If I thought that hard work alone would make my partner and me a better dancer then I wouldn't use a professional at all.

While extensive practice may not be sufficient to produce good dancing, it is absolutely necessary. Spending money is no substitute for time on the floor.

You keep insisting that, without the "guidance" of these top level coaches, practice is counterproductive. That statement makes me wonder how much you actually practice, if at all.

The nature of ballroom is such that, beyond a certain basic level (at which using expensive coaches would be stupid), even amateur dancers know when something is not right.

This is the point in this exchange when your lack of experience with an amateur partner betrays you. Even with their teacher's help, a couple needs to work on figures and routines until they understand in their physicality what they must do. It seems pretty apparent to me that you do not do so.

My partner and I have corrected several issues by ourselves and we always have our progress confirmed by our coach.

Perhaps, some day when you have a litle more confidence in your dancing, you'll find the courage to share with the others on this board as much as they've shared with you.

I doubt it.



jj

"If I thought that hard work alone would make my partner and me a better dancer then I wouldn't use a professional at all."

But why does the same logic not extend to the quality of the professional?

For some kinds of things, the leading experts are easily twice as cost effective as garden variety professionals. For other things, you may simply need an outside perspective requiring hardly any dance expertise.

"Spending money is no substitute for time on the floor."

I never said it was.

Spending money can, however, help you make the switch from practicing something in the wrong (or suboptimal) way to practicing in in the right (or at least more optimal) one.

"You keep insisting that, without the "guidance" of these top level coaches, practice is counterproductive."

No, you keep making up things to argue against which I never said.

"The nature of ballroom is such that, beyond a certain basic level (at which using expensive coaches would be stupid), even amateur dancers know when something is not right."

There's a difference between knowing that the overall effect is not right, and knowing what is wrong with enough specificity to productively fix it. That's where the experts come in. (This also points out the mistake in the common habit of putting beginners with less skilled teachers - once the beginners are ready to take things seriously, they can benefit from expert coaches as much as anyone)

All you have to do is look at average non-finalist professional competitors to see what happens when dancers practice hard without sufficient expert guidance to find solutions to their real problem. What you see there is dancing that is highly rehearsed, but very inefficient. If they really want to improve, they are going to need better guidance in addition to heavy practice.

"This is the point in this exchange when your lack of experience with an amateur partner"

Still retreating to personal attacks based on UNFOUNDED ASSUMPTIONS whenever you run out of arguments of substance...

this foolishness is at an end.


Baloney. What you see is both younger, less experienced couples and a few older couples whose skills are beginning to fade but who are not capable of maintaining their lifestyle through teaching, disregarding the fact that they will soon have no choice. This is the type of competitor who often becomes a pro/am coach.

In those instances in which you do see poor coaching play a role, it generally involves those situations where a naturally skilled but penurious young couple is laboring under a lack of coaching time moreso than coaching quality.

The only thing that they really gain from hiring the judge to "coach" them is familiarity.

Your causality is wrong.

More to the point, I bascially eliminated virtually all of your objections in another post in this thread. I'll let you enjoy it.



jj

jofjonesboro.
The couple I was refering to is a professional competitor. There are many Amatures who will be having lessons from those who are judging there events. This will be with the full blessing of there regular coaches. In fact the coaches are in the main the orchestrators of this. We have a major competition in a couple of weeks time part of which is the World Latin Amateur Championship. This will reach your tv screens at some time or other. I believe we will be seeing it on Xmas day. We will see the whole show and not just the World Latin.
To get back to the judging bit. It is impossible for us as humans not to recognise somebody we know or have met. If we didn't have this natural ability we wouldn't recognise any of our family. Every time we meet them it would be like the first time. So if you have had recent lessons from one of the judges or more, your chances of being seen are better than one who hasn't.

Require each judge before every heat to declare his or her relationship to any of the couples being judged.

This would take less than a minute (unless you have a seriously f-cked up situation) before each heat and would invite the appropriate level of public scrutiny of each judge's scoring.

After half a day or so of competition, any judge consistently giving high scores to his own clients might legitimately have his qualifications reviewed. No competition, professional or amateur, would want a reputation of hiring judges with questionable records.

When you consider the matter, there would be no supportable reason for any judge to decline to make such an announcement and increased oublic awareness can only be good.

Saying ". . . there will be many Amatures (sic) . . . ." is pretty vague.

Of course their coaches would support such a system if it benefits them. They want to be able to tout their "success rate" to prospective new students.

The problem in this situation is that the results are claimed to be proof that taking lessons from these judges has made the couples better dancers when it is not just as but even more likely that the judges are simply rewarding their clients.

