Introductory Scorekeeping - Lesson 1

Scorekeeping Fundamentals

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Below is the full script of the lesson, if you learn or process material better through the written word!

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Hello there!

Welcome to the Cascade Games Scorekeeper Lessons. As always, I’m your host Jonah, and today we’re going to dive into the introductory course of the Star Wars: Unlimited Scorekeeper certification.

The goals of these lessons are to provide information to future Star Wars: Unlimited Scorekeepers and to set expectations about this role. We have previously discussed Judges and how they are responsible for making sure the rules of the game are followed, the tournament runs in a timely manner, and that players feel safe and assisted. But if judges care about all that, what else is left to do? Why do we need Scorekeepers? Why do you need this certification?

Scorekeepers handle a lot of tasks that require them to be at their station - and that means that they can’t be out on the floor answering questions. While for smaller events, it’s possible to manage both responsibilities, as events scale up, it becomes more important to have a dedicated scorekeeper. Furthermore, while the key functions of running an event are relatively straightforward, a lot of scorekeeping software is complex and has a lot of features that you may not be aware of and frankly, won’t need to use ninety percent of the time. However, there are tools and utilities that individuals who are intimately familiar with the software can take advantage of and these experts are Scorekeepers.

This certification isn’t going to make you a master scorekeeper immediately - in fact, this is just one of a few Scorekeeper tracks we have planned, and that higher level of expertise will come with those later lessons. Furthermore, while a lot of Scorekeeping effectively is knowing which buttons to press, there’s a fair amount of it that’s more philosophical in nature - when should you repair a match or leave it as is, or repair the whole round? These are questions of logistics and philosophy that you’ll gain through these lessons and through experience.

This is one of four lessons for the Introductory Scorekeeper certification, which you can earn by completing a short exam. This certification does not require an endorsement, but the exam will cover material from this lesson as well as directly from Melee, so having some practical experience will be beneficial.

What is a Scorekeeper?

Tournaments are usually run using software that matches players against each other. The process of matching a new round, in Star Wars: Unlimited’s case, is fairly simple and can even be done using a phone. But not everything is simple about a tournament: setting it up and making sure all players are correctly registered is not easily done without a computer; fixing results, editing decklists, and having an overview of penalties are also challenging. But some things go beyond the matchmaking software, like dealing with printers and statistics.

At smaller tournaments like your weekly LGS ones or even at some Planetary Qualifiers, judges can usually manage scorekeeping tasks, maybe with the help of a store employee. But as events become larger and more complex, the need for a specialized staff member also grows. Scorekeepers are the members of the staff who use all the power of a computer (and printers and internet and everything else) to support judges and players - and sometimes even the fancy coverage team you watch during big events! We’ll learn about what these tasks are and how to perform them in the next lessons.

Before we dive into specifics, though, we should start from the beginning: Tournaments!

Tournament Documents

As you’ve played a weekly event at your local game store, you may have heard you have 55 minutes to play a best-of-three match or 25 minutes for a best-of-one. These numbers were not randomly chosen by your local organizer. They are defined in the Star Wars: Unlimited tournament documents. Have these at hand for your studies.

Of course, in order to communicate well with players and your teammates, it would be useful to understand the game terminology and concepts, so you may want to consult the Star Wars Comprehensive Rules (the CR) too.

Your Role in a Tournament

According to the Tournament Documents, a Scorekeeper’s responsibilities are:

More than that, though, Scorekeepers are part of the Staff. Players are our customers, and we are hired to take care of them. They often do not know the difference between the 3 PM Draft Scorekeeper and the Galactic Championship Deck Checks Team Lead - and it’s okay that they don’t know it!

We must ensure that our main tasks are taken care of, but we must also find solutions and support our team and our players to the best of our abilities. For example, please don’t get out of your station to bring a player to their table on the other side of the floor because while you help this person out, there may be ten, fifty, or even hundreds waiting for you to launch their next round! But what you CAN do is point them in the correct direction if you are familiar with the venue layout or the general event schedule. This also applies to information about your local store’s restrooms, power outlets, or closest café: questions big and small!

Some problems or questions are not yours to solve, but you can make an effort to ensure you are the final deviation in this player’s journey by bringing them to the person who is able to deal with it - a judge, the TO, or your LGS clerk.

