Tournament Format

It seems like the LD community has whole-heatedly embraced the regular invitational tournament format. Yet, it is far from perfect. I'd like to later discuss issues like seeding in this thread, but for now I'll focus on two things.

1) Walk-overs.
I remember RL and Diehl discussing this in relation to college debate, but it's also applicable to high schools.
I can't name a single bid tournament which breaks brackets in order to avoid walk-overs, although that would seem like the most sensible thing to do.
We can all agree that the prelims seeding is far from accurate even at a tournament with a very accurate power-matching and superb judging (that's why we have outrounds), so the benefit of pairing people strictly according to bracket as opposed to shifting it by one seed is marginal.
At the same time, the detriments of walk-overs are apparent. They bring in too much chance into the game, knocking debaters who had a chance to go much farther out of the tournament for no good reason, sometimes ending their careers in a stroke of bad luck. On the other side, you have ghost bids, which are, once again, based entirely on luck and discriminate against people with small squads.
In short, walkovers are easily eliminated from the system, and I don't see any tangible benefit to justify all the unfairness caused by them.

2) Single elims [EDITED TO MAKE MORE CLEAR].
Proposal: an NPTE-like format for the TOC, that is, less prelims, more elims, two judges per prelim and double (or even triple) elimination in outrounds.
A case for double-elimination: A single-elim format brings in too much chance into the system, attaching more importance to a one round that that round deserves. I don't see any reason why a debater who was 7-0 in TOC prelims and loses on a 2-1 on octas should be out of the tournament, while a 5-2 debater who picks up on a 2-1 in octas gets to move on to quarters; 7-3 ballot count is not better than 9-1. Yet this is exactly what happened two of the last three years (JKwan and Danielle).
AT/Double/triple elimination will take longer, will have to cut down on prelims: In a limited amount of time, each tournament has to balance between two goals - providing education for all (prelims) and determining the best debaters in the pool (elims). A regular single-elim invitational seems to balance these two goals fairly well, both providing everyone a fair amount of preliminary rounds (5-7) and having enough outrounds to break about a quarter of the field and determine a champion.
But while this balance (about 60/40) is probably appropriate for a regular bid tournament (and a an even bigger skew towards prelims should exist at the less "important" tournaments, such as sometimes a 100/0 split for leagues), I find it surprising that the same ratio (7 prelims/5 elims) is used at championship tournaments such as the TOC. To downplay the educational importance of the TOC, it is the last tournament for most of its participants, and almost all of it's participants are fairly active in the LD circuit, so they had plenty of opportunities before the TOC. While education is less important at the TOC than it is at a regular bid tournament, which might be the only chance for many in its field to try out circuit debate, so that it would make sense to provide them with as many rounds as possible, even if they don't break, the "game" aspect of debate should be valued higher at the TOC than it would be at a regular-season tourney; TOC is used by many as the ultimate determiner of who is a better debater. A regular-season tournament is justified in deciding against checks against low-seed upsets in order to provide more rounds for non-breaking debaters. TOC is not.

P.S. As a side note, there should probably be a forum for the discussion of LD issues in general(paradigms, tournament formats, flex prep etc.) since circuit discussions/help me seem to be geared in a somewhat different direction.

First, that's what the theory forum is for.

Second, there are 2 reasons why some of your suggestions are a bad idea:

a. judges - If you want to ensure quality judging, 2 pannel judges through prelims is not the way to do so. Tournaments are already pretty hard pressed to put together enough quality judges for double flighted single pannel prelims.

b. Triples would require adding more people to the pool. If we did triples at TOC, 64 of the 75ish debaters would clear. Do the math, approximately 84% of debaters would clear under this format. What value does clearing have if 84% of the field did the same thing?

I do however, agree with the idea of eliminating walk overs.

i think double elimination is a great idea.

Theory forum is great, but this particular thread didn't really fit in there.

On your two objections.

AT/a: I am not advocating 2 judge panels for "tournaments" in general, just for the TOC. For a tournament this elite, an effort to have two-judge panels while maintaining the quality of judging would be worth it. To compare: elite tournaments like round robins routinely have two-panel judges. Outrounds of Berkeley have about 50 debaters (63 this year) judged by fairly good judges, and the panels have 3 judges, not 2. Finally, this system is already implemented in college parli, so there can't really be a structural barrier to it.
I will admit, however, that I am not a tab expert, so there might be some legitimate reasons for why the TOC was unable to follow the example of the aforementioned tournaments.

