General Philosophy

The way Feature Matches are generally handled makes Featured players not treated the same way as other players: While they may already be on their way to their table, they may be asked to go in a completely different direction instead. These announcements may happen some time after Pairings (either online or on-site) have been posted. Finally, once players reach the Feature Match Area, they often need to be seated at specific seats.

All of this is very time consuming and may end up giving less time to these players to complete their pre-game shuffling properly.

Considering it would not be reasonable to delay the entire event to wait for Feature Matches to be ready, they often start after the rest of the tournament. So as to ensure consistency of treatment between all players in a same tournament, accurately tracking time at Feature Matches is therefore important.

 

 

General Policy

 

Unless time is tracked individually at the match, all Feature Matches should receive a minimal time extension of 3 minutes to make sure players have enough time to properly shuffle and present a randomized deck, even if they reached the Feature Match Area before the round started.

If a player is coming late to the Feature Match area, they should not receive a Tardiness Penalty but additional time equal to the number of minutes they are late plus three (3) minutes. If a player is more than ten (10) minutes late, they lose the match and should be marked as dropped on the result slip.

For the sake of clarity, additional time should be tracked on each individual match’s result slip, even if all tables have received the same extension.

If players are seated before the round starts: Additional time of 3 minutes
If one player comes to their seat X minutes after the round starts: Additional time of X+3 minutes

 

Video Tables specifics

 

Definitions

Video tables: Tables with fixed video equipment for broadcasting, whose timing is decided by Coverage.
Non-video Tables: Other tables in the Feature Match Area (text Tables or simple Feature Tables)

Note that non-video tables are subject to the General Policy.

 

It is preferred that time is tracked independently at Video tables (a cell phone with a stopwatch is acceptable). Players should have easy access to the time left in the round (having to ask the judge or a Coverage member is acceptable)

The 50-minute countdown start on Coverage’s signal. Note that this usually happens once players are ready to play their first land, after shuffling and mulligans.

 

Handling paused matches

If a Video match is paused (due to going back to the Commentators’ Booth or for a judge’s ruling for instance), additional time should be given as the match resumes, unless that match’s clock was stopped while the match was paused.

If a non-video match is paused to transfer to an on-video table, the amount of time left in the round at that table should be tracked. When resuming the match on video, the total amount of time left in the round (including additional time) should be displayed to players.

Other pauses (such as judge rulings) at non-video tables should be recorded as usual on the Results Entry Slip.

 

Kevin Desprez.