Running a Tournament¶

This document will cover anything you need to do after all the teams, judges, and rooms are registered and checked in.

For each round after round 1, you need to enter results, make sure you have enough judges, and pair the next round. Having multiple people logged in and entering result information and checking that information makes your tournament run significantly better (faster and more accurate). It is highly advised that you do this.

Entering Results¶

After pairing a round, you will mostly be dealing with the current round’s pairing view (navigate to Pairings > View Current Pairing in the navigation menu). This is kind of the control center for the whole tournament, and you can change pretty much anything from this view. The areas of importance are shown below:

Red: This area shows you basic information about the government and opposition teams. Use this to quickly check if the pairings make sense.
Green: This area shows the judge(s) assigned to a round. In the case of a panel, the chair is the one with the highest rank, not necessarily the one at the top. Click the “NA” button to select panelists
Yellow: This is where you click to enter results for that round. Note that whenever entering forfeit wins or losses, enter speaks of zero and assign ranks arbitrarily. The program will do the right thing. Possible results are
1. Gov/Opp win: The government or opposition team won outright, this is 99% of results.
2. Gov/Opp win via forfeit: The government or opposition team won via a forfeit, e.g. their opponents did not show up. The winning team will get average speaks and ranks for the round and the losing team will get speaks of zero and ranks of 7. You can manually assign the losing team speaks greater than zero if you don’t want to totally tank their speaks, but they will continue to get ranks of 7 (this is potentially changing going forwards).
3. All Drop: Both teams lose the round. Everyone gets speaks of zero and ranks of 7. Use this for when both teams don’t show up.
4. All Win: Both teams win the round. Useful for when a judge does not show up to a round and you don’t want the tournament to run behind. Both teams get average speaks and ranks for that round (recalculated with every round).
Blue: This is where you click to edit the round in the administration interface. From that interface you can change anything you want about the round, e.g. which teams are debating, which judge is judging, which room the debate is in, etc … Note that you can also drag and drop judges around as well as teams from the pairing view, but only within the pairing (i.e. you can’t drag a judge that wasn’t paired in into the pairing, you can make this change from the admin interface, however). Alternatively, you can use the “Alternative Judges”, “Alternative Teams”, or “Alternative Rooms” buttons to swap judges, teams, or rooms without entering the admin interface. Please do not delete rounds unless you also delete the corresponding Round Stats (viewable from the admin interface) for the debaters in that round. You really should not need to ever delete a round, the various options for the results of a round should be sufficient.

Judge Portal and Ballots¶

MIT-Tab supports electronic ballot submission (e-ballots) for judges. Each judge has a unique judge code that is automatically generated when they are created. This code can be found on the judge list view and in the judge detail page.

To use the judge portal and ballots:

Ensure pairings are released (see “Releasing Pairings” below)
Judges can access the judge portal from the public homepage and enter their unique judge code
Only the chair of a panel can submit e-ballot results
Judges can update expected availability from the judge portal
E-ballots have configurable minimum and maximum speaker score limits (see Advanced Topics)
- Default minimum: 15 (configurable via min_eballot_speak setting)
- Default maximum: 35 (configurable via max_eballot_speak setting)
- Scores outside these bounds require justification to tab staff

Tracking Missing Ballots¶

To see which rounds are still missing results, navigate to missing ballots from the public homepage. This page shows all rounds that don’t have results entered yet, helping you track down missing ballots quickly. This is especially useful when you’re ready to pair the next round but waiting on a few stragglers.

Viewing Team Statistics¶

MIT-Tab provides detailed statistics and records for each team:

Team Detail View¶

When you click on a team from the teams list, you’ll see:

Total wins
Total speaker points
Number of times on gov/opp
Average opposition wins (opposition strength)
Number of times pulled up
Number of times hitting the pull-up
Links to view the team’s tab card

Tab Cards¶

Each team has a “tab card” that shows their complete tournament record. You can view a team’s tab card by clicking “View Tab Card” from the team detail page, or view all team tab cards at once from the Backups menu in the navigation bar.

Tab cards display:

Round-by-round results (W/L)
Gov/Opp sides for each round
Individual debater speaks and ranks for each round
Opponents faced in each round
Judges assigned to each round
Current tournament statistics and standings

Pairing the Next Round¶

To pair a round, navigate to the current pairing view (Pairings > View Current Pairing in the navigation menu) and hit “Prepare Next Round”. For any round after round 1, make sure that all results have been entered. After that, you should see this page:

This signals that it is safe to pair the round. Backups before and after the pairing will automatically be created for you and labeled with the round number in case you need to restore from backups due to a pairing error.

After pairing, you have several options:

Assigning Judges¶

Hit the “Assign Judges” button to automatically pair judges into the rounds. The automatic assignment algorithm:

Assigns the highest-ranked judges to the highest-seeded (best speaking) rounds
Respects all scratches (both tab and team scratches)
Avoids rejudging when possible (teams seeing the same judge again)
Excludes wing-only judges from chair positions (they can still be assigned as panel members)
Uses a maximum weight matching algorithm for optimal assignments

Manual Judge Assignment: You can also manually assign or swap judges, this is frequently needed after the automatic assignments:

Click on any judge name in the pairing to see alternative options
Use “Set To Chair” to change who is chairing the round (for paneled rounds)
Use “Remove Judge” to remove a judge from a panel
Drag and drop functionality is also available for quick swaps
Chair assignment: The chair is automatically set to the highest-ranked judge when judges are assigned, but you can manually override this
Rejudge Warnings: If a judge has judged one or both teams before, you’ll see a warning badge with a count (e.g., “(2)” means they’ve judged both teams before). This helps you avoid rejudges when possible.

