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Baltimore Spring 2010

Will you attend this competition?


  • Total voters
    30
  • Poll closed .

Kian

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Oh yeah and I proved myself or something like that.

Getting a single high 16 with an OLL that was the beginning of a Y perm and T Perm for PLL does not prove you average 13 seconds.

I remain an embarrassment.

Did you get back already?

Yes sir. Got back around 10. Less than a 3 hour drive for Kyle and I.

In all seriousness, I did have fun at the competition because of the people, but I think there are a lot of organization lessons to be learned from this competition. Among them are: Have score sheets printed beforehand; print scrambles (especially FMC sheets) with color ink so that the color scheme is not several shades of gray; have people you expect to judge in each round; run rounds in groups (heats) and use two sets of scrambles when necessary; go over the schedule beforehand so that very obvious things aren't missing; and many others.

Basically my point to those that might run another competition and to anyone else is that preparation is more than just securing a room and ordering pizza. I'm not trying to demean anybody, problems can only be rectified when they're addressed head on. I do this so that more people won't make the same mistakes. All competitions have flaws, our goal should be to reduce them.

Again, I will reiterate that I had a great time, as I always do, but I just could have done without the complete lack of order and not doing FMC just because I was afraid we would fall too far behind if we didn't have a number of people available to get through other puzzles concurrently. It's so much that I care about the event as much as it just shouldn't be necessary to do what I did, and I feel it was.
 
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Tim Reynolds

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Oh yeah and I proved myself or something like that.

Sorry, but I don't see how you proved yourself...You claim to be a 13-second cuber, and your best solve was 16.xx with a really easy last layer. Get a decent 3x3 average, and you will prove yourself. Stop wasting time at competitions, and people will respect you. Other than that, since nobody cares about single solves, you didn't prove yourself today.
 

puzzlemaster

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I remain an embarrassment.

He got a 13 on his first solve. (I highly doubt this was legitimate)

How could it not be legitimate if it was official? Confused...

People have told me how it could have been done, but I don't really want to post it here as people might be able to use this in a competition. (I doubt that it could be used much, unless the runner makes a mistake, or the competition was very busy, and people weren't paying attention to things - which could easily happen.)

I don't want to assume it was fake, but I doubt that someone who averages 50-60 seconds can get a 13 second solve.

Yea I noticed it on the sheet and showed it to bob and tim. Both of them just looked at the sheet like "what??" Bob was then watching his next solve on which he got a 34 or something. In any case, there wasn't really any reason or proof against him so i'm assuming that's the reason that bob gave it to him.
 

chris410

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Oct 12, 2009
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I remain an embarrassment.

No...I get that award! Why? I DNF'd 2x2...it was my first time solving 2x2 in competition and I was distracted on my last solve (completely my fault) and ended up with a DNF. Of course, I compete because I enjoy them and it is always nice to sit and talk with other cubers. The final was fun to watch, congrats everyone!
 
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fanwuq

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In all seriousness, I did have fun at the competition because of the people, but I think there are a lot of organization lessons to be learned from this competition. Among them are: Have score sheets printed beforehand; print scrambles (especially FMC sheets) with color ink so that the color scheme is not several shades of gray; have people you expect to judge in each round; run rounds in groups (heats) and use two sets of scrambles when necessary; go over the schedule beforehand so that very obvious things aren't missing; and many others.

Basically my point to those that might run another competition and to anyone else is that preparation is more than just securing a room and ordering pizza. I'm not trying to demean anybody, problems can only be rectified when they're addressed head on. I do this so that more people won't make the same mistakes. All competitions have flaws, our goal should be to reduce them.

Again, I will reiterate that I had a great time, as I always do, but I just could have done without the complete lack of order and not doing FMC just because I was afraid we would fall too far behind if we didn't have a number of people available to get through other puzzles concurrently. It's so much that I care about the event as much as it just shouldn't be necessary to do what I did, and I feel it was.

1. The score sheets were printed ahead of time. Filling in everyone's names ahead of time could have helped, but we did not lose any time there.
2. I'll take the blame for the scheduling. I forgot to put 5x5 in there.
3. The WCA delegate is supposed to provide the scrambles according the the new rules. It's not my fault that Bob did not get several groups of scrambles, print them in color ahead of time, or that we did not have color ink.
4. I tried to gather people to help with judging and scrambling, but many people that I asked said that they did not want to do the work. It was also a bit disappointing that a few friends that were supposed to show up and help did not show up. I was busy most of the time; there simply wasn't a lot of people who were willing to help. The other 2 organizers did not do as much work as I expected.
5. Dave Campbell had a lot of organization experience. We should have discussed the plans at the beginning of the day. I was way to busy trying to keep everything in order myself that I did not get to talk much to the experienced people. I do thank the experienced people for helping with judging, entering data, and scrambling. Overall, we got done all the events we needed to do and things ran fairly well until people I wanted to find started to disappear on me. That's when timers started to be used inefficiently.
 

