I will always remember this first tournament I judged with Mikaël. It was a endless 4 days competitive tournament, and we had this big conversation about watching magic. His ability to understand the game and be passionate by games is one of the many important qualities of Mikaël in judging,. Competitive player, he is known for his ability to detect potential of cheating, analysing games and understanding the possible outcome of them. Countless are the times he called judges in PT to show something that happened on streaming.
In the past year, he also created this extremely new and helpful tool that is the Counting Card challenge, a tool to improve investigations. Mikaël not only has abilities on tournaments, but he is also always passionate by sharing and teaching everything he knows to others. If you never tried the counting card challenge, go there and look at them, it’s fascinating. Judges often struggles to unravel real situations with many cards or when turns already passed. This tool provide judges practice and method to do it outside of tournament without pressure, so they are able to have better understanding when a real one happens.
His involvement into mentoring goes way above though. Since 5 years leader of the French translation of Cranial insertion, he never missed the Monday publication and created a solid team of translators, always finding volunteers when needed. He is in various French mentoring projects as the L2 mentoring project where he is able to provide recent examples for every rules or IPG points. Always looking for new ways of teaching, he brought an escape room seminar in the last French conferences, where judges had to solve judging situation in order to find codes to escape.
All this hadn’t waited for last Sunday to be in practice in the French or global community. Mikaël, if he wear the number 3 just since then, has been a pillar of the French community since way more and I am happy to officialize it now.
You can congratulate Mikaël on his promotion post on the Magic Judges Facebook page.