Can you name the competition in question?



jj

"Require each judge before every heat to declare his or her relationship to any of the couples being judged."

Going back how far?

"This would take less than a minute"

No, it would take quite a while with 5 or more judges and a 40 or more couple first round, and questionable memories, and inevitable confusion.

"After half a day or so of competition, any judge consistently giving high scores to his own clients"

Sounds like you are talking about pro/am with its huge numbers of entries per dancer... in ordinary professional or amateur competitions, there's only one opportunity to place a given couple - and that's if they make the final (well, two if they are eligible for rising star or some other secondary division, but that's probably on a different day). Otherwise all a judge really gets to say is that a couple is in the top 50% of the current round.

"When you consider the matter, there would be no supportable reason for any judge to decline to make such an announcement"

Except for it being largely impractical in the real world.

"The problem in this situation is that the results are claimed to be proof that taking lessons from these jdges has made the couples better dancers when it is not just as but even more likely that the judges are simply rewarding their clients."

You seem to be forgetting that the results don't really change at competitions where their coaches are not judging.

You also forget that you need to convince the majority of the judges in order to get a placement. If a couple deserves 6th and their coach outrageously marks them first, it's unlikely they will get any better than 5th (and probably they will get 6th), meanwhile that outlying mark that accomplished nothing IS going to raise a lot of questions.

Your entire argument against this suggestion is that it would take too much time. Because such a thing has not been done, you have no background on which to base such a claim.

You also have provided no logical reason to believe that this policy would be impractical.

I did not say "round"; I said "heat," meaning - with a few exceptions - eight to ten couples.

Once the couples have taken the floor, the MC would ask the question "Has any judge accepted any fees from a couple on the floor?" Each judge in turn would then call out the number of each couple who had done so. That entire exercise would barely take a minute even if every judge in the panel had accepted fees from every couple.


In another post, you made this claim:

Now, suddenly everyone forgets who is working with whom? Even the judges themselves?

People tend to remember things that matter. If this policy becomes a rule and both competitors and judges know that there would be consequences for faulty disclosure, they will remember.


You are trying to obfuscate the issue here. A judge could very well - and in your world, probably would - have several client couples in the competition. Even if he judges each of them only once, his scores for different couples over a series of heats would still establish a pattern if he is not basing those scores on performance.


I'm not forgetting anything because I have never known that claim to be true and I still don't.


The basic principle behind my proposal holds true for one judge or several. You have already said that there are amateurs who take coaching from judges. There's nothing to keep those who can afford it from taking such lessons from several different judges over the course of a year.

I've seen several of the same judges at every competition which I've attended. Were I so inclined, I could buy "coaching" from all of them.

It's genuinely fun to imagine a scenario under my proposal in which every judge in a panel called out the same number. If that couple received first place, the raising of eyebrows among everyone in the hall would create a breeze.


This is your only legitimate point. I'd say one year. Judges, being human (at least according to Polished), are susceptible to the "What have you done for me lately?" syndrome.

Your only objection to my idea is based on nothing more than supposition.

The more I think about this matter, the more than I realize that it would work - and work well.



jj

"Your entire argument against this suggestion is that it would take too much time. Because such a thing has not been done, you have no background on which to base such a claim.

You also have provided no logical reason to believe that this policy would be impractical."

You ignore the basic math I set out for you. 5 judges (minimum) * 40 couples = 200 potential relationships. But it's actually closer to 400 because the couples might have been with a different partner when they might have studied with a judge.

Stop and THINK for a minute how long it is going to take to remember and declare all of that.

"I did not say "round"; I said "heat," meaning - with a few exceptions - eight to ten couples."

It's you still have the same number of couples time the same number of judges to announce - it doesn't matter if you do it all at once or 12 couples at a time.

"In another post, you made this claim:

It is no great mystery to those in the midst of things who various couples are studying with.

Now, suddenly everyone forgets who is working with whom? Even the judges themselves?"

The difference is that between the lower and upper bounds. It's no great mystery to determine a number of the judges that a number of the competitors work with a lot, because people see each other's lessons, talk about what they are doing, etc - word gets around. That's enough to amply demonstrate the utilization of expert coaches.

But for your proposal, we need to determine ALL of these relationships - we don't need to just prove that most top dancers study with top experts, we need to declare ALL of the combinations - that's a whole other order of challenge.

"People tend to remember things that matter. If this policy becomes a rule and both competitors and judges know that there would be consequences for faulty disclosure, they will remember."