Tim Reynolds

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1. The score sheets were printed ahead of time. Filling in everyone's names ahead of time could have helped, but we did not lose any time there.
Yes you did lose time there. When rounds were supposed to be starting, the cards were being written--that meant also I had to stop doing data entry so that the spreadsheet could be used to write cards. The reason the round started in a timely manner was that people like Dave, Bob, Kian, Dan, and I just went ahead and started rounds anyway, making our own scorecards.
3. The WCA delegate is supposed to provide the scrambles according the the new rules. It's not my fault that Bob did not get several groups of scrambles, print them in color ahead of time, or that we did not have color ink.
This is the kind of thing that, regardless of whose job it is, it's your job to make sure it's done properly. You should have checked in advance that Bob was going to generate the right number of scrambles (there's no need for two groups if you have a judging staff, which many competitions do). You should have checked that they were going to be printed properly--I'm sure that, had you asked and told him you didn't have a color printer.

Basically, as the competition organizer, anything that goes wrong needs to be corrected by you, and everything that could likely go wrong and mess up the competition should be thought of in advance and made plans for. It doesn't matter whose fault something is--it ends up coming down to the organizer.
4. I tried to gather people to help with judging and scrambling, but many people that I asked said that they did not want to do the work. It was also a bit disappointing that a few friends that were supposed to show up and help did not show up. I was busy most of the time; there simply wasn't a lot of people who were willing to help. The other 2 organizers did not do as much work as I expected.
This is a good lesson for all organizers: non-cubers who have no reason to show up (basically, people who aren't family members or girlfriends/boyfriends) are, for the most part, horribly unreliable at showing up to judge. Hard to blame them--cubing competitions are pretty boring for non-cubers, especially judging.

Basically what it comes down to is that the competition organizer needs to know exactly what's going on and what needs to be happening. Experienced competitors shouldn't be the ones deciding when a round should start--that's the organizer's job to figure out. When a round starts, the organizer should know who's available to judge/scramble, and should ask those people to do so.

I don't mean to call you out in particular--nearly every problem I saw was something that came up at competitions like DC, Brown, Fort Lee, Captain's Cove, Cumberland Valley, etc. But I'd just like to see competition organizers be, in general, more organized and more in control of what's going on.
 

puzzlemaster

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1. The score sheets were printed ahead of time. Filling in everyone's names ahead of time could have helped, but we did not lose any time there.
Yes you did lose time there. When rounds were supposed to be starting, the cards were being written--that meant also I had to stop doing data entry so that the spreadsheet could be used to write cards. The reason the round started in a timely manner was that people like Dave, Bob, Kian, Dan, and I just went ahead and started rounds anyway, making our own scorecards.
3. The WCA delegate is supposed to provide the scrambles according the the new rules. It's not my fault that Bob did not get several groups of scrambles, print them in color ahead of time, or that we did not have color ink.
This is the kind of thing that, regardless of whose job it is, it's your job to make sure it's done properly. You should have checked in advance that Bob was going to generate the right number of scrambles (there's no need for two groups if you have a judging staff, which many competitions do). You should have checked that they were going to be printed properly--I'm sure that, had you asked and told him you didn't have a color printer.

Basically, as the competition organizer, anything that goes wrong needs to be corrected by you, and everything that could likely go wrong and mess up the competition should be thought of in advance and made plans for. It doesn't matter whose fault something is--it ends up coming down to the organizer.
4. I tried to gather people to help with judging and scrambling, but many people that I asked said that they did not want to do the work. It was also a bit disappointing that a few friends that were supposed to show up and help did not show up. I was busy most of the time; there simply wasn't a lot of people who were willing to help. The other 2 organizers did not do as much work as I expected.
This is a good lesson for all organizers: non-cubers who have no reason to show up (basically, people who aren't family members or girlfriends/boyfriends) are, for the most part, horribly unreliable at showing up to judge. Hard to blame them--cubing competitions are pretty boring for non-cubers, especially judging.

Basically what it comes down to is that the competition organizer needs to know exactly what's going on and what needs to be happening. Experienced competitors shouldn't be the ones deciding when a round should start--that's the organizer's job to figure out. When a round starts, the organizer should know who's available to judge/scramble, and should ask those people to do so.

I don't mean to call you out in particular--nearly every problem I saw was something that came up at competitions like DC, Brown, Fort Lee, Captain's Cove, Cumberland Valley, etc. But I'd just like to see competition organizers be, in general, more organized and more in control of what's going on.

