Judges are great. They are, simply put, The Best. I love judges. Throw enough judges at any problem — any problem — and they’ll solve it. Judges are inventive, dedicated, selfless, and perhaps above all, selflessly dedicated. We tend to be willing to jump in at a moment’s notice to tackle the problem, whatever it may be.

As the Bard would tell us: ay, there’s the rub.

Judges become judges for a wide variety of reasons, but one reason that is often shared between games, geographical areas, and years, is this: judges simply want to see things done right.

A lot of judges want to see things done the right way. We want to see processes improved, prize structures set up in a logical way, and end of round dead time minimized. We want to see players have the best possible experience and help tournament organizers. We’re a bunch of optimizers.

While a lot of good things can come from that attitude, it’s not all upside. Sometimes, that common urge to roll up our sleeves and help out can cause some real problems. So, please: stop working for free.

Here, have some anecdotes.

1 – At Grand Prix Louisville about eight years ago (the one that took place a day or two after an exhibition of some sort of farm animal, which meant the setup crew spent several hours meandering around with a can of Febreze going full blast in each hand), I was the logistics team lead. At some point the tournament organizer tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to some nice, unused chairs on the far side of the hall, asking for them to be moved to the event and replace the less-cushy chairs the players were currently sitting in.

My team and I began swapping the chairs out under the players, one match at a time – we were trying to cause minimal disruption to matches in progress.

Someone from another team saw matches being (briefly) paused and decided to jump in and be helpful…by taking it upon themselves to march down the aisles and loudly call for all players to pause their matches and stand up. They had gotten to five or six full rows of players before I was able to catch up to them and ask them to please stop, and get the ~100ish players back to their matches.

2 – A judge I certified for L2 once reached out for advice – they were having trouble getting any local game stores to pay them anything for judging. I asked what they had tried so far, and the L2 explained that they had been judging many events in the area for free for a while. They wanted to cut their teeth a bit and get familiar with the stores and so forth, and now that they’d been at this for a year, they now wanted to get compensated for their efforts.

Somehow, the stores seemed to have mysteriously gotten the idea that judging was not something worth compensating.

Eventually, that L2 gave up on judging. Some time later another judge moved to town and started knocking on the doors of the LGSs. Dear reader, you will never guess what problem they ran into.

3 – I once gave a judge a bit of feedback that they needed to be a bit more detail-oriented, and they occasionally missed important bits of event preparation because they assumed they’d be taken care of. This was exemplified by an event where they were the pairings lead and didn’t realize the pairings boards hadn’t been set up until the round one pairings were coming off the printer.

A bit later this judge was staffed as the head judge for a mid-size event in a ballroom. Their call time was at 8am, the other floor judges and I were scheduled for 8:15am, and the event began at 9am. This was a recent change – the tournament organizer had pushed their call times back by 30 minutes compared to their previous events at my request. They were a little skeptical that everything could be set up and ready to go in the morning with these call times, but they were willing to try it once at my urging and see how it went.

I had several goals for Saturday morning: convince the TO that the judge staff could come in at a sane hour and things would get done just fine, and follow up on my earlier feedback to see if this judge would notice all the things that needed to get done before the event could begin.

Several floor judges came in at 8am and set up all the table numbers and pairings boards before their shifts started.

The TO got no useful data about their shift times, and I was unable to give the judge feedback on whether they had improved at noticing details.

4 – A large event got closer to 1500 players than the 1000 that were anticipated or staffed for, so things were stretched a little thin. The deckcheck lead worked through their lunch, staying on the floor and helping out instead of going on break as scheduled. Baby Judge #1 and Baby Judge #2 were on their team and noticed the lead didn’t take their break.

At another event a bit later, Baby Judge #1 had grown up and was in their first time team leading, and even though they were feeling very hungry and could really use a lunch break, they stayed on the floor because they thought this was the expectation for team leads.

And Baby Judge #2? They weren’t at the second event. They had decided they didn’t want to keep judging if it meant they were expected to work full shifts without pause.

Wanting to roll up your sleeves and get in the mix is great, but make sure you know the plan before charging to the front.

You deserve to be paid for your work. It’s hard to start getting paid if you’ve been working for free. It doesn’t just affect your bottom line; it affects the next judge too.

Don’t start working before your shift time.

Take your breaks.