This article also doubles as my tournament reports for PPTQ Vancouver at Alexandria & Maou Neko – 24th & 31st January 2015 – Johor, Malaysia

First, some background: I’ve been judging for slightly over a year and while I have a handful of GP experience under my belt, but I’ve never had held leadership roles. Two stores in Johor, much closer to home than where the rest of Malaysia’s judges are based, got Advanced status just in time for the first PPTQ season.

I reached out to the TOs of both stores, Adam from ‘Alexandria’ and Amos Lim from ‘Maou Neko’. Congratulations were offered and I introduced Judge Apps to them and reminded them to acquire a L2+ judge to HJ the event. Both storekeepers requested that I take on the role. I accepted gladly but with some trepidation. While I’m eager to take on bigger responsibilities, I’ve never been to both stores nor have experience in leading a team.

Here’s a compilation of the lessons I learned. There will be some overlap with Smith’s (L3, Thailand) and Alex’s (L2, Malaysia) excellent PPTQ Handbook but I hope my experience will be interesting enough to be useful to some.

But first, my goals leading into the events:

i) To introduce and provide a great example of what the Judge Program can offer to store owners

Both stores had never ran anything bigger than a Pre-release or a Game Day, and had not have the chance to work with a L2+ judge before.

Coming into the events, I aimed to impress the TOs. I want these TOs to feel that they can count on the Judge Program, and how well I handle myself will shape their opinions of us judges as a whole, so I really want to get it right.

ii) To mentor and guide the local judge towards L2

Despite my suggestion of using Judge Apps to secure a judge crew, both Adam and Amos decided that they would like me to head judge and Izzy (Izzaidi Mohd Farid) to be the floor judge. Izzy is a local L1, and his experience was limited to mostly Regular REL events. Izzy is interested to level up and with both stores being able to run more Competitive REL events now, having a good local judge with a strong knowledge of the IPG and tournament operations will be very beneficial to the local community.

In hindsight, I had left out an equally important goal:

iii) To educate the TOs on good tournament practices, and increase familiarity with the WER

Things like player registration, tournament structure, seating, pairings, result slips, round clock, distribution of prizes, drops are familiar to us, but not all. Since I’m working with new Advanced status stores, they might also be unfamiliar with WER and Judge Apps.

While Adam and his store ‘Alexandria’ runs primarily Magic events, introducing them to the things I mentioned earlier was easy, but Amos’s store however is more focused on other games, and he was rather overwhelmed by the amount of new information.

Getting a good feel of to what extent the TO’s knowledge and experience is and preparing them for what to expect is important for your pre-event preparation, which leads me to my first advice:

#1) Pre-event preparation

There’s a lot that can be done before the event itself to makes your life easier and make the tournament experience very much more enjoyable for the players, the TO and your staff.

I took the drive down to Johor to meet up and chat with Amos, Adam and Izzy a few weeks before the PPTQs. While we’ve all talked to each other online, meeting face to face is invaluable and will leave a better and deeper impression and help us get to know each other better.

Also, I was unfamiliar with the store’s space, layout and available equipment. I don’t want to make the drive to Johor the morning of the PPTQ and then only decide table layouts, or tell the TO that I wished he had prepared one thing or another.

I made a few lists to help me with my discussions with the TOs on what I expect and hope to have available for me:

i) Equipment – the essentials:

• PC with working internet and WER
• Printer, paper and backup toner / ink
• Decklists
• Sealed prep (if applicable)
• Tape for pairings & paper cutter or scissors
• A clear and visible round clock (if possible)

The TO might already be aware of most, but it doesn’t hurt to remind them. I also suggested the use of zip-lock plastic bags for Alexandria’s Sealed PPTQ which I got the idea from mainly American PTQ tournament reports, which Adam obliged, to my delight.