And on top of all of that while all of you were doing FMC we had to start doing 4x4 in an attempt to get the schedule back on track. Kian and I had to start otherwise we would've had a HUGE delay. Dont worry Tim...this statement isn't directed at you. As mentioned by both Kian and Tim, the organization could definitely have used some work. I tried my best to help :p obviously it wasn't enough to keep everything on track. In the end though, it was fun.
 

JBCM627

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As mentioned by both Kian and Tim, the organization could definitely have used some work.
This is why I've been sending out surveys after competitions. It gives people a chance to point out things that went both poorly and well. But if you do create a survey, you definitely have to be receptive to criticism, and not try to point-counterpoint everything in your head. If you can do that, then coming up with good solutions that address issues and suggestions people come up with is really the hard part.

Somewhat related: If anyone is thinking about creating a competition survey, I'd recommend not asking multiple choice or "rating" questions. From experience, I've found that these questions don't tell me anything I didn't already know. They also seem to discourage people from answering free-response questions. I've also found about a 20-25% survey response rate to be normal.
 
Last edited:

fanwuq

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1. The score sheets were printed ahead of time. Filling in everyone's names ahead of time could have helped, but we did not lose any time there.
Yes you did lose time there. When rounds were supposed to be starting, the cards were being written--that meant also I had to stop doing data entry so that the spreadsheet could be used to write cards. The reason the round started in a timely manner was that people like Dave, Bob, Kian, Dan, and I just went ahead and started rounds anyway, making our own scorecards.
3. The WCA delegate is supposed to provide the scrambles according the the new rules. It's not my fault that Bob did not get several groups of scrambles, print them in color ahead of time, or that we did not have color ink.
This is the kind of thing that, regardless of whose job it is, it's your job to make sure it's done properly. You should have checked in advance that Bob was going to generate the right number of scrambles (there's no need for two groups if you have a judging staff, which many competitions do). You should have checked that they were going to be printed properly--I'm sure that, had you asked and told him you didn't have a color printer.

Basically, as the competition organizer, anything that goes wrong needs to be corrected by you, and everything that could likely go wrong and mess up the competition should be thought of in advance and made plans for. It doesn't matter whose fault something is--it ends up coming down to the organizer.
4. I tried to gather people to help with judging and scrambling, but many people that I asked said that they did not want to do the work. It was also a bit disappointing that a few friends that were supposed to show up and help did not show up. I was busy most of the time; there simply wasn't a lot of people who were willing to help. The other 2 organizers did not do as much work as I expected.
This is a good lesson for all organizers: non-cubers who have no reason to show up (basically, people who aren't family members or girlfriends/boyfriends) are, for the most part, horribly unreliable at showing up to judge. Hard to blame them--cubing competitions are pretty boring for non-cubers, especially judging.

Basically what it comes down to is that the competition organizer needs to know exactly what's going on and what needs to be happening. Experienced competitors shouldn't be the ones deciding when a round should start--that's the organizer's job to figure out. When a round starts, the organizer should know who's available to judge/scramble, and should ask those people to do so.

I don't mean to call you out in particular--nearly every problem I saw was something that came up at competitions like DC, Brown, Fort Lee, Captain's Cove, Cumberland Valley, etc. But I'd just like to see competition organizers be, in general, more organized and more in control of what's going on.

1. While it was not the conventional way to do things, what we did for the first event could have worked for everything else.
I expected to just call out that an event is starting. People will line up to write their names and put down their puzzles. The scramblers could immediately start scrambling while people write their names. They can make 4 lines at the registration table and that shouldn't take more than 3 minutes. Apparently that's not the way things work now, but it seems possible that this can become a good system.
3. There's no way I could have expected that before the competition. I'll take this into consideration next time.
4. There were 4 people in my cubing club that promised to show up and didn't. I emailed them several times in the last week. People have other things to do; I can't do anything about it.
I wanted to collect puzzles before the round starts. Dave wasn't so happy about that; he clearly liked to be in control, so I ended up judging a lot of people off to the side. While it is possible for me to become a dictator to make the events go faster, I thought it was better to give everyone more freedom. I make the event possible and help out as much as I can. People who like to control the situation can do that. People who just want to chill can do that too.

@Sagar

I think 2x2 r1 and 3OH r1 were quite satisfactory. We started to get off schedule when I went to do FMC. The other 2 organizers did not do what I told them to do...
Actually, it doesn't even matter. They had fun and nothing ever goes perfectly any way. Not a lot of things went wrong; we simply had to cut OH finals. We can always do better next time.

Thanks to everyone who has helped!

@JBCM627

The survey is a nice idea. Care to share any of your results/conclusions?
 
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