Steve Guillerm, Level 2, Massachusetts, United States
Judge Conference
Wake up in the morning feeling like…it’s way too early for it to be Kesha time. Casey Brefka, Jeph Foster
, Brogan King
and I departed Boston, MA for Ottawa at about 6 am, and arrived just in time for the judge conference at 2pm. Driving 7.5 hours straight into sitting in a dim classroom is a recipe for disaster. Fortunately, our fabulous presenters kept things interesting, and I fought off sleep, and even managed to learn some great things about Investigations, Communication, the Exemplar program, and Replacement Effects.
Unfortunately, I had to skip the last two sessions, because it was time to go to the Canadian Tire Center to see the Senators defeat the Nashville Predators 3-2. Local L1 April Schmidt took the lead on getting us a block of seats at the hockey game, and while it wasn’t super educational, it was a pretty good bonding experience. It’s far too easy to get in the habit of hitting only restaurants, hotels, and convention centers for these tournaments!
Day Zero (Friday)
The staffing was staggered interestingly, with shifts coming in at 8, 9, and 10 am, and a “super grinder” of up to 256 players launching at 10 am. That meant we needed a whole lot of sealed pools, and our 9 am team was assigned to get that ball rolling. Without an official leader, Brogan King and I sort of alternated as de facto team leads, setting up a sort of assembly line where we’d open cases, set up 32 sealed pools plus land packs and deck sheets, and placed them back in case boxes for later. Sarah Ellis, Amanda Stevens, and Adam Zakreski were the rest of our team. I was impressed with how well we worked together in a rather limited space, especially considering I had little to no working experience with the team.
Later on, we were deck checks for grinders, working under Jason Wong. Unfortunately, there was no dedicated space for deck checks, and every hour or so, we would be moved to another table on the floor. While there was not really space by the stage, and it was useful to have a deck check station out on the floor, it would have been ideal if anyone had blocked off a row on the seating chart. I regret that none of us (to my knowledge) went up to the stage to request that, rather than just sort of moving along. Over all, a smooth, if uneventful day.
Day One (Saturday)
I was on the 10 am shift, working on the floor/coverage team under Riki Hayashi. Kevin Desprez
schedules GPs so that every one is paired with another judge to discuss calls or otherwise have someone to get to know. I was paired with Sarah Ellis
.
We arrived for our shift just as deck construction was finishing, and we took a survey of the room setup. The main room had originally been shaped like a U, but the last quadrant of tables was set aside for side events, so the tables for the main event ended up like a J before numbers continued in the spill-over room. If this sounds confusing, that’s because it was!
Round 1, I had my most frustrating call of the whole weekend. A player called me over after 10 minutes had elapsed, and I filled out her match slip, and her opponent got the match loss. Unfortunately, before I had even stepped away, the TO himself had rushed over to the table with her opponent, who was a VIP. He claimed that he hadn’t heard that round 1 started from the other room, even though the speakers were piped into both rooms. The TO demanded that I start their match, and he basically strong-armed the HJ into allowing it because it’s good customer service to the VIP.
I obviously could not over-rule that ruling, but it felt like such a game of “gotcha,” because the non-tardy player lost her match win simply because she hadn’t run away from her table fast enough.
Round 2: Break. Somehow we were scheduled for break after only 1.5 hours, but we made the best of what we had.
Round 3: After noticing that players are finding it confusing that the tournament suddenly ends half-way down the left side and then jumps to the other room, I start wondering how we might prevent this. Players are earning tardy penalties, and can’t discern main event announcements from side event ones. Signage isn’t really working too well.
Round 4: More confusion, and I get an idea. I grab some bright green gaffer’s tape, and put some arrows on the carpeted floor to point the way from table 414 (last number in main room) to the overflow room. Sometimes the low tech solutions are the best.
Round 5: Coverage, relatively uneventful. I’m not a huge fan of working the coverage laptop, so Sarah did the on-camera feature match, while I assisted the rest of the feature matches.
Round 6: Coffee break! The Starbucks and Tim Hortons both in the convention center were closed on weekends (WHAT?), so Sarah, Riki and I drove over the bridge into another province to get Starbucks. We really needed the boost, because of that way-too-early break. The little things really do sort of snowball; if the TO had notified the food court stores a couple of weeks in advance that they’d have a couple of thousand customers needing coffee, they’d have surely stayed open. If we had a break a bit later, the second break wouldn’t have felt so desperate.
But man, that coffee was so good. Like water in the desert.
Round 7: More coverage, same set up.
Rounds 8 & 9: My notes are a bit fuzzy, but it was mostly down to just customer service for the players out of contention, and the players at the top tables didn’t have a ton of calls.
Day Two (Sunday)
I was on the paper/EoR team with Jon Goud as my leader, and paired with Gerard Trpin
.
I’m used to constructed events, so I was not quite prepared for the sheer length that a Limited Day 2 runs. One very slow draft, plus 3 rounds of Swiss, but our turn-around time for those rounds was great. By the end of the day, I had taken ownership of the End of Round responsibilities, and while the scale of the tournament meant that it wasn’t strictly necessary, I got some good experience collecting results and re-deploying judges to sit on tables.
There were a few delays in the second draft of the day, including I believe 2 DQs, neither of which were my calls. The lack of coffee shop was really coming to hit home.
While round 15 went on, Jeph Foster went about preparing the materials for the Top 8, and I was impressed at how quickly he was able to turn around from the official announcement to getting the draft going. From this point onward, delays were strictly due to coverage needs rather than anything we had control over.
I remained on duty working with Jeph, Chris Lansdell, and Guillaume Beuzelin
for the draft and first round of the Top 8, and unfortunately missed the end-of-day judge meeting. So it was to my surprise later that apparently the tape arrows had been really appreciated, and it took Kevin Desprez
a while to find out that it was my doing. I got recognized by the head judge for putting tape on the floor! I guess it was one of those things where it just seems obvious in hindsight.
Wrap-up
Before this tournament, I hadn’t really had a great appreciation for how much the physical layout of a tournament can affect things. The layout wasn’t abysmal, but because of the ad-hoc change to the main room, many players found themselves lost too often. There was also a general lack of trash barrels, which lead to considerably more trash left on tables. It turns out players will throw out trash if it’s easy, but make it hard, and they’ll get lazy. I spent more time picking up trash at this event than any other event.
On the other hand, I got a considerable amount of face time with higher-level judges, and I feel like I gained a lot more experience in logistics and planning. Sealed tournaments just have so much more product and paper going around, and I hadn’t worked setup for an event before. The best events are either the ones where they go really smoothly, or the ones where you learn a lot, and I feel like this was definitely the latter rather than the former, but certainly still quite good!