Joined: Aug 18, 2003
Germany
Posts: 1520
Location: Germany
Status: Offline
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Dear Blood Bowlers
Let me assure you, I have tried to give you the best possible tournament in history, I tried to think about every small detail to make it great, I had one chance only, and I blew it. I feel extremely bad, up to the point where I just want to leave everything behind me and be somewhere in a dark cave so I don't have to speak to no-one.
In order to understand what happened, I wrote this for you to see what we went through during these days.
First of all, despite everybody blaming the Software for all the delays, it probably sounds funny or strange, but the Software worked exactly as expected. But if you feed the software with wrong information it will calculate it wrong. The Software has worked at UKTC without any problems, also at Tilean team Cup and German Team Bowl. Only at Bibali Cup it did not work because the preparation of the file was bad. There were misunderstanding between me and the organizers, which lead to a breakdown in the draws. Nothing we could fix that easily. So 3 out of 4 tries worked without problems, the software works, but we knew we had to be very careful when setting up the file.
The whole mess basically started 3 weeks before the event when I found out that the glue on the iron foil will not stick to the markers as we had planned. The manufacturer tried several things, but nothing really improved the problem. So I thought that it would be ok for people to use superglue to getter better contact, but in order to help people I made the decision that everybody gets them pre-assembled, instead of the players putting them together themselves. This was the worst decision I have EVER made. It took 2 weeks, 4-6 people working on them until 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning, including myself. Instead of taking care or proper data-entry I was putting puzzles together. Instead of entering all the line-ups of each squad and making sure the manual draw was properly entered I was putting ironfoil on the puzzles.
So on Wednesday afternoon we started to put the skill markers into the bags for each coach.... and on Thursday until 4pm. This is when we make a second bad call, instead of letting the coaches pick their own markers, we sorted them by ourselves... This is what caused the long delays on Thursday.... In the meantime we registered the squads to see who is missing. At that point I knew about 12 coaches missing. Then another mistake happened, which we still don't know who's fault that is, but it is pointless to argue. There was an Italian group which had two squads, but they only send one person to the registration for both squads. Either they forgot to tell our staff who the second squad is or our staff forgot the put a check mark on it. It's pointless to do fingerpointing now, it just happened. So by midnight, shortly before the hall closed, I was given the lists. I put in on inside of my laptop, but when I left it must have slipped out of it. When I was at the hotel the list was missing. Here is when I started panicking the first time, because at this point I also noticed that the squad order was not in the system and Milo had the list on his computer. So I started entering the infos from our webdata base manually and gave up at 2 a.m. in the morning after I had only done 10% of all squads.
I went with Milo early to the venue on Friday morning where I found the missing coaches list on the floor. I started organizing the drop-outs in the way we had planned it. We had 18 drop-outs plus one team (so we thought). In the meantime Milo started to write a script to enter the lineups. Under pressure and his sickness it took very long, it felt like ages. As originally planned and announced prior to the event, I had called the single sign up squads to me and told them which team they will be with from now on and we sent them to their new squads. We also had to switch one pairing. Now we are already in two hours delay and I had to to start the opening ceremony, which of course also had a technical problem since the server just broke down shortly before the presentation was about to start. I'm on the stage and was hoping Milo was getting the script done. Usually he is very quick, but with his health condition getting worse his concentration was gone. Every few minutes somebody of our staff came in and asked him how long? how long? And we couldn't give any good info. By the time the draw was out, we had 2.5 hours delay. We thought we were in calm waters now. Then the one squad came back and told us there was already some other squads playing. This is when we found out that the missing squad was indeed not missing. Usually I would have called the captain of that missing squad to see what happened, but due to the other problems I was overloaded with work and did not ask somebody else to do it. So we came up with the idea of them having to play each other (it was a squad of single sign-ups and they did not know each other), which they liked.
