Eric Lee, Level 2, Vancouver, Canada
Enjoy!
A bit of background on me, first.
I recently moved to Baltimore, MD. With no car, I looked for the closest store to me and found one around 2 miles away, a small bookstore that also deals in Magic cards and holds a few events per week, Amazing Spiral. I met Dave Wright, a spirited and enthusiastic L1 who was the store’s main judge. I have primarily worked in big stores with mostly experienced players, and more experienced judges. I have a decent amount of GP and SCG Open experience under my belt, and this would turn out to be the first small store I would work with regularly as the most experienced judge there.
It soon hit me that things would be very different here.
Dave exclaimed that we were having a 28 person FNM, the largest that they’d ever had. The store was filled with regulars, some of which were experienced players, newcomers, and a good number of kids from the age of 8-14. As a judge who was used to large events and experienced players, the difference in environment came as a shock, and I wanted to outline how things have developed over the months at FNM, and how we dealt with a big slow play issue. I have attended and judged every FNM except for two or three from September to December, and each time, Dave and I were the two judges for the event.
One of the first things I learned as a judge was that it only takes one slow player in the room to delay the tournament significantly. Having worked on the floor for mainly large events, the bottom line for me has been round turn around time. This means looking for, calling out, and addressing slow play. Even at Prereleases and FNMs, when people take too long to make a play, usually after a few comments or a short conversation about the problem at hand, they tend to speed up and play at a more reasonable pace.
At Spiral, there was a mixture of young children, newcomers, and a few people who did not speak English as their first language. Every round went to time, with multiple tables involved in huge board stalls, or just people who took long turns in the tank.
When you’re a small store, it’s difficult to come down too hard on things like slow play, especially for newcomers and kids. If you do things in the wrong way, it’s easy to come off as harsh and make the player feel unwanted. When you’re trying to raise your store to Core level, you want to raise your attendance numbers, and that makes the slow play talk a touchy subject.
I wanted to wait a few weeks so that I didn’t look like I was going over Dave’s head and scolding people on slow play right off the bat, and so after a week or two, Dave and I discussed the presence of slow play in the store and decided that we had to take some action.
First of all, Dave sent out a weekly email newsletter to everyone on the mailing list, informing them that slow play was a problem in the store, and without singling any one person or a group of people out, said that we’d be trying to address the issue of slow play more and more. This allowed us to start giving the slow play talk to the entire audience of FNM players without making anyone feel like they were being targeted or singled out, and inform people why slow play matters and why we had to enforce it.
The second thing we did was to start manually dividing people into different pods. In an average FNM, we generally had somewhere between 12-20 people, which would result in anywhere between two and three pods. We started having a children/beginners pod, and that was a huge success. The more experienced players were happy to be able to have better draft signals, higher levels of competition, and faster pace of play, while the beginners were happy to have a higher chance of winning prize, and to feel less pressure to have to keep up with what most likely felt like a difficult or impossible standard.
We still called people on slow play and asked them to play faster, and in one extreme case, we had to game loss a player for continuing to play far too slowly after repeated cautions. After making sure that the player understood exactly why he was receiving a game loss, he came back the next week and finished his games in a timely manner, which was very encouraging.
Nowadays, the pace of play seems to have noticeably increased, although the beginner’s pod still needs to be kept moving. Dave often enters himself into the beginner’s pod because he is exempt from the prize pool as an employee of the store, and makes sure things run smoothly.
Before I moved to Baltimore, I wasn’t really used to a small, developing store and a small, developing local community, so I feel that I’ve been learning a lot. If you’ve been having trouble with a large skill and experience disparity in your stores, I would recommend trying a beginner’s pod sign up as a separate event from the regular draft. It’s helped bring back experienced regulars who disliked the imbalance of skill levels during Friday Night drafts without sacrificing the attendance of the children and newer players who clearly have shown a lot of interest in the game and loyalty to the store.
Moving forward, I think I should come up with more ways to increase player attendance, because the store has not quite reached the necessary number of players for Core level, but helping to build this community with Dave has been a very rewarding experience thus far.