Written by Riki Hayashi

Introduction

This blog has been created on behalf of the StarCityGames Organized Play Department in order to better communicate with judges about various aspects of the SCG Tour, including items like application publications and upcoming deadlines, changes to the Tour, and operational tips. The primary author of the post will always appear at the top as it does here.

Season Two Applications

Applications for the SCG Tour 2019 Season Two Keystone Sponsorship Program have been posted. In addition, individual event applications through September have also been posted. Applications for our three October SCG Tour events have not been posted due to the TBD nature of the formats. You can apply for Keystone for these three events, and we will do our best to communicate clearly and quickly with the judges we select to be the Head Judges as soon as we can share more information. Depending on when we expect to publish the formats for these events, we may open applications without that information available, and will do our best to accommodate judges whose plans may change based on the announced formats.

Season Two Keystone applications will close on Sunday, May 5th. Selection offers will be communicated privately over the following two weeks, and we hope to publish a final schedule by Friday, May 17th. Our first Season Two event, Pittsburgh, will close its applications on May 27th, so you should have enough lead time to be able to apply after learning who the Head Judge for the second Team Modern Open in history will be.

Partial Shifts

Starting with Season Two this year (2019), we are introducing a new feature to the SCG Tour: the Partial Shift. To contrast with this, what has been the default shift of judging from start to finish will henceforth be referred to as a Full Shift. Partial Shift judges will start each day with the same call times as Full Shift judges, 9:00am on Saturday and 8:30am on Sunday and will end their shifts after 6 hours (3:00pm on Saturday and 2:30pm on Sunday) with a normal length lunch break of approximately 1 hour. Compensation for Partial Shift judges is $65 for L1s, $90 for L2s, and $115 for L3s.

Our hope is that the Partial Shift will appeal to a broad cross section of judges, including but not limited to:

• Judges who cannot work a Full Shift that day for whatever reason.
• Newer judges who don’t want to commit to a Full Shift, but who wish to try out judging on the SCG Tour.
• Judges who enjoy playing! Both day’s Partial Shifts have been designed so that a judge can jump into a Challenge event of any format after finishing their shift.
• Judges who travel to our events from a long distance. Particularly for those leaving on Sunday, we hope that hitting the road early is helpful to you in getting you home at a reasonable hour.

For us as Tournament Organizer, we hope that the use of Partial Shift judges will improve the experience for everyone judging with us by concentrating the most judges on the rounds where they are needed most, then as the number of players tapers down so too will the judges on the floor, keeping things from entering that late tournament lethargy from overcrowding.

We want to thank the judges who first suggested this idea to us, as well as those of you who have participated in limited trials and provided feedback to us.