Then the second game came upon us. Apparently some 7man squads had wildly mixed their team and other people ignored the order we assigned them. This lead to about 10 games to be changed manually, which took time. The next draw was out, but we learned quickly that some pairings had just played in round 1 against each other. So I looked in the Software why this happened. It took a while to locate the error. It was not an error in the code, but a data entry problem. When I did the manual draw during the press conference I have updated the game 1 page with the results of the draw, but I forgot to update the center piece of the main window with the pairings, so it still showed a random dummy draw and by accident it only affected a few squads. I'm actually happy that it happened already in game 2 and not later during the tourney. NAF committee came in to see what the hold up is and I explained it to them. Again, Milo wrote a script to extract the data from game 1 and sorting it so I could fit it in my main page. Again that took time of unknown length. So once the draw was out NAF committee and us agreed on dropping the third game especially after the long Thursday.
After game 2, Milo and I went to the hotel and worked until 2 a.m to clean out all remaining mess in the system, except one, but this only affected the two student teams and we were able to enter data manually for them after each draw. We did some tests and we were somewhat confident that it should work now, but we were also confident at game 1 and 2, so we cautioned the NAF committee, that we believe 4 games are feasible, but only if we have more time between games and also reducing the game time back to the original 2.25hours. The 45min in between games was enough to download the results (takes about 5-8min for 1428 coaches), create the ranking (4-6min) and put the next draw up online (5-8min). After each step we have reviewed the data thoroughly to make sure there were no errors. This lead to a perfect Saturday.
On Sunday morning Milo put the 7-man-squad changes on my computer, which I was supposed to put in during the first game. This morning was crazy, so many people needed information and ask question after question and by the time game 7 came to close I still had to put the changes in the system. That caused about 15min delay. Then the 3hour-free-Wifi ran out and in the middle of uploading the data we lost internet connection and it was impossible to get my laptop to do anything. After 15min we finally were able to get the file on a USB stick and put it on Milos computer. This was the moment when I ran onto the stage to make the announcement that there will be a delay. In the meantime we had the data uploaded and Milo was running the last checks to see if there are any mistakes left and indeed, he found one. But that was an easy fix, but the upload would take 6min. We still double checked the data again and then we announced the draw. The rest is history
For the award ceremony we wanted to look for the best coaches, but this was only possible on Milos database and he missed some tiebreakers in his rankings, which I had in my Excel system. So we cross-checked it while Christian Schwager was writing the award documents. That mismatch between Milos ranking an mine also caused the confusion of some coached believing their squads should not play against each other. Actually, that was partially true, because in my system I accidentally mixed the second and third tiebreaker around after game 6. So games 7 and 8 had indeed the wrong pairing, but only to a small amount. Unfortunately it hit Alfea and Masters of Tilea, but at this point of time I did not want to redo the draw and cause more delays. I argued that if you want to become World Champion you need to beat each other at one point, either round 8 or 9.
To make one thing clear: 99% of all the mistakes were done by me and I accept full responsibility.
I know all of you have spend time and money to come to this huge event, but on the other hand, I had to take 2 months off of work, unpaid. And all the time and personal money which was spend during the last 2 years is not even accounted for in any balance. We are totally aware of my short-comings, but keep in mind, we are all volunteers and not a professional event organizing company. Mistakes happen, do we like this: definitely not. Can we change the past: no. Will we get another change to make up for the mistakes: no. Did our and especially my reputation suffer from that: sure as hell, yes.
All the bitching and whining about my incompetence here on Facebook may help the one or the other to vent their frustration. It’s human nature. Some of the comments have been over the top in my opinion. I am thankful for all the posts showing respect to out group running this huge event and I’m glad most of the people enjoyed their time in Dornbirn and enjoyed the World Cup. I’m pretty sure that the next World Cup organizers will be aware of all the mistakes, which have happened, and they will provide a much better event than we did. If they ask me for advice, I will definitely give this to them. A „things well done and lessons learned“ document will be produced and given to the organizers of the next World Cup organizers. Again, overall, there was only ONE REALLY BAD DECISION during the event preparation, but that decision was crucial for the performance.
I will not allow any comments to this post, since all has been said about this and this is my closure to this. If you have comments, good or bad, see me at any future event and tell it to my face, I can handle it.
Cheers
Torsten |
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Dwarves rule!!! Especially when they pass!
3rd place Underworld Cup 2003
Swiss Champion 2004
2nd place Royal RumBBL 2015 and White Star Cup 2016
.....and now Ex-Vize-Prez
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