Nanaimo, BC, Canada

April 25th, 2026

Admin Lead

Administrative Acclimitization

This was another extension of my admin responsibilities in Calgary. I once again sent out a team email and organized breaks for my team. However this got thrown into chaos when two of my staff needed to pull out a day before the event! To further the chaos I was invited to help with setup quite late as well. The original offer was to go in at 6am before the event to set up the hall, but I was a little concerned that some things might take longer than that. Since my flight landed quite early the preceding day, I went in the evening before to do setup instead. The event used pre-registered pools for the sealed event, which players and judges love. The one issue is that decklists aren’t packed in with the appropriate sealed pools, they need to be manually packed. This was one of the tasks I took care of the day before. I also ensured we had enough product for the listed cap.
The next pile of things that needed doing were the tech things. I ensured the tablets and square readers were charging, and set to work on setting up the printer. Unfortunately as always, the printer presented some issues and ended up taking longer than expected. This meant I ran out of bandwidth to log into square and the other laptops. This was a bit of a mistake since the next morning it was a bit of a scramble to track down all the correct passwords. Luckily I ended up going in a bit early the next day anyways, anticipating some unexpected hiccups.

The Keeper of the Score

There were only two scheduled events for the day, an RCQ run through Melee as well as a chaos sealed run through eventlink. Both had online pre-registrations that needed to be enrolled into the events manually. I’m not very experienced as a scorekeeper, and have only mainly interacted with it from the judge side, which is largely, flipping rounds, dropping players and editing matches. Actually starting a tournament isn’t something I’ve had a ton of experience with. So not only did I enroll the players in the wrong part of melee (I put them into the preregistered players section, instead of active players) but I also ended up pulling the player list for the Quebec event of the same format (on the same day) instead of the Nanaimo player list. This caused so many issues that I ended up having to call the organizer and have him help me through it. We ended up having the players sit for build, and verified their payment receipts, then after players were building, we rebuilt the event and imported the correct player list into the correct part of melee. It was a pretty stressful experience and a major punt, but afterwards I settled down and resolved to do better for the rest of the day.

A Strange Format Indeed

The event was double elimination sealed. This is a bit odd since we so seldom rundouble elimination events. This meant that we’d be using sudden death rules, which are a constant source of crazy win stories and intense bad beats stories. The philosophy for doing double elimination was to avoid an incredibly long tournament. Since this was a one-day show, we didn’t have the option of running the top 8 on the second day, and using the traditional sealed + top 8 draft structure, meant players would be playing for 10+ hours, which is a bit of a drag for everyone. The structure also caused some prize payout issues, players would get a promo as they dropped out of the event, with the eventual invite winners getting foil promos. This meant that each round the judge would have to hunt down the matches of the X-1 players and only put the drop out promo on those tables. I think a better strategy would’ve been to give everyone a nonfoil of the promo and then give the winners an additional promo. Due to the aforementioned scorekeeping shenanigans we weren’t able to do no-shows during build, however we wanted to avoid giving out a bunch of byes in an event like this. If players arrived and didn’t have opponents we would manually repair them with other players without opponents. If this ended up with a player who was significantly late being an odd player (in that we ended up with no one for them to play against) they’d wait until the 10 minute mark before getting a bye, and then at the top of the next round they’d get a game loss for their tardiness in the previous round. It wasn’t super clean, but was a reasonable solution that wouldn’t reward players for arriving late.

Breaking the Schedule

Breaks were a bit crunchy, being down two people made it awkward, but in the end everyone managed to go at a reasonable time. One thing that was ambiguous was whether I was responsible for covering the prize wall guy or not. As it turns out he didn’t have anyone to cover him, and so near the end of the day I made sure he got a bit of a breather while I watched his area. In the future I think it might be prudent of me to be a little more proactive on ensuring not only people under my purview get breaks, but also people adjacent to my area.

…In Conclusion

Overall this was the most administrative role I’ve ever held at an event. My judges were taken care of, but the scorekeeping, especially in the morning, was a bit of a mess. I’m just not that experienced with melee yet, and it shows. On the flip side, I kind of got to do a bit of everything, which is a role I enjoy, and got to place myself wherever I was most useful at any given time. I’d be happy to do a similar role in the future, but would like someone there as a safety net just in case things go sideways again.