However, we did not have a properly working printer for Neko’s PPTQ. It had issues where it could only print a page at a time, and had to be reset after every print. While it caused delays, it was still workable until we had to print result slips where it’ll reset back to the first page every time. I had to work around that issue by ‘printing’ it as a PDF file, and then manually print the PDF file page by page.

Making sure that the available equipment is actually working the way you want it to is now on my list of things to look out for when working with new stores.

ii) Venue

• Participation cap?
• Appropriate layout for tables
• Table numbers
• Where to post pairings
• A judge table for deckchecks

Whether or not to set participation limits was difficult for both TOs as they have no idea how many players to expect. Space for both venues are relatively small so a participation cap was encouraged. We also discuss how to layout the playing tables with a reminder on leaving ample space for moving around.

iii) Judging staff

• Compensation
• Standbys
• Scorekeeper (SK) responsibilities

This was one of the hardest part of our conversation – judging compensation is always a tricky issue and constantly discussed. I gave both TOs some proposals based on consultation from a senior Malaysian judge (Fong, L3). I also managed to convince the TOs to get standby judges just in case it got way too many for Izzy and me to handle. We also discussed at length why the SK position is important as the entire tournament flow starts and ends with the SK.

What I should have also prepared was:

iv) What the TO should and could expect over the tournament

Perhaps equally as important is to describe how would the tournament be like to the new TO so that he can have a better idea of what to expect and how to handle it.

As mentioned earlier, Amos who was not familiar with Magic tournament operations, had some trouble starting the tournament which led to a 40-minute delay due to some registration errors and confusion.

A feedback I received from Amos was that he was overwhelmed by the many operations of WER – how to do pairings, result slips, penalties, drops and the like and wished I’ve ran through them with him earlier.

Also unfortunately, he did not take my advice regarding having a dedicated SK nor have someone else take care of store sales and operations which also contributed to delays. Which leads me to…

#2) Get there early!

Here’s an embarrassing mistake from Neko’s PPTQ – I got to Johor early, had a great lunch (event is scheduled to start at 2PM), I set my GPS and off we go… to the middle of nowhere. That cost me almost an hour and I arrived 15 minutes before the scheduled start of the event, much later than I’d wanted to.

Amos was juggling sales, handling questions and registrations all at the same time. Amos had also neglected to prepare table numbers. Thankfully, Izzy was already there and with the help of Tech (L1, Malaysia), took care of it before I arrived.

If I’ve arrived earlier – I could have helped with crowd control, helped handle questions and probably avoid the many registration issues we had that delayed our start badly. I also regretted not being able to do a proper briefing with Izzy.

My mistake here was that I got a little too comfortable – I could have avoided the delay if I was a little more vigilant. Getting there early will not only allow me more time to ease into the event, we could also deal with issues before we get too close to the start time.

#3) Be calm and confident; friendly, but firm, and don’t forget to smile!

A feedback I received at Neko’s PPTQ was that a player was impressed as he was used to sloppy tournament officials from other games and that he was playing in his first competitive Magic tournament.

There were many issues we had, but I kept my composure and dealt with them as best as I could. My prior tournament experience helped here as I told myself, “it’s ok. I know how to deal with this,” several times over Neko’s PPTQ.

Being calm and confident helps to foster trust from players and also your TO.

A kid who was not playing in the tournament was excitedly looking around. I was busy deck-checking at one point and he stared hard and asked what I was doing. I had to focus on the task at hand as the check was running long and my floor judge and scorekeeper were both engaged at that moment. So I smiled and told the kid that I will explain to him later, which I did.

Many judges wiser than me had mentioned in reports and articles alike – judging should be fun, if you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong. My goal at the event in my opinion is ultimately to help players have a good time. It’s an awesome ‘job’, and smiling is a great way to show it.

Later in the evening before the kid left, he came looking for me to say goodbye and had a wide grin.

I’d like to think I made a good impression.

#4) Mentorship – observation and giving feedback (and getting them too!)