Similarly, can a judge check by themselves what’s the name of a player’s last opponent? Sure. But you can probably do it faster and more easily. On the other hand, judges can teach players how to report their results, drop from a tournament, or at what time the next round starts as well or maybe even better than you. Prioritize, support, and ask for support.

Event Formats

Most card games offer two big kinds of tournaments: Constructed and Limited. Constructed events are those in which players show up to play with their deck. Limited events are those in which players build their deck during the event - no need to bring cards from home!

As defined in the Star Wars: Unlimited Tournament Documents, Star Wars: Unlimited supports two formats of Constructed events: Premier and Twin Suns. They have many differences in rules and deck constructions, but these don’t really matter from a Scorekeeper perspective - players simply get paired, sit down, and play. Star Wars: Unlimited also supports two formats of Limited events: Sealed Play and Draft Play.

During a Sealed event, players receive a number of booster packs (and maybe special packs, a pre-constructed deck, or other material) and must build their deck out of the cards they open from this material. This means there is a deck construction phase before any actual matches happen.

Draft Play adds even one more step: instead of simply opening packs, players are assembled in pods (typically made up of 8 players) and must draft the cards they’ll use to build their decks. In some events, they’ll also play only opponents from the same pod as them. As you can imagine, Drafts have many more details we should pay attention to.

Phases of a Tournament

On our end, a tournament has roughly 5 parts:

  1. During Preparation, we make sure we have the adequate tools to launch the event: an assigned judge, an internet connection, a printer, etc. It’s good to verify that we have the tournament’s fact sheet informing us of its number of rounds, prize structure, and whatever else we, our team, and our players may need to know. Some Organizers also ask that Scorekeepers handle prizes and perform other tasks, so get all of this aligned.
  2. Once all is set up, you must enroll players and make sure any Registration exceptions are taken care of. You may need to assign a fixed table to a player, for example, or deal with typos, double entries, and other issues.
  3. With your player list ready, it’s time to Kickstart this tournament! Check that you have the final and correct information about the starting table, number of rounds, and any other special parameters. Print the initial papers for your team, publish initial seatings for your players, and get the show started! For in-store events, this step is usually minimal, as you’re often only launching the one event.
  4. When players have started playing (or assembling their decks), we have a routine of dealing with No-Shows, End-of-Round procedures, and flipping the Round. This is usually relaxed, but timing and communication are fundamental here!
  5. Then, after a few (or way too many) hours, players have finished their matches, and we can wrap it up! Make sure all teams have the appropriate information they may need for prizing, marketing, floor management, and whatever else has been asked of you by the TO. Clean out your station, stretch your back, and close the tournament tab on your browser - you can rest now (or get prepared for the next one!).

Pairings

For the last portion of this intro, let’s understand a bit about how players get to play. In our case, what we mean is: how are they paired? Let’s look at two of the most common methods, as presented in our Tournament Regulations:

Swiss Rounds

Our main method to find opponents for players is called Swiss. The Swiss pairing system was first implemented in 1895 by Dr. Julius Muller… Just kidding, this is not important. What we must know about the Swiss pairing system is:

Also, suppose it’s impossible to find a suitable opponent for a player (most commonly because there is an odd number of participants). In that case, that player is assigned a random bye, a ‘free win’. Since pairings start from the player with the most points and go down, random byes are awarded to a random player with the fewest points.

Swiss rounds are used from weekly play to most rounds of large and professional events. But there are other possibilities!

Single Elimination

The second pairing method we should be aware of is Single Elimination. Using this system, when a player wins, they advance to the next round. If they lose, they are eliminated from the tournament. Simple enough, right?

For this kind of tournament, we usually set up a bracket.

A significant detail here is that when the number of players is multiple of 4 and this is not the beginning of the tournament (which is the case in the final phase of Competitive tournaments), we must use the standings of the previous rounds to build our bracket: the player in the first place will face the one in the last place, the second place will face the second-to-last and so on, as you can see in the previous bracket: 1 vs 8, 2 vs 7, etc.

And that’s it for our introduction! In the next lessons, we’ll start actually building events according to what we’ve learned (or reviewed) here.

If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us after new lessons 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.

Until next time, good luck and have fun!

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