It has been five years since I started tabbing debate tournaments. When I stared tabbing TRPC or Tab Room on PC was already in use for quite some time at Slovenian debate tournaments. Till now it is safe to say that we have used TRPC for more than hounded tournaments in Slovenia. In this five years I tried a lot of different software solutions and I can say that TRPC is currently best software that I can find. 

 

The software was developed by Rich Edwards and is still supported.  You can find software and the manual here: 

https://bearspace.baylor.edu/Richard_Edwards/www/TRPC_Software.html

 

I have been using TRPC from beginning and I learned  quite a lot about what it can do and how can you use it even if it’s not optimized for your tournament. Main characteristic of the software is possibility to use power-pairing system, which I believe is the fairest system for tournament. Even more it allows you to use different kinds of power pairing. I mostly use so called high-low power pairing that we will discuss latter on. For me it was natural to use power pairing and I was used to from the times when I stared debating in high school. Once I entered international debate circuit I was shocked to see that there is not many high schools tournaments that would use power pairing. Ljutomer International tournament was only one I knew that was power paired. In nine years since my debate career started things have changed. Now more and more tournaments are using power pairing and I am proud to be part of this transition. It all started in 2011 when I was consultant at Heart of Europe and we used TRPC as secondary system for power pairing. Tournament went well and next year we already saw more power paired tournaments. I was tab master at Heart of Europe 2012 and ARGO open 2012. Both tournament went well and most important they were on time. Especially Heart of Europe showed how much potential TRPC has and with a little bit of playing with it we were able to pull out a great tournament. In 2014 I can see a lot of power paired international tournaments but a lot of them are manually power paired which can create problems and delays tournaments. 

 

I would like to give you a complete guide how to use TRPC for World Schools tournaments. Currently there is no quick and easy guide (that I am aware of) to help you with TRPC. Of course there is a manual, which contains a lot of useful information, and I recommend reading it. This guide is meant to give not only the theoretical knowledge about the software but whole experience you will get as a tab master. We will start with the basics of power pairing and then continue with using the software and some tricks that should help you with your tournament. At the end I will tell you a story about how we tabbed Heart of Europe 2012. 

 

In the end I would like to give a huge thanks to Rich Edwards for creating the software that enable us to run fast, efficient and most importantly fair debate tournaments. In case you have any questions about software or tabbing you can contact me via email: aljosapolsak@gmail.com .

 

Author: Aljoša Polšak