Assigning Rooms¶

After judge assignment, you can also use the “Assign Rooms” button to automatically assign rooms to pairings based on room rankings. Higher-seeded rounds will get better rooms if the enable_room_seeding setting is checked (default).

You can also manually change room assignments by clicking on any room name and selecting an alternative room from the dropdown.

Swapping Teams¶

If you need to swap teams between rounds (e.g., to fix a pairing error), you can:

Click on any team name in a pairing
Select “Alternative Teams” to see other teams available for swapping
Choose a replacement team from those not yet paired in

This is useful for quickly fixing pairing mistakes without having to go through the admin interface.

Releasing Pairings¶

Use the “Release/Close Pairings” button to toggle whether pairings are publicly visible. When released, pairings can be viewed by anyone without authentication (navigate to Pairings > View Current Pairing).

Afterwards, hit the “Assign Judges” button to pair judges into the rounds.

Backing Up¶

MIT-TAB supports the concept of “backups” which allow you to create full backups of the state of your tournament at any given moment. Treat your tournament like a final paper: save early, and save often.

You will automatically get backups before and after each pairing event, labeled with the round number. If you manually backup a timestamp will be appended to the name so that you can tell which is which. Eventually, we plan to support arbitrary naming, but that is not ready yet.

Use cases:

You pair a round but need to re-pair because teams showed up that were checked out, or a bunch of judges shows up late, etc …
If you download the backups it can also serve as a crash prevention system. If for whatever reason your server goes down, you can start up your tournament on another computer using the downloaded backup file.

Creating a back-up¶

Under the “Backups” menu in the navigation bar, select “View Backups”
Name your backup, then click “Create Manual Backup”
You will now be redirected to the lists page, where you can see the backup file
(Optional) Click on the backup file and click the “Download Backup” copy to have a local version just in case

Restoring from a back-up¶

(Recommended) Create a back-up of your current tournament state using the instructions above, in case you need to access it again.
Under the “Backups” menu, select “View Backups”
Find the back-up you’re looking for. Auto-generate back-ups are named clearly. Manually backups have a imestamp at the end of them
Click on the back-up and click “Restore From Backup”

NOTE: You may be logged out after restoring from a back-up. The username/password is still the same.

Re-pairing a round¶

If something went wrong in the pairings, you may want to pair the round again. In order to do this, all you have to do is restore from the before pairing back-up and then pair the round as described above

To find the back-up to restore from, go to “Backups” > “View Backups” and click on the one with the name round_x_before_pairing.db, where x is the round number that you want to re-pair.

Removing Teams, Rooms and Judges¶

Throughout a tournament, you may have to remove a room, drop a team, etc. There used to be a delete button, but deleting teams/rooms/judges can potentially delete results from rounds that occurred, so that button was removed.

If you want to delete an entry (rather than just checking it out):

Reconsider your decision. Why does checking it out not work?
Make sure that the judge/team/room/debater was not paired in to any rounds.
Delete it using the Admin Interface

NOTE: You will never have to remove a debater if there is still another debater on the team. Just enter the results as an iron-person round.

Removing a team¶

To remove a team, simply uncheck the “Checked in” checkbox at the bottom of the team’s detail page. Simply re-check this to add them back in

Removing a judge¶

To remove a judge, uncheck the “Checked in for Round _” checkbox for each round that you want to check them out for.

Removing a judge

Removing a room¶

To remove a room, uncheck it in for the given round. You must have enough checked in rooms for this to work.

Public Displays¶

MIT-Tab supports public displays for teams, pairings, and results to allow competitors and spectators to view tournament information.

Settings Form¶

The easiest way to manage public visibility and other tournament settings is through the Settings Form (accessible via Admin > Settings in the navigation menu). This provides a user-friendly interface with descriptions for all available settings, eliminating the need to manually edit settings in the admin interface.

Public Pairings¶

Pairings can be made publicly visible with the “Release/Close Pairings” button on the pairing view. When released, the current round’s pairings are accessible without authentication from the public homepage.

Public Teams List¶

The teams list can be made publicly visible by checking the teams_public setting. This makes the teams list accessible without authentication. You can control whether debater names are shown using the debaters_public setting.

Public Judges List¶

The judges list can be made publicly visible by checking the judges_public setting. This makes the judges list accessible without authentication. The public judges list shows:

Judge names
School affiliations
Check-in status for each round

Batch Check-in¶

MIT-Tab provides a batch check-in interface (navigate to Admin > Batch Check In) that allows you to check in or out teams, judges, and rooms for multiple rounds at once. This is significantly faster than checking in entities individually and is useful for managing availability across the entire tournament.

The batch check-in interface has three tabs:

Team: Check teams in or out for the entire tournament (teams are either in or out)
Judge: Check judges in or out for specific rounds, including outrounds (round 0)
Room: Check rooms in or out for specific rounds, including outrounds (round 0)

Note: Unlike judges and rooms, teams cannot be checked in for specific rounds. They are either checked in for the entire tournament or not at all.