Level Two - Lesson 7

Tournament Regulations - Event Structure

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Hello there!

Welcome back to the level two lessons for the Star Wars™: Unlimited Judge Program!

As always, I’m your host Jonah, and today we’re going to start the first of several lessons on the Tournament Regulations and related concepts. This lesson is going to discuss tournament structure, primarily for constructed format 1v1 tournaments. That’ll be premier tournaments, not draft, sealed or Twin Suns.

Some of what’s covered in this lesson has been covered briefly in L1 lessons, including L1 Tournament Regulations and L1 running an event, but we’re going to go into more detail and cover a bit more of the ideas behind some of these regulations and structures.

Starting the Event

The hardest part of every event is getting it started - you have your players who want to start playing, but don’t have anywhere to be, the TO who wants you to start, but who also wants to keep registering more players, and keeping registration open until the last second, and no momentum to keep you going.

You want to come to your event knowing key cut-off points.

Many large events will have online preregistration, and most other events will allow folks to register as soon as they’re present. However, sometimes registration doesn’t open until an hour or two before the event begins.

This is especially prevalent at larger conventions as Tournament Organizers want to minimize the number of refunds they have to issue, and a player who signs up for an event, but then gets distracted by a panel or otherwise doesn’t return, is a player who needs to be handled later.

You also want to know the cut-off for when registration ends. At the store level, you’re frequently going to have the event start time also be the cut-off for registration - the events are small enough that a player who scoots in at the last moment can quickly get registered and the event can begin. However, with larger events or conventions that have many side events, frequently pairings are generated before the announced start time so that play can begin closer to that time, rather than five or ten minutes later - preserving time for attendees is very valuable. This means that registration can frequently close five to fifteen minutes before the event is scheduled to begin, to allow for these logistical operations.

Of course, there’s often someone in line, or a player who has a registration issue, and so that deadline is pushed back a small amount. How much events get pushed back will be dependent on the size of the event and the particular organizer, so it’s something that you’ll have to adapt to individually, but it’s good to know.

Some stores will definitely develop reputations as places where showdowns start fifteen minutes late because there’s someone who always calls ahead and says that they’ll be late and the store delays the event.

However, you’re also able to start the event as scheduled, pair the player as though they were on time, and assign tardiness as appropriate. If you do this in response to a player calling in, be sure that they’re aware of this restriction - some players may know that they won’t be able to make it within the time limit and wouldn’t want to play with a game loss or match loss.

Similarly, you’ll want to know both the theoretical cap on the event and the actual cap. Many events have a player cap, but sometimes that cap can be stretched a bit. It’s often used as a guideline for how many players the organizer expects or how much space they have available.

However, if one or two extra players show up and want to play, many organizers add an extra set of chairs to a table and have folks squeeze in. I’ve even played some prereleases with players playing across the store counter, and I’ve definitely worked with convention centers to get more tables and chairs set up while players are playing in events.

Nonetheless, sometimes there are events where the organizer can’t break that cap and can’t add more players. This is often because they don’t have the necessary product - they have exactly enough participation promos or prerelease kits. It can also be because of seating limitations - as much as they might want to add more players, they might genuinely not have enough space.

Knowing what the baseline player cap is gives you a good expectation for the event, but knowing the actual cap, which again is something you’ll learn through experience with individual organizers, lets you be prepared when things go unexpectedly well.

Next we approach the event structure and understand whether or not it’s flexible based on player count. Most casual tier events will be a fixed number of rounds - usually three or four and then prizes are distributed, and so they’re independent of the number of players.

As soon as you have four players, you can play a full three-round event - each player is able to play a new player each round, and you won’t have any byes. You’ll have a 2-0 paired against an 0-2 in the final round, but that’s acceptable for a four-player event.

