Hi all!

A lot of you attended to GP Barcelona, or followed the streaming on Twitch, so there is no need to tell you which deck won the GP or which archetypes dominated the Top8. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my weekend as a judge and how it was, probably a bit different from yours if you were playing.

Day -1 / Thursday

Seems like there is some fog in Barcelona, so our flight is delayed and we arrive late, only to take a quick dinner and go to sleep… we have a long weekend ahead!

Day 0 / Friday

Friday is Trials day, always (but in Trios events). Though there are some players that go to the venue to play other tournaments, most of those who attend to the venue on Friday are planning to get their 2 byes (I guess that from now on they will represent an even higher percentage, since not having GPTs at stores will reduce the number of players that can arrive at the GP with their 2 byes already secured).

On Friday I wasn’t assigned to any specific tournament, but I was going to be a resource to help whenever was needed. For example, at the beginning of the day there were a lot of questions about how to register for the tournaments, how to get the playmat from the Early Bird Trial… After the first wave of Trials, some On Demand (8-players) tournaments fired, so I was moved to that area. In addition to answering player questions and delivering rulings, we need to prepare the material that is going to be used, look for an area where they can play comfortably but without affecting other tournaments that will start later… I don’t know if you have tried Chaos Draft, but they are usually the funnier tournaments of the weekend, and it’s hard to be able to play them at stores or with your local play group.

In the afternoon, I was devoted to Modern & Sealed tournaments at the same time and finally, the last Trials started. Just after that, my shift ended and other judges would take care of finishing the ongoing tournaments. Usually on Friday before the GP there are a couple of seminars to help judges to improve their knowledge, or just to discuss situations. At this event, we had two of them: First, Decks and frequent interactions on Standard; Second, Hidden Card Error, one of the most complicated infractions. If you want to take a look at the seminar about interactions, you can find its slideshow here.

Day 1 / Saturday

Saturday was Day One of the Main Event and, with a few exceptions, most of the judges are assigned to this tournament, since it is the biggest one of the weekend.

With that many judges and players, a bit more organization than in a store tournament is required, so judges are divided in teams to perform different tasks (pairings, entry slips, deckchecks…). I was part of the team that took care of the End of Round Procedure (EOR). Yes, there is a team only for that and it is indeed very needed if we don’t want rounds that last forever. Though there are matches that finish in 20 or 30 minutes, most of them usually end in the last 10-15 minutes of the round, take the extra turns or even finish later because they had a time extension (from a long ruling, a deckcheck…). That means that a lot of results are arriving to the scorekeeper on a very short timeframe, so we can’t wait until he is done with introducing them to find potential problems (tables that are still playing at the end of the round, entry slips that might be missing, players that finished their match but forgot to bring their entry slip…).

The End of Round Team finds all the tables with time extensions so they can be covered when the time is called and players can enjoy their extra minutes; detects how many tables are still playing and which ones; finds missing results (tables that are not playing but whose result is not yet in the computer) before a lot of time has passed.

For this event, we divided the floor in several areas and each team member took care of one of them, with the help of other judges, of course. To communicate with the Team Leader and with the Scorekeepers and to have real time information, we just used a group chat. So, when you saw us with the phone in our hands, we weren’t amused, we were working to avoid delays on the tournaments 😉 If you want to know more about this system, you can take a look at this article.

I want to take the chance to remind you about the importance of bringing your entry slip to the main stage as soon as your match is over. If you don’t do this, we will have a table without a result but no one playing there. So we will re-check all the entry slips, just in case it was misplaced; we will try to find it around the play are, just in case it was dropped; we will check that you weren’t moved to the feature match area, etc. So, several judges will lost their time searching something they are not going to find, just before you get called on the Public Announcement system. When this happen with one or two results is not a big deal, but imagine what would happen if everybody would do the same…

Day 2 / Sunday

If Friday is usually focused on Side Events and Saturday on Main Event, Sunday is a mix of both. Only a percentage of the players get to qualify to Day Two, but the Rules Enforcement Level changes to Professional. On the Side Events, we have Competitive events (PTQs, special prize tournaments) but also a lot of fun (Frontier, Historic Sealed… or just Regular REL Modern, Sealed and Standard Tournaments).

On Sunday, I was planned to be the Head Judge of a Competitive Sealed Tournament at the beginning of the day, but with the inclusion of the PTQ on the schedule (that was Sealed as well), there wasn’t a lot of people interested on playing my tournament, so a couple of hours later I was assigned to other tournaments in order to give their judges a break. From my sealed tournament I was moved to a couple of adjacent tournaments of Legacy and Standard (Regular REL) during a round, and then I took care of keep running 4 of the PTQs. After my lunch break and after making a L2 interview, I helped with the beginning of Top 4 on each one of the PTQs (8 in total) and then I changed again to another Standard tournament (last one of the day!). One hour later I came back to the PTQ for the quarterfinals and when they were done, my shift finished as well.

As you can see, there was a lot of variety in my weekend! Sometimes it’s complicated to keep changing between formats, roles, RELs… or even being responsible of several tournaments at the same time. You need to be very flexible and focused; it’s hard to manage, but really fun!

Credits