This past weekend, I had the pleasure of head judging the main event of Eternal Extravaganza 2, a Legacy tournament that drew about 320 players to compete. More significantly, the judge staff for the weekend included fourteen people.
One of a head judge’s most important tasks is assigning judges to teams. Choosing how many teams you’ll use, defining the scope of each team’s tasks, selecting appropriate team leads, and assigning judges to each team are critical decisions that can make or break an event.
In this post, I’m going to break down how I chose to organize the judges for this event, then reflect on which aspects of this structure worked, and which could be improved for the future. It’s going to be a fun ride, so buckle up!
First of all, I want to note that the average judge level and experience level of this event was fairly high. Of the 14 judges, 4 were L1’s, and all of them had worked one or two Competitive REL events before. The other 10 were L2’s, ranging from newly-promoted to established faces. However, not many of the L2’s had significant team leading experience. In particular, two of the judges with the most team lead experience — Tom Davis and Brogan King
— would be head judging their own events the next day, and I didn’t want to use them as team leads unless I absolutely had to.
Second, I thought about how the staff had been structured for other similarly-sized events of which I’d been part. Although specific team assignments can vary among head judges, large events usually have three core teams: Deck Checks, Paper, and Logistics.
The role of the Deck Checks team is self-explanatory: collect deck lists, verify that each player has turned in a list, and conduct deck checks. The Paper team handles just that, paper! This includes posting pairings and standings, cutting and distributing match result slips, and (sometimes) running the end-of-round procedure to help make sure we get each match result as quickly as possible. Finally, the Logistics team handles anything related to the setup of the tournament itself, such as table numbers and ensuring the room has an adequate number of chairs. Outside of these duties, Logistics is the primary team handling floor coverage, especially at the beginning of the round when Paper and Deck Checks teams might be busy with other duties. Logistics might handle the end-of-round procedure and/or side events if no one else is assigned to those roles.
I was also concerned about organizing breaks effectively across the three teams. One strategy would be to send one person from each team on break each round, while another would be to send an entire team on break for a round and have the Logistics team step in for them. The former strategy is useful for ensuring continuity of each team’s operations (since the entire team is never totally absent), while the latter strategy is great for team building.
Finally, I was interested in exploring whether it would be useful to sub-divide the Paper team into a Pairings team and a Slips team. I’d seen this division be employed at some much larger events like SCG Opens and Grands Prix, and I was curious if it would be helpful here.
All of these factors led me to dividing the staff as follows:
- Pairings team (2 judges)
- Slips team (2 judges)
- Deck Checks team (2 judges)
- Breaks team (2 judges)
- “Special Ops” team (4 judges)
- Scorekeeper (1 judge)
- XO/Appeals Judge (1 judge)
You can also take a peek at the full schedule here! Whenever possible, I assigned roles based on judges’ responses to a survey I asked them to fill out. Survey questions included asking the judges to prioritize how highly they wanted to be on the various teams, if they wanted to be a team lead, and if they wanted to work with anyone in particular. This is more of an art than a science, as it’s generally impossible to satisfy everyone’s requests, but these survey responses definitely form a helpful baseline to work from.
Overall, I was very happy with this structure, especially the Breaks team. I think all the judges on staff did a great job, and the event went very smoothly. Thanks for making me look good, guys!
Of course, I certainly ended up with feedback and ideas for improving in the future. For example, whenever one team takes over another’s duties, a smooth transition is very important. I could have done a better job reminding the relevant team leads about this — I recall a minor hiccup when the Breaks team had trouble figuring out how far the Deck Checks team was in counting the lists for legality, but there were otherwise no major issues. (Although I instructed the Deck Checks team to focus on performing checks checks rather than counting lists, in accordance with our new philosophy about deck checks, we ended up with enough judges relative to the size of the event that the Deck Checks team also checked every list for legality. Nice work, Adrian!)
Like introductions, team structures are an incredibly important element of head judging that sometimes get taken for granted. Although the conventional structures may be tried and true, being unafraid to experiment can pay huge dividends, as can customizing teams depending on your staff’s size and level of experience. Whatever role you find yourself in for your next big event, take a moment to really think about what that means in the context of the rest of the event!
Although Eternal Extravaganza 2 was a fairly quiet weekend in terms of investigations and other sensitive situations, I did encounter a number of interesting rules scenarios that I’ll share next week. Until next time!