Competitive events usually require at least eight players to launch, and have a variable number of rounds based on the attendance, before a top cut. The reason these events have a variable number of rounds is that you generally want to have a structure that makes it so that all players with an X-1 record or better make that top cut. This isn’t an absolute requirement, but it’s a common expectation. It’s also generally desired to have as efficient of a tournament as possible. For example, with sixty-four players, you should generally run a six-round event - you’ll usually have seven or fewer players with a record of five wins and one loss or better, which hits the goal of all X-1 players making the cut.

We’re going to talk about tournament math for a second - there’s a chart in the tournament regulations, but a rough guideline for breakpoints for number of rounds follows powers of two - four rounds up to sixteen players, five rounds up to thirty two, six rounds up to sixty-four, seven rounds up to one hundred twenty eight...

However, this math starts to break down once you get to about two hundred players. Unintentional draws, pair downs, and other complications begin to screw with the math. Following tournament regulations is the best practice. But, keep in mind that the closer you get to a break point the narrow your margin of error is.

It’s possible that you could have a sixty-five-player event that runs six rounds and not seven, and not have any X-1s miss the top cut, but it’s not a guarantee, and players will make tournament decisions based on the reliability of this math. Thus, it’s important to determine how many players you have, and announce how many rounds you’ll be playing at the start of the event, especially if it’s not as the tournament regulations prescribe.

Finally, we get to deck registration - this is one of the last things you need to know before you start your event. This is only something that should happen during competitive tier events. For casual tier events, while players should play the same deck for the duration of the tournament, you don’t need to manage decklists.

However, for competitive, you do want those decklists. Decklists should be collected or registered before play begins for the first round. If you’re using a digital decklist tool, such as the one built into Melee.gg, you can set a time when submissions are closed. I recommend having it close shortly after the event is scheduled to begin. Give them a minute or so of wiggle room. This is because players will be trying to make adjustments up to the last second, especially players who registered themselves very close to the deadline. Giving them time to input decklists means that you have fewer paper decklists you need to manage.

If you’re dealing with paper decklists, you’ll want to collect them before play begins for round one. You can hold a player meeting before seatings for round one, or you can collect them at the start of round one.

Your only other consideration is if decklists are public. Some events will have public decklists for the duration of the tournament. For these, decklist submission must be closed well in advance of the decklists being published - otherwise players could make last-minute adjustments to their deck to adapt to the now public metagame.

That’s pretty much everything you need to consider in the lead-up to the event. Now it’s time to get the ball rolling.

This is when we get players seated. Often, this is just for round one, but sometimes you’ll want a player meeting.

A player meeting is where you have seatings for the players, but they’re not seated across from their opponent. This comes with several benefits.

First, it allows you to quickly check for no-shows. The first round of larger tournaments is likely to have a significant number of players who preregistered but have not arrived. By seating players but not pairing them, you can identify who is missing and have them dropped before round one begins, thereby avoiding issuing round one byes.

Second, it allows you to manage collection and distribution easily. If you have to collect decklists, media waivers, or some other form of paperwork from players, you can seat them in alphabetical order, and then anything you collect will be in that known order, rather than the randomness of first-round pairings. (There are ways to index and manage that randomness, but that’s not something we’re concerned with for today.) It also means that players aren’t seated across from their opponent, and so they’re slightly less worried about revealing their decklist (although they’ll still be circumspect about it).

For goodies that you’re distributing, it means that players aren’t trying to play a match while you’re handing them promos, tickets, playmats, vouchers etc... if they’ve started a match, they’re only going to be partially paying attention to judges distributing things, and it’s very possible that they won’t realize they’ve been given something, forget about it by the time the match ends, and then tell you that they never received it.

However, these advantages are mitigated significantly at smaller events. At tournaments where you’re the only judge, you can know whether or not you gave someone promos, and not have to hunt down the judge who you’ve been told was assigned to handle that task who tells you they delegated it to someone else...

