your judges based on your preference for them to judge you. Usually, you rank all judges in the pool on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 being your most preferred judge, and 6 being your least preferred judge. The manner in which you pref judges is completely subjective, though debaters will typically pref the judges who they think have the best ability to evaluate the style of argumentation that the debater likes to read.
When being assigned an opponent, you will be assigned a judge who both you and your opponent mutually prefer, that is, the judge who you and your opponent have the closest pref match, with higher prefs being preferred.
Ordinal Prefs
Sometimes, tournaments will offer an alternative form of mutual judge preference besides the tiered system where you rank judges from 1 to 6. Instead, you will rank each judge from 1-N where N is the number of judges in the pool. For example, if there are 85 judges in the pool, you can rank judges from 1 to 85 with 1 being your most preferred judge and 85 being your least preferred judge.
These types of prefs are more accurate because in a tiered system where you rate judges from 1 to 6, not all of the judges in the 1 tier may be equally preferred. However, with an ordinal system, you can distinguish between for favorite judge (Your "ordinal" 1) and a judge that you think is great, but maybe not your favorite (Maybe your "ordinal" 10).
However, these prefs may require one to do more work because rather than placing a judge in a tier from 1 to 6, you must place a judge relative to all judges in a pool. This seems overwhelming! How is one able to distinguish between the 23rd best judge and the 24th best judge? An easy solution is to rank judges into tiers first (assigning a value of 1 to 6), saving your prefs, and then sorting within those tiers.
How prefs are used in tournaments
Tournaments may vary in how they assign judges and how they pair rounds, but traditionally the Tabroom software will prioritize assigning the best judges to debaters who are "on the bubble" or in other words, debaters who have two losses. Then, it will assign judges to debaters with one loss, then those with zero losses, then those with three losses, and then those with four losses.
Moreover, traditional Tabroom software will prioritize "mutuality" rather than "preference" What does this mean? It means with the traditional tiered system, Tabroom will try to look for a judge that both debaters have ranked 1, then look for a judge that both debaters have ranked 2, then look for a judge both debaters have ranked 3, and then look for a judge one debater has ranked a 1 and the other debater has ranked a 2. More simply, Tabroom will look for a 1-1 judge, then 2-2 judge, then 3-3 judge, before it looks for a 1-2 judge.
