This report has been submitted by Jernej Lipovec after he organized a judge booth at his local PTQ. If you also would like to organize such a judge booth at one of your local events, do not hesitate to contact us for assistance and material!

We had a PTQ in Ljubljana, Slovenia on October 5th where 115 players gathered to compete for an invite to PT in Valencia. Since it was a big tournament we expected many people from other regions of Slovenian will come, where we don’t have any active judge and I thought Judge Booth would be perfect to get people interested and get them to
study and become a judge. I’ve asked the leader of the Judge Booth Michael Wiese to share a nice looking document I’ve seen many times during the GPs. Slowly but surely Michel managed to send it to me and I proceeded to print out the answers, but instead of printing all the questions, I’ve decided to put them on my tablet. It worked really well, it would be even better it tablet was 10″ instead of 7″, but people could easily see all the cards, even if they were not the ones sitting in front of me.

I’ve started the Judge booth in round 4 around 20 minutes into the round when all the tasks have been completed and tournament could spare a judge. I’ve set up a table, printed out some nice looking papers that attracted people and also announced it on speakers. Soon after I sat down at the table people started coming in. First just one, then many people joined and we had a fine discussions about the puzzles and we have learned quite some new rules – myself included. In the next round I decided to rotate judges, so everyone got a chance. I’ve selected judges with good rules knowledge so that they were able to explain the solution, not just provide one. At the end of the day we reached our goal, since a lot of people were asking how to become a judge, especially from regions where we have none yet.

Many thanks to the Judge Booth team for the material you have provided and keep up the good work!