AT/b: I was probably being unclear, but you are obviously not getting my proposal. I am not advocating keeping a single-elim system and adding trips at the TOC. The reason there would be more elims under my proposal is not that we break more people, it's that it takes more rounds to get a given number of debaters down to one champion under the double-elim system than it does under a single-elim system.
To clarify, this is how a double-elimination works: debaters are in the tournament as long as they have one or less loss. That means that even if a 7-0 loses a round, he would still be in the tournament, whereas a 6-1 would be knocked out right away. This system has been used at California State Tournament, and it got a field of 64 debaters down to 1 in 9 rounds. I would have to calculate the logistics, but it might even be possible to implement a triple-elimination system. In it's pure form, the double-elim system doesn't even require prelims, you just keep debating until there is only one debater left. In Cali State, however, they allow the 0-2 debaters to debate in round 3, just so that they don't have to go home after 2 rounds. The reason there is more elims in a double/triple elimination system is that it's harder to eliminate a debater.

P.S. You can check my math, but I think it takes 13 rounds (or 12 if we get lucky) to get a pool of 72 debaters down to 1 if we use triple-elimination. TOC currently has 12 rounds. If we allow 0-3 debaters to debate in round 4 (there's typically 4 rounds on the first day), the possibility the tournament can be finished in 12 rounds increases slightly.
Math: Use Pascal's Triangle (or combinations on a graphing calculator if you still remember those). Row 14 of the triangle has a total of 8192 (2^13) combinations. The last three numbers are 1 (chance of going 13-0), 13 (chance of going 12-1) and 78 (chance of going 11-2). (1+13+78)/(8192)=0.0112 while 1/72=0.0139 . Voila.

arurra wrote:AT/a: I am not advocating 2 judge panels for "tournaments" in general, just for the TOC. For a tournament this elite, an effort to have two-judge panels while maintaining the quality of judging would be worth it. To compare: elite tournaments like round robins routinely have two-panel judges. Outrounds of Berkeley have about 50 debaters (63 this year) judged by fairly good judges, and the panels have 3 judges, not 2. Finally, this system is already implemented in college parli, so there can't really be a structural barrier to it.
I will admit, however, that I am not a tab expert, so there might be some legitimate reasons for why the TOC was unable to follow the example of the aforementioned tournaments.

The reason this is a bad idea is that it requires teams to have a 1 to 1 judging commitment. For big teams this can get really expensive in flights, hiring costs, etc. Round robins are able to do this because there are only 16-odd kids and there are generally max 2 kids from a school. It would also probably wreak havoc on the MJP system in place at ToC, because most of those 2 judge panels would be a 1 and a 3. This year went pretty well, but I think even if there are enough judges to have panels, the likelihood of fitting that into an MJP system is quite low.

arurra wrote:
AT/b: I was probably being unclear, but you are obviously not getting my proposal. I am not advocating keeping a single-elim system and adding trips at the TOC. The reason there would be more elims under my proposal is not that we break more people, it's that it takes more rounds to get a given number of debaters down to one champion under the double-elim system than it does under a single-elim system.
To clarify, this is how a double-elimination works: debaters are in the tournament as long as they have one or less loss. That means that even if a 7-0 loses a round, he would still be in the tournament, whereas a 6-1 would be knocked out right away. This system has been used at California State Tournament, and it got a field of 64 debaters down to 1 in 9 rounds. I would have to calculate the logistics, but it might even be possible to implement a triple-elimination system. In it's pure form, the double-elim system doesn't even require prelims, you just keep debating until there is only one debater left. In Cali State, however, they allow the 0-2 debaters to debate in round 3, just so that they don't have to go home after 2 rounds. The reason there is more elims in a double/triple elimination system is that it's harder to eliminate a debater.

I see. Hmmm...I'll think about this. I agree with thurm about the judging though. This is something I have to think more about

"The reason this is a bad idea is that it requires teams to have a 1 to 1 judging commitment. For big teams this can get really expensive in flights, hiring costs, etc. Round robins are able to do this because there are only 16-odd kids and there are generally max 2 kids from a school. It would also probably wreak havoc on the MJP system in place at ToC, because most of those 2 judge panels would be a 1 and a 3. This year went pretty well, but I think even if there are enough judges to have panels, the likelihood of fitting that into an MJP system is quite low."

Fair enough.

okay I have a question to someone familiar with a double-elim format.
Are the pairings high-low (outside of brackets) or high-high?

Obviously, every double elim format could be different, but the one that NFLs uses is paired randomly within brackets.