Alexandria’s PPTQ had much lower than expected turnout so I had alot of time to talk to Izzy and to shadow his calls. My aim was to not take a single call if I can help it (as long as there’s not multiple calls), so that Izzy can gain experience taking calls and I can shadow him.

During the first PPTQ, Izzy had strong rules knowledge but didn’t deliver his ruling as confident as I feel he could, given how sure he was of the answer. He also had little familiarity with issuing penalties, filling penalty slips and deck checking. His IPG knowledge could use more work too. Given the amount of experience he has at Competitive REL, it’s pretty understandable.

The relaxed pace at Alexandria’s gave me plenty of time to talk and guide Izzy and their scorekeeper. Their SK was well experienced with Regular REL and was awesome. He paid attention to round times, made sure slips were keyed in quickly and correctly, and was not burdened with distractions from the store’s business. I only had to spend a little time walking him through penalties and spent most of our interactions discussing MTR and why certain policies were written the way they were.

And remember, feedback goes both-ways:

After giving my feedback to both Amos and Izzy, I asked for their feedback on me, stressing that I especially want to hear anything I could have done better or anything negative at all so I can avoid or improve.

One particular scenario stood out and we spent a lot of our debriefing time discussing – there was a situation where Izzy came up to me for a consultation and almost immediately we got another call. I decided to walk to the second call while listening to Izzy. There’s a chance that it could be a simple rules confirmation.

Izzy started by saying something to the likes of “So, there’s a Courser and… the player cracked a fetch land the top card was revealed, and then, the top card was flipped, and then they, uh, realize there was some…”

By this time we reached the second call’s table. I told the players I will attend to them momentarily and… we get a third call.

So far it sounded like a Looking at Extra Cards scenario, so I said so to Izzy and told him to make the best ruling he can and remind him to encourage the players to appeal if unsure. I then quickly acknowledged the third call before attending to the second which thankfully turned out to be a simple one so I could attend to the third.

Turns out the player called for a judge because he and his opponent discovered that there was a slanted stack of cards right next to his library. Both players agree and think that part of the library probably slipped off when he cracked his fetchland to cast his Courser of Kruphix which then they noticed it when the player want to reveal for Courser. Izzy could confirm the sleeves were rather slippery as this was early in the tournament and the player said he was using new sleeves. A rather uncommon scenario, but Izzy was convinced there was no foul intentions, so he fixed the library and issued no penalties.

While we were discussing the scenario, Izzy said he didn’t like how badly he started off the consultation with incomplete information and how he could have passed information better. He considered LaEC as I suggested, but decided that it didn’t felt right, so he went with his best judgement instead.

Izzy was aware about his shortcomings and I was happy that he was willing to look past a careless offhand suggestion from me. He made me realize that Izzy might have just issued LaEC because I suggested it based on very vague information.

That was my biggest mistake of the tournament – while trying to manage three calls at the same time, I should have just trusted my floor judge to make the best decision he can and trust the players to appeal if it didn’t felt right. Making a suggestion of an infraction without concrete information felt very wrong in hindsight.

Between dealing with the issues, taking calls and guiding Amos on score-keeping, my time that I could spend on Izzy was limited. From what little observation I had however, I was very happy to see that Izzy has grown much more confident and able to perform tasks I instructed him to do compared to the week before and how I too am able to learn lessons from him.

In conclusion

It has been an very interesting month as I was fortunate enough to have the chance to judge in two GPs and 2 PPTQs. I grow more and more comfortable judging GPs and advising new stores as they grow. Taking on a mentor role instead of just being the one who got mentored is also a skill I’m eager to grow.

The two PPTQs were very different in terms of preparation and I felt that I learned a lot on what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully this report could help you avoid some of the mistakes I made. I also hope the article didn’t come off as me being too full of myself, being a novice to leading and all.

I also look forward to what other advice other judges much more experienced than I am have to offer. Please do share your insights or any comments at all at the Judge Apps forums here.

Thank you very much for reading!