What this contest actually tests
Where the other Texas titles test presence, speech, and what you do with a stage, this one puts your hands to work. You need to know your products, read leather on sight, and run a stand under real conditions with real people sitting in it.
Judges are active members of the leather and bootblack community, which means they are watching the work, not the performance of the work. If bootblacking is your craft, this is where Texas recognizes it.
How the scoring works
Six categories, 1,800 points, and two things about the scoring that are unlike every other contest in the family.
Scoring is straight. Nothing is dropped. The other Texas contests use Olympic Scoring, where each category's highest and lowest judge scores come off before the rest are counted. Here every judge's score counts, in every category. There is nowhere for a weak round to hide.
Half the points are technical, and there is a hard floor under them. The Tech Boot and Stand Time categories are 450 points each, 900 of the 1,800 between them. You must score at least 630 in Technical Skills to win the title, and if no contestant reaches that, no title is awarded, however many people are running.
That threshold is 70% of the technical points, and it exists because a Texas Bootblack who cannot do the work is worse than no Texas Bootblack at all.
