Star City Games IQ – Tarentum
Head Judge Tournament Report
Competitive; Standard

Cast:
Tournament Organizer: Jonathan Engel
Head Judge / Scorekeeper: Dan Regewitz (myself)
Floor Judge: Christopher Hartman
Floor Judge: Chelsea Hogan
55 awesome players.

For this particular event, I found myself wearing many hats. I was Judge Manager, and responsible for securing staff for the event. I was Head Judge, responsible for identifying tasks and goals, and delegating responsibilities. I was Scorekeeper, and had to keep track of the event as it progressed. I’m going to discuss various aspects of all of these roles.

= Preparation

I originally lined up this event with Jon after I had just completed a 50 player GPT with myself as the only judge. As that event was a little stressful for me personally I knew this event, we were going to need at least one other judge. Fortunately, we had a lot of time to consider what we needed to do and how for the event, as it took some time to get permission to run the event from the owner (this was the company’s first SCG-IQ), as well as order and receive the tournament kit.

So as Judge manager, I created an event on Judge apps, made a call out for other judges, and had to turn at least one judge away entirely. This was all new to me, as I had never formally acted as a judge manager for a multi-judge event before. I knew that I needed some judges. As our planning continued, it became clear that my tournament role would mostly likely be scorekeeper AND head judge. So, I knew not to count myself for ‘floor coverage’. Our estimated attendance was 30-60 players, which we did hit. So our target was 2 floor judges, with a third possibly on standby in case something crazy happened.

Overall I prepared well, even making notes for myself on what to cover in the pre-event judge meeting, and player meeting. I also took some steps that were clearly over-preparing. For example, I packed my own laptop and printer to the event – again just in case something catastrophic occurred.

= Score keeping

My experiences as Scorekeeper are perhaps the least exciting. As a local judge and TO, I have had close to 5 years of experience working with tournament software (first DCIR, now WER), and was fairly confident that I could score keep a competitive REL event. I vaguely recall a few moments where things were a little hectic, however barring a hiccup or two, the day was without severe incident.

Christopher showed me the wondrous multiprint feature, which I had not had the opportunity to use previously, and that certainly made things go smoothly.

I in turn, was able to show him the WER fixed seating workaround. For those unfamiliar with this, WER does not have a function where you can fix a player to a certain table number. However, you sometimes want to do this to make the day easier for people with crutches, or a cane, etc. The workaround involves pairing all matches randomly, finding the player whose seat you want to fix, and unpairing them. Then, you find and unpair the table you want to fix them to. Then you repair the 4 players correctly, in table order.

The only other scorekeeper note I have for this event, is one match where the players finished game 2 in turns, and were 1/1, but the slip was filled out 1/1/1. So in this case, no third game was played, and I took the liberty to fix the slip after clarifying the situation with Chelsea.

= Head Judge

As an experienced lv1, I have had my turn at being Head Judge in various situations. However, as luck or providence would have it, this was my first event as Head Judge where other judges were under my direction. This changes the focus of what I need to do and think about in terms of the event. In context, being head judge in such a situation is a lot more about defining tasks, giving instructions, and delegating responsibility.

In terms of defining tasks: It’s pretty easy to identify the various pieces that go into running a successful event. The timely posting of pairings, the distribution of match-slips near the beginning of round, Deck checks, and the coverage of the floor throughout the event. It is quite another thing to meld these items into a cohesive whole. I found it helpful to imagine things as they would occur in an actual tournament environment, come up with a proper sequence, try to think about potential snag-points, and modify accordingly. Lastly, although you have this wonderful plan, don’t be afraid to modify it based on what is actually going on in the live event.

Just as an example, I announced the start of the round, but was having difficulties projecting properly on the day. Thus some players had started their match and some had not. Chris re-announced the start of round more robustly, but because of the confusion included we skipped the beginning of round deck check for that round, pulling a mid-round instead.

Giving Instructions: So as head judge I had two sets of notes. One was information I was going to go over with the judges at our judge meeting. This largely included the tasks that identified, and the way in which I imagined them being executed. The other set of notes was for the player meeting, and included information for them: please check your deck lists for errors, what competitive REL means, and so forth. The point is that communication is a big piece of being head judge.

There are two instances where my communication to the players broke down a bit. The first is I simply had issues projecting. This is an issue I had throughout the day, though my end-of-round announcements went smoothly. I am simply accustomed to being a quiet speaker, and need more practice making these sorts of announcements.

I had planned to make an announcement going into the final rounds of the event with an instruction that players should be playing magic, or shaking hands, and not improperly determining winner, or attempting bribery. This announcement was unintentionally skipped due to other issues that had to be dealt with – a direct result of my multiple tournament roles.

= Other notes

On the day, I was called in on an appeal twice. The first case involved a player who called judge upon discovering their opponent counting 59 card main deck, 16 card sideboard, in between games 1 and 2. Christopher was the responding judge. It was his ruling that as we are currently between games, no penalty is issued. This ruling was upheld.

The other case involved Player N cast Magma Jet targeting Prognostic Sphinx. Player A discarded a card to give the Sphinx Hexproof. Chelsea was the responding judge. It was her ruling that the spell will resolve and do as much as possible, allowing Player N to scry 2. This was overturned. As Magma Jet goes to resolve, we check to see if the target is legal, and it is not because of hexproof. As a result the spell is countered by the game rules and none of it’s effects occur (CR 602.8b).

A small hiccup occurred in logistics. A player asked me as were entering round 4 (of 6) if standings had been posted at all. They had not, and I did want to post standings at the end of round 3, as that was the half-way point for the event. I thanked the player and made a note to post standings end of round 4. Standings were posted, but then I quickly forgot to pair round 5 before printing pairings and match-slips. This resulted in duplicate pairings, which we had to quickly retract. Fortunately I caught the error quickly.