Table of Death

carlyle said:

Utilizing the judges that you have at a contest in a way that is fair to everyone is one of the biggest challenges that an organizer has.

Currently the only tools at my disposal are previous experience with individual judges,
how many contests they have done, and any info shared with other organizers.

With the new scoring system providing so much more information, I have hopes that
organizers will get some new tools to help sort our judges and create tables that are better balanced. I hope that is not a naive pipe dream!

And judges need the kind of feedback that the teams are now seeing to evaluate their own performance. Just talking among themselves between categories would not have helped the situation you described, since the whole table was down. Not just one or two individual judges. Ways need to be found to communicate this scoring info to the judges
while maintaining the anonymity. There has to be ways to do that.

IMO- it is just as bad to have a "hot " table as it is to have a "cold " table.

More opinion- no matter how good a team is, there can be an occasional bad result.
That is why we have to actually cook the contests, and not award prizes based on team standings. Probably not the case here, though, since that table was consistently
low across all 4 categories.

Very sorry for your experience and your bad luck to land on that table.

Much thanks for sharing the specifics on the Brethren. The info needs to be out there.

To some degree, this is a preventable situation by creating balanced tables using all the
data available.

KCBS, please help us organizers do just that. Help us create a more level playing field
for everyone. So that the winner is actually the best that day, not just who was the luckiest to hit the best tables.

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Podge said:

I totally agree. These kind of tables will hurt competition BBQ as a whole. I was too, at Hendersonville sam's. I didn't hit table #1 and GC'ed by 12 points. I could have potentially hit that table and not made it to the Nationals. I was fortunate. Good thing that Rub is such a hell of a good cook to be RGC after hitting that table!

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bbq.tom said:

From a Table Captain and Judge perspective I'd like to address this issue:
1. MOST of the contests that I TC or judge I am NOT assigned a table, just told to go sit at a table.
2. Where I have been told a particular table to go to it is either based on check-in order or based on number of contests judged.
3. Finally, I've been the TC for a "table of death" and I tried almost every entry, and the judges did NOT under score the entries. Sometimes a team has a bad day no matter how good they usually are.

There definitely needs to be more thought to judge placement at tables.

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landarc said:

Actually, with the improvements in data, perhaps what Carlyle suggest will be possible, as judges will now have a track record. Over time, even a year, you will be able to manage table assignments based upon ratings of judges. Not whether they are good or bad, but, by handicap, so to speak. That would actually do wonders for evening out scores and eliminating both hot and cold tables. That would be good, across all aspects.

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