Here are the April 2018 judge anniversaries!
20 years
Mark Brown15 years
Takatoshi Sato10 years
Roberto Castro MahoneyKohei Niwa
Pavlos Akritas
Alexis Rassel
Nathan Hopkins
Mikaël Rabie
5 years
Alexandre Rangel MachadoMax Kahn
Steve Baker
Avery Redgurr
Matt Stone
Daniel Winston-Ruiz
George Bochenek
Antonio Zanutto
Mike Brum
Robert Pence
Jordan Minamimaye
Brandon Fagan
Alexander Johansson
Hyung Lee
Aleš Jeraj
Erik Edelkamp
Andres Martinez
Fred Edelkamp
Aleksi Kytölä
Arvind Radhakrishnan
Paul Martin
Dathan Brown
Yoshitoki Sakai
Masaki Tazawa
Ronny Minasian
Travis Hewitt
Andrey Burlaka
Mikhail Pedchenko
Theodore Scamp
Christian Genz
Joe Gillard
Cameron Bachman
Markus Radspieler
Dusan Galovic
Milos Stajic
Israel Escorizza
Eduardo Gurgel Pinheiro
João Lelis
Federico Sotelo
Rafael Silva Willians
Alice Araujo
James Combrink
Claudio Santos
James Collette
Hyun Sung Park
Joseph Berkley
Woong-sun You
Aaron Bluestein
Jorden McEldowney
Derek Wickham
Alex Dufresne
Grzegorz Flis
Guilherme Nigri
Jason Baes
Anna Cotti
Joe Corruccini
Sean Knowelden
Larry Glidewell
Thorbjørn Louring Koch
Matt Wall
Ryan Perch
Douglas Tilden
Apostolos Logothetis
Harilaos Soultis
Peter Creutzberger
Nicholas Brown
Eric Evans
Don Williams
Colin Williamson
Alex Dobberstein
Khristopher Liles
Filip Vukovinski
Jasper Weinrib
Ben Beaumont
Marcus Beyer
Phil Rose
Jamie Abuhashish
Jonathan Lovelace
Aaron Cross
Kevin Pearce
Iwika Ble
Florian Laroumagne
Nicholas Crowley
Kenny Ang
Paul Gulbis
Jan Gräfen
Jae-hong Kim
Khin Kyaw
James Winward-Stuart
Bryant Chang
Unnsteinn Barkarson
Michael Echols
Jimmy Freeman
Sean Johnson
Kevin Gray
Juergen Wierz
Joseph Achille
Aaron Neuding
Ray Randolph
Christopher Bennett
Daniel Gallegos
Philippe Monlevade
Jack Hesse
Michael Wasserman
Matthew Jarrell
Sebastian Baldriz
Doug Malotte
David Guteša
Marko Mišković
Marcus Vinicius Angelo
Bruno Lopez
Patrick Nelson
Daniel Sheehan
Lucas Costa
Paul Jones
Kin Yen Lee
Zachri Volgarino
Héctor De Paz Carmona
Pablo Armas
Daniel Schaerf
Richard Centanni
Johannes Wagner
Natalie Heylen
Stefan Bergmans
Richard Berze
Congratulations, and thank you for all your hard work!
This month we have 3 featured judges: Jack Hesse, David Guteša, and Jasper Overman. First, lets celebrate with Jack’s RC, RobI’ve worked with Jack for several years, and have watched him really step up into being a strong leader in the North, helping to build both the local Madison community and the wider judge community.
I think Jack’s approach to judging and handling things is probably best shown with his Level 2 exam. We had a huge, oversized PTQ, where we ended up recruiting a couple of Level 2 judges from the players to work it. Jack came up as an L1, and had planned to test that day, as did another candidate.
I sat them down in a quiet place off to the side of the event at the same time, gave them my spiel on how to test, and set them loose. The other candidate burned through his L2 test in maybe 45 minutes, going through each question once, ripping off an answer, and declaring it good enough, so they could get back on the floor.
