Level 3 - Lesson 2
Writing Tournament Reports
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Hello there!
Welcome back to the level three lessons for the Star Wars™: Unlimited Judge Program!
As always, I’m your host Jonah, and today I’ll be talking about Tournament Reports. Tournament reports are a tool that can help demonstrate your knowledge and provide education to other judges. Writing a tournament report is also a prerequisite for level three advancement.
What Are Tournament Reports?
On a technical level Tournament Reports are written documents describing what happened at a tournament, predominantly used for sharing your experiences with other members of the community so that you can learn from them.
In the context of the judge program, they’re focused predominantly on judge calls and event logistics. Players will often write tournament reports, although those are frequently less formal and these days are often videos - they talk about the player’s experience at the event holistically, but usually go through round-by-round, talking about their match-ups and lines of play.
There is, in fact, a lot of similarity between a player’s tournament report and a judge’s, from a broader perspective. They’re necessarily limited in scope, because it’s the perspective of just one person, but as we often say, perception is reality - a judge or player’s perception can be a meaningful evaluation of the event.
Who Can Write Them?
Anyone can write a Tournament Report. Most frequently, we see Tournament Reports as something written by head judges, but that’s because they were initially considered as a resource to be shared with the publisher, for additional information regarding their earliest events.
However, it doesn’t matter your role at an event - if you think you have something valuable to share, it’s useful to share it. A great heuristic is that if you learned something that you could only have learned through experience, sharing that experience is going to help somebody else at a future event.
When an experienced Head Judge writes a report, they may say that they “handled product distribution.”
For a less experienced judge, who is working their first competitive tier limited event, they are likely going to learn a lot more, and consequently may express “we handed out product in this order this specific order, which the head judge explained was to avoid specific issue - this wasn’t something that I had considered, and it immediately showed it’s value when players tried to go out of order, but pre-event planning prevented that”.
However, you don’t even need to be in a judge role to write a tournament report that’s helpful for other judges - if you write one as the Tournament Organizer or Scorekeeper, you may have a different perspective that is valuable to other judges. If you write one as a player, you get the most valuable perspective - the entire purpose of running these events is to ensure that players have a positive experience. We can write tournament reports about how efficient we made the event machine, but if it leads to a poor player experience where they’re just confused or uncertain, we haven’t actually led to a successful event.
Note that the requirements for the L3 advancement Tournament Report require very specific elements, and so a TR from the perspective of a non-judging role is very unlikely to be able to provide the insight necessary.
Why Are They A Requirement?
We’ve mentioned a few times that these are a requirement for the L3 advancement process. Why are they required? This, along with the L2 mentorship certification, are the first written requirements, which will be a barrier to some people.
Note that the Tournament Reports do not need to be submitted in English if the author is more comfortable writing in another language, to help minimize barriers.
But that doesn’t explain why it’s a requirement. I’ve talked about the value it brings to the program as an education resource, but that isn’t why they’re necessary - it’s not required that anyone other than the evaluator read the Tournament Report.
Here’s the crux of it - while every judge may be called upon to write a disqualification statement, it becomes more likely the higher the stakes get, and the more players there are in the event. At this point in a judge’s career, when you’re acting as Head Judge for events with seventy to a hundred players, often with meaningful prizes on the line, it is simply more likely for a player in your event to cheat or otherwise commit an offense that requires a disqualification.
When that happens, you’ll need to be able to write a statement that is submitted to FFG (see the elective on Disqualifications) that gives them the information they need in order to make any decisions they have to.
That means it is important that L3 candidates demonstrate their ability to write a useful statement. However, we very much want to avoid incentivizing judges disqualify players in order to fulfil an advancement requirement, and so we use the closest facsimile to a statement.
How Do I Write A Good Tournament Report?
How do you write a good Tournament Report? It depends! What are your goals? If you’re writing one for the L3 certification, just ensure that in addition to the general guidance here, you also adhere to the more specific criteria in the Tournament Report Rubric.
So, the first question to ask and answer is “Why are you writing this?” Are you writing it to process what happened at a tournament for self-improvement? Are you trying to explain what went wrong so nobody else made mistakes? Do you feel like you had areas of improvement, but aren’t sure what they are? Was the event an unexpected success and you kinda just want to brag? There are many reasons to want to talk about an event you ran, and can lead you to a different focus.
If you’re focused on helping others avoid mistakes, talking about why you made the decisions you made, what information you learned that showed you it could have been better, and how you could get that information sooner in the future.
If you have a tournament operation that you’re experimenting with - maybe a new way to run end-of-round, or to prize out on-demand events, you can talk about only that. You don’t need to talk about everything that happened all day.
If you had a very complex base damage discrepancy call that you had to get the Head Judge involved in, and the two of you went back and forth and both learned a lot, you can make your tournament report about just that single call.
On the other hand, if you had a holistically positive experience, but can’t narrow it down to any specific moments, you talk about the day. If the event was the biggest event you’ve been to, you can include stats - how many players, how many rounds, how many calls - what’s the breakdown of rules vs. policy. How many times were you asked about Krayt Dragon or Condemn or whatever the latest hotness is.
While the rubric is going to lead to some homogenization, as folks strive for something suitable for use in that particular case, a good tournament report is one that you’re excited to write, and one that people are excited to read.
You can absolutely write a meaningful and useful tournament report that covers the same typical calls that crop up regularly in tournament reports - heck, even the fact that some calls show up frequently is very helpful information. However, writing one that is dynamic and unique will draw more attention from other judges, and if it gets more people engaging, has a broader impact.
Where Can They Be Found?
Tournament Reports can most frequently be found in the Tournament Reports forum on Discord; they aren’t required to be shared there. Tournament reports can be found in the wild, though - some people might post videos that they’ve created covering their experiences, or write posts on social media sites or personal blogs.
However, Tournament Reports don’t need to be posted publicly. They can be shared to a smaller audience if you’re not ready to share your insights, or are concerned about criticism, or they can be kept entirely private (although then they start to bleed into self-reviews, and the line between them gets a little bit blurry, but that doesn’t really matter for this).
That’s all we have for this lesson! If you’re writing a tournament report for the L3 certification process, be sure to check out the Tournament Report Rubric to make sure you’re getting what you need in your document. Otherwise, come back next time as we discuss the Mentor Certification and ways to provide useful feedback to help others grow.
If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more level three lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us 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!