Everyone? No way. And now way you'd get such an impractical policy enacted.

"his scores for different couples over a series of heats would still establish a pattern if he is not basing those scores on performance."

How? All you can do is do statistical analysis of one judge against the panel as a whole - that's the hard part. But you can do that already. If you find a case that's actually interesting, you can ask around and find out if there's a relationship.

What you find when you look at real results though is that some judges are just plain individual in their views. There are couples they mark better than the others do, and couples they mark worse, and many times there is no personal relationship at all.

"You seem to be forgetting that the results don't really change at competitions where their coaches are not judging.

I'm not forgetting anything because I have never known that claim to be true and I still don't."

Then you have little knowledge of actual results in the real world of seriously contested professional and amateur competition.

"It's genuinely fun to imagine a scenario under my proposal in which every judge in a panel called out the same number. If that couple received first place, the raising of eyebrows among everyone in the hall would create a breeze."

Don't you think it would matter how they danced?

"Your only objection to my idea is based on nothing more than supposition."

No, it's based on knowledge of actual event sizes and results in the real world, things that you don't seem to have known enough about to consider.

and you're making no more sense than you ever did.


Every competition of any size (and size is a big part of your objection) prints a program which lists all competitors for each heat. It would be nothing to require each judge to read the program and pick out his clients before the competition even began.

I have pointed out how the actual announcements would take very little time. Your claim that they would take too much time is based on nothing - absolutely nothing.

Unless someone gets married, I've never heard of people changing their names when they change partners.


This statement is utter nonsense. The judges would have predetermined their relationships to the competitors. Declaring it would require very little time.


Statistical analysis for what? The purpose of the policy is to make these relationships public. Once they are announced, there is no "analysis" to be made. The patterns will make themselves obvious.

But here's the essence of your dishonest schtick:



You always resort to your appeals to authority, in this case yourself.

Isn't it strange how you claim that you have this "knowledge of actual event sizes and results in the real world," but refuse to share any details about your experience? Perhaps you do so because you actually lack such experience.

You have still failed to raise any reasonable objections to my suggestion. Your assertions that people can't remember things and that it would take too much time are just that - assertions, with no substance.

What are you afraid of?



jj

"Stop and THINK for a minute how long it is going to take to remember and declare all of that.

Every competition of any size (and size is a big part of your objection) prints a program which lists all competitors for each heat. It would be nothing to require each judge to read the program and pick out his clients before the competition even began."

If you were experienced in the real world of competitions, you'd know that many couples register too late to make it into the program. That's especially true of some of the top competitors.

"I have pointed out how the actual announcements would take very little time. Your claim that they would take too much time is based on nothing - absolutely nothing."

You obviously do not have much experience with events that have large numbers of couples, or you would realize how impractical your idea of querying the judges really is. Competitions already struggle to meet schedules while keeping all the important events in prime time schedule slots.

"It's you still have (sic) the same number of couples time the same number of judges to announce - it doesn't matter if you do it all at once or 12 couples at a time.

This statement is utter nonsense. The judges would have predetermined their relationships to the competitors. Declaring it would require very little time."

You ignore the plain fact of my statement: it takes the same amount of time regardless if you run through all 40 couples at once or if you do them 12 at a time. All you do by breaking it up is shift that time around.

"Statistical analysis for what?"

To determine if there's any fire behind your smokescreen.

"The purpose of the policy is to make these relationships public."

You keep demonstrating that you care about appearance but are happy to remain ignorant on the issues of underlying substance.

"Once they are announced, there is no "analysis" to be made. The patterns will make themselves obvious."

The patterns of who studies with whom are of no concern in relation to who is winning - the students of the stronger teacher tend to win even when those teachers are not on the panel, after all. These relationship are only of concern if you can demonstrate a correlation between studying with a judge and marks from that judge which show a pattern of inconsistency to marks from the rest of the panel.

I suggested you start by trying to find patterns of outlying marks, and then ask around to see if there is a relationship. You could do this investigation without having to rewrite the rulebook, but you don't seem interested in it because you are more content to make armchair proposals than to actually research the substance of the matter.

"You always resort to your appeals to authority, in this case yourself."

No, I resort to the common experience shared by all of us who are involved in the real dance world. Those who are more casual participants on the fringe won't have these experiences first hand, but can readily confirm them if they become more involved.

"You have still failed to raise any reasonable objections to my suggestion."

You've simply ignored point after point...

"Your assertions that people can't remember things and that it would take too much time are just that - assertions, with no substance."

No, they are based on the reality of the real dance world, which you continue to demonstrate that you have no involvement with.