Jack probably felt intimidated by this – I know I would have been. The other candidate was returning to judging from a hiatus, and was completely unintimidated by the testing process and was very confident in his skills.
Jack spent another hour on his test. He took the time to be settled, to make sure he did things *right* on this test he felt was important, despite seeing another candidate take less than half the time to take the same exam.
I graded the other candidate, and had mostly gotten through his debrief by the time Jack was done with his exam. The other candidate passed, but not by a lot. He knew what he got wrong, but was a little cavalier about the process. He has overall been a good judge. I’ve been happy with him.
Jack I was much more interested in.
I graded his exam, and we went to debrief. Jack had a rundown and explanation for every answer he gave. He really really knew what was going on with the exam, inside and out. He aced the policy portion (which is unusual for L2 candidates), and got only two wrong on his rules portion. I was quite impressed, and trusted that this was someone who wanted stuff to be really correct and well-structured in his judging and community. He puts in the work, and puts it in well, and is willing to take the time to make sure things are as good as he can get them.
Next, GiorgosDavid is one, if not the most well-known judge in the world if you don’t count L3s 🙂 Some of you may find this statement inflammatory, but let’s go through the motions of knowing him, shall we?
David was born in one of the most multicultural and tormented places, the Balkans and most specifically Serbia. Magic entered his life from a young age and stayed with him continuously through today. Seeing that Serbia had a lack of judges he stepped up on his own and seek for a mentor. Your truly answered the call and after some talks and exams we met formally for the first time in a PTQ in Thessaloniki (David travelled 10hours by car to get there). He passed the test with flying colors and set up to change the world 🙂
Soon he realized that L1 is not the level that is happy with and almost immediately shoot for L2. Without a close mentor, with no big tournaments, things were rough for David, but what David wants, David gets 😀 and one year later we made again the 10hour drive to Thessaloniki, took the test and passed. Now he was ready to change the world.
Soon enough David discovered some tournaments called Grand Prix. Reading the application David read free travel/hand out with judges and he harassed be on all types of social media to get him on board one of them. Within the next 3 years David judges more than 40 GPs and 20+ judge conferences. After the first year, Europe felt too small for him so became a frequent visitor of North and South America, Asia and Japan.
In his real life David is a romantic student of the law, a semi-professional mtg trader, and also a restaurant owner?!
Will David travel to Australia? Will he aim and become a L3? I guess we will find out in five year’s time 🙂
For this month, we have asked BeNeLux Regional Coordinator, Richard Drijvers“Jasper is one of the judges who I’ve known from way back when. He was already a judge when I became one 16+ years ago.
He was L2 before I was and we met while judging the old style PTQs and mega-Prereleases (from when there were still 2 weekends of Prereleases).
For a long time it looked like that’s where Jasper’s ambitions stopped, but after the redefinition of DCI Judge levels in 2012, Jasper indicated he wanted to do more. That’s why he went ahead and worked towards obtaining the next level and 5 years ago he managed to get certified for L3.
Since then Jasper has been judging all over Europe, but mostly in the BeNeLux and Germany. He has always been heavily involved in his local community in Enschede, being the driving force behind local tournaments, as well as training others for nearby stores.
I’ll never forget the day when I was there to head judge a Sealed Deck PTQ that Jasper organized and the power went out, leaving us in a very dark bowling alley in the middle of deck construction. Jasper kept his calm and handled all the dealings with the venue, HJ and players splendidly. After a few hours the back-up generator arrived, was hooked up and we could finally start Round 1. Top 8 finished somewhere around 2AM, and I was happy I could drive home instead of having to take the next train (which would’ve taken a few more hours according to the railroad schedule).
Thanks Jasper, for showing me some great logistics, and even better diplomacy in dealing with those understanding, but unhappy players.”
Best wishes to Jasper on his years of service as L3.
Happy anniversary to all of you! We look forward to many more years of judging from you all.