Tournament Quick Start
This Tournament Quick Start guide is designed to give you a high-level overview of the steps involved in tabbing a tournament using Tabroom. It's written with a first-time tabber in mind, but may also be useful for experienced tabbers as a checklist reminder of what to do at each stage of running a tournament. Each section is deliberately brief - more information and extensive documentation on each feature can be found in the rest of the manual.
With the sheer number of options and settings available, tabbing a tournament can sometimes feel overwhelming. Fortunately, most of the options on Tabroom are only there if you need them - almost everything is set to a reasonable default, so if you're not sure what something does or whether you need it, it's usually safe to just leave it alone.
At its most basic, running a round successfully only requires three things - competitors, a judge, and a room. The process of running a tournament is mostly about providing those three things in a (hopefully, somewhat) timely fashion. Everything else is just details.
If you were to sum up the order of said details in the most general sense, it would look something like this:
1) Set up the tournament - define events, rules, schedules, rooms, etc.
2) Let people register so you have entries and judges
3) Pair/panel a round
4) Enter ballots or let judges do it themselves
5) Repeat #3 and #4 until the tournament is done
6) Publish the results
That's it! This guide and manual will walk you through each of the above steps.
Getting Started
If you want to follow along with this guide, you'll first need to Request A Tournament.
Once you have a tournament linked to your account, the first step is to make it your active tournament by clicking on it in your sidebar:
You'll notice the top row of tabs change - you're now in "Tournament Mode" rather than the general public website:
IMPORTANT TIP: Tabroom is designed to progress logically from left to right, and top to bottom. When in doubt, going on to the "next" menu option will usually put you in the right place.
Each of these tabs corresponds to one of the stages of running a tournament, from beginning to end:
Settings - Contains all the options for things that need to be set up before the tournament, such as events, registration, judge and tabulation rules, entering rooms, scheduling rounds, setting entry fees, etc.
Entries - Lets you view and manipulate entries for competitors and judges, along with some helpful features for manipulating your tournament data, importing/exporting your tournament from other tab programs, etc.
Paneling - Creates pairings and assigns judges for Individual Events. Is not really used for debate events (CX, LD, PF, etc.). The main exception is room pools, which are configured here for all events.
Schemats - Creates and manipulates schematics (a.k.a. pairings, postings) for debate events, including assigning judges and rooms, and lets you view or print them for all events.
Tabbing - For entering ballots and tabulating various results.
Results - For creating and publishing results after the tournament is over.
Settings Tab (aka Tournament Setup)
The Settings tab is where you configure your tournament, from general options to setting up judge groups, events, and the schedule.
The vast majority of problems people have when tabbing a tournament are the result of having failed to properly set something up in advance. To ensure your tournament runs as smoothly as possible, you'll want to check the settings described in this section thoroughly before starting to pair rounds.
In general, you should work your way through the menu options from top to bottom, and check each set of settings carefully. To successfully tab a tournament, you will need to progress through each of these setup steps - it's usually easiest to do them in the order presented here.
General Settings
The "Tournament" menu option contains a number of tabs with general settings for your tournament. Usually, you should scan through all the options on each tab and just set the ones that look applicable to your situation. For more in-depth explanation of each, see the section on General Settings.
Name & Info - Most of this information will already be filled out from when you requested the tournament. If necessary, this is where you can add/remove your tournament from different circuits, and where you upload your tournament invitation document or congress bill packet.
Settings - This tab lets you mark a tournament as a "Test" tournament that won't be listed on the calendar, or a "Closed" tournament where you create all the entries/judges yourself instead of using Online Registration. You can also decide if you want to require adult contact information to register, which is a good idea at most high school tournaments.
Dates & Deadlines - Contains various deadlines, such as when registration opens and closes. These were set automatically when you requested the tournament, so unless you need to change them, the defaults are probably okay.
Access - If you need to give additional people administrative access to the tournament on Tabroom (e.g. tab staff), add them here.
Housing - Only needed if you plan to offer tournament-provided housing, which you probably aren't.
Messages - Lets you create messages shown to all registrants or placed on invoices. Totally optional.
Notes - This can be used to keep a scratchpad of ideas/problems during the tournament, so that if you run the same tournament the following year, you can look back on your notes and (hopefully) not repeat the same mistakes twice.
Rules & Results
"Rules & Results" is where you set up Tiebreakers and Sweepstakes rules. Tiebreakers are rules for determining the seed order in each round (for powermatching prelims), or who breaks to the next round (for elims). This is where you configure things like "break ties on High/Low Points, then Total Points, then Opponent Wins."
Your tournament comes with some default Tiebreak sets, including separate sets for Debate, Speech, and Congress, for both prelims and elims. You can edit these or create your own - or if you're unsure what any of it means, you can just use the built-in tiebreakers, which are a very reasonable default.
If your tournament doesn't have sweepstakes, you can ignore that tab. Otherwise, you can set up the rules for determining sweepstakes points.
For more information on configuring Tiebreaks and Sweepstakes, see the longer section on Rules & Results.
Judge Groups
The "Judges" menu option is where you set up Judge Groups. A "Judge Group" is a collection of judges which can be used in one or more events or divisions. Every event must be in one and only one judge group. For example, you might have a group of judges that can judge either the novice or open divisions of policy, a second judge group exclusively for congress judges, and a third group of judges which could judge any other IE event.
It may seem odd to set up your judge groups before setting up your events - just remember that a single group of judges may be used across multiple events, but a single event will only ever pull from a single judge group. This means it makes more sense to assign events to judge groups than the other way around.
Note that a Judge GROUP is different than a Judge POOL - Judge Pools are used to draw from a specific subset of judges in the larger judge group - for example, only the judges that are still obligated for the semi-finals.