I would recommend against player meetings at smaller events because they do have a real cost in time - they don’t take terribly long, but it’s three or four minutes for players to find their seats and get settled in, and then you create another mass of congestion when you assign players seatings for round one. Many players who arent expecting a players meeting are also confused, and treat it like the first round - fully unpacking and getting ready to play, when they don’t need to do that, which again eats into the tournament’s progression.

With that being said, many of the things you do during a player meeting can simply occur at the start of round one, before you instruct players to begin play.

Once you do, you’ve finished the hardest part of the event, and you progress through to the end of the round, where you manage outstanding tables and time extensions, and ensure that all results come in.

There are a few priorities as rounds end.

First, you want to ensure that all matches that have completed play and left their tables have been reported. These are colloquially known as ghost matches. It’s critical to identify and address these, as they won’t resolve on their own. The matches that are still playing are going to eventually finish their games and report their results.

Depending on the venue and your familiarity with the players, you can either make announcements to the hall asking for generally unreported matches to reported, for specific players to report, or seek out the individuals more privately to ask them their match result.

Your next priority is ensuring that tables enter the end-of-match procedure properly, going into their final action phase when it is appropriate to do so. Most matches can be handled with a general announcement to the tournament saying that it is time in the round, and players should finish the current round before proceeding to the final action phase.

Matches with time extensions may need to be addressed individually. This can be done by judges who go through aisles and check in with matches still playing.

Finally, you want to ensure that judges (including yourself) are both sitting on key matches as well as some judges being available for calls if you don’t have enough judges for every table.

When you’re watching a match during end of round, stay engaged - your role is to not only make sure that they go into the final action phase when appropriate, but to understand the game state. That way, if an issue arises, you’re able to handle it quickly, and to minimize the amount of time that is spent catching up. If you’re distracted by a task, or don’t catch everything, don’t worry - that happens.

We’ll be going more in depth on how to maximize your efficiency and productivity during end of round in future lessons.

For casual tier events, that’s pretty much it - you’ll rinse and repeat until all rounds are complete, and then either distribute prizes or hand over the standings to the tournament organizer who will handle that task.

For competitive tier events, there are a few key differences. First, you might have one or more cuts. You’ll sometimes have a cut to a second day of swiss play - playing more than eight or nine rounds begins to get very taxing for the players and can be equally taxing for the staff running the event. Therefore, if an event needs more then eight rounds of play, due to the number of players, play is split across multiple days. These cuts are sometimes based on record, sometimes based on standing, and sometimes a hybrid approach with something along the lines of all players with a record of X-2 or better or top 64, whichever is more players making the cut.

Generally, day two play is more swiss, not single elimination, as players who make the cut are all live for top eight, and we don’t want to eliminate an undefeated player immediately. Penalties points don’t reset after cuts - there are some old tournament softwares that needed to treat second days as entirely new events, which is why some games have penalties resetting.

Match player history (but not match points) does reset with these cuts - this means that after a cut, you’re eligible to play someone you’ve faced before. This is necessary because if you make it to a top eight cut, it’s frequently the case that the players have played against each other already. In fact, if you have an undefeated player and only one player at X-1, it’s almost guaranteed that the undefeated player was the individual who gave the X-1 player their loss - and if they both make the top cut and make it to the finals... well it would be anticlimactic to say that they’re not allowed to play each other. That’s all to say that after a cut, players should be prepared to play someone that they have already played, although the software will generally try to pair them against new players.

After any additional Swiss rounds, there will be a cut to top eight or another size single elimination bracket. At this point, players begin to get knocked out, but we’ll cover this in detail in the future lesson on running a top cut, as they have a different atmosphere than the rest of the tournament.

In any case, that’s all for now. Join us next time as we talk a bit more in depth about draft and sealed in our coverage of limited events! If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more level two lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us Tuesdays and Fridays on twitch.tv/swu_judges for live broadcasts covering the content of these lessons as they are released, and join the Star Wars: Unlimited Judge Program Discord to join the community in discussion of this and much, much more.

As always, good luck, and have fun.

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