After creating or selecting a judge group from the sidebar, you'll see a list of tabs with the settings for that judge group:
Register - General settings for the judge group. The most important option to set is choosing a "burden method" to compute judge obligations. You should also make sure to set an abbreviation for each judge group. Most of the time, the rest of the default options are fine.
Hires - If you plan to offer hired judging at the tournament, or want to enable a "hiring exchange" where judges and schools can match up with each other, configure it here.
Tabbing - Contains options about how judges are placed, a few MPJ-related options, and lets you choose a method for ballot entry (i.e. whether you have to double-enter each ballot). The defaults on this tab are usually sufficient for most situations.
Ratings - This is where you configure mutually-preferred judging. For the most part, all you need to do is double check the date/time that prefs open and close, and then choose a "Pref Method," whether using Ordinals or Tiers.
MPJ Tiers - If you enabled a tier-based MPJ method on the Ratings tab, this tab will appear and let you configure them.
Part timers - If you have a number of judges likely to be unavailable for large blocks of the tournament (such as judges that only come on Saturday), you can configure timeblocks here that allow registering schools to mark their judges as "unavailable" during certain times. If you just have a few judges that need to miss a round here or there, you probably don't need to use this - you can instead just add a time strike for that judge. Make sure you read the directions on this tab for how to name your time blocks, to help avoid confusion.
Pools - This lets you configure sub-pools of judges from the larger judge group, for example only judges still obligated in an elimination round. Using these is optional, but can make your life easier. You can also create pools as you go through the tournament, so leaving them alone during the initial configuration is fine.
For more information, see the section on configuring Judge Groups.
Events
This is where you configure which events/divisions you will offer at the tournament. Once you have created or selected an event on the sidebar, you will have a number of tabs with options for that event:
'Main - General settings that you set when you created the event. Make sure you set a minimum and maximum number of competitors per entry (almost always both 1 for Speech, Congress, and LD, and both 2 for PF and Congress). You should also set the appropriate event "Type" so that Tabroom knows what types of options to show you for that event.
Registration - The defaults on this tab are usually good for most situations. Primarily useful if you need to set a cap on the number of entries or use a waitlist.
Tabulation - The most commonly set item on this tab is to enable Online Ballots. Make sure you set a number for minimum and maximum speaker points - otherwise your online ballots will appear blank. You can also enable Live Updates for the event, which is commonly used in conjunction with Online Ballots. The default settings for powermatching, judges, and results should be fine for most situations - but if you need to change something like how presets are paired, this is where you do it.
Ballot & Rules - Lets you configure the appearance of the ballot for the event. The default is fine if you don't want to mess around with it.
Updates - Completely optional, lets you have an email sent to someone (e.g. a tab person) when the first and last ballots are in for each round.
To learn more, see the section on setting up Events.
Schedule
The Schedule tab tends to be one of the areas which confuses first-timers the most. You'll proceed in two parts - setting up timeslots, and then scheduling rounds from different events in those timeslots.
Tabroom divides up your schedule into "Timeslots" rather than Rounds. Each timeslot can then have one or more rounds (from one or more events) assigned to it. Different timeslots can also overlap, for example if you had different events running at different sites that started at different overlapping times. You can also have multiple timeslots with identical start/end times but different names for different events if it helps you keep things straight - like an 8-10 slot for Policy and an 8-10 slot for IE's. For an example, see the image below.
First, create your timeslots, which should largely mimic your tournament schedule. Then, click each event on the sidebar and schedule rounds in the appropriate timeslots:
IMPORTANT TIP - For each round you schedule, you must select a "Type" and a "Tiebreaks" set. Otherwise, Tabroom won't know how to pair the round, and won't know what information to collect from judges on the ballot. This is probably the single most common mistake people make when setting up their tournament.
For a more in-depth explanation of timeslots and scheduling rounds, see the section on Schedule.
Sites & Rooms
Sites & Rooms is where you enter your list of available rooms. You can then create "Room Pools" for each event, so that they stay in the same rooms.
On Tabroom, a "Site" is a grouping of all the rooms at one tournament location, such as a campus or hotel. Odds are, you'll only need one "site," even if you use multiple buildings. You only need to create multiple sites if your tournament is very large and spread over completely different locations (such as two separate high schools, or a campus and a hotel).
Once you have created a site, you can either enter the rooms manually or import them from a CSV file. If you use a CSV file, make sure to pay close attention to the instructions on how to format your file.
Optionally, you can assign a "Quality" rating to each room, where 1 is best and subsequent numbers are progressively worse - ties are fine, and the scale is open-ended. Tabroom will then attempt to assign the "best" rooms first.
After all the rooms are entered, you'll usually create a "Room Pool" for each event, and potentially separate pools for certain elimination rounds. Creating a room pool is usually as simple as giving it a name and then clicking on the rooms to add to each pool.
For more info, see the section on Sites & Rooms.
Money
The Money menu option lets you set up entry and judge fees, nuisance fines, as well as sell things like parking passes (i.e. "concessions").
You are given the option of setting entry fees, judge fines, etc. in some of the other setup steps above. The Money section puts these all in one place for easy editing - if the same option exists in multiple places, it doesn't matter where you choose to set it.
You'll want to make sure you have set the entry and judge fees/fines correctly - invoices will be automatically generated based on the numbers you enter.
Website
Each tournament on tabroom comes with a public web address for accessing information about the tournament, schematics, results, etc. You chose the "web name" of your tournament when you requested it, and it will be something like:
http://mytournamentname.tabroom.com
The Website section lets you configure what information/pages are visible on your tournaments site, or when accessing it through one of the tournament calendars. Note that your "Invitation" document is uploaded separately in Settings -> Tournament.
Whether you include additional information or customize your tournaments website is optional. For more information, see the Website section of the manual.