Tournament Operations & Logistics
Aspects of Judging
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Hello there!
Welcome to the Aspects of Judging lessons. As always, I’m your host Jonah, and this elective lesson series is going to cover the Aspects of Judging - just like it says on the box.
As promised, we’re going to start digging into Tournament Operations and Logistics. This is the largest of the categories, and like Game and Format Knowledge, is one that is relatively intuitive - knowing how to run a tournament is very obviously an important part of being a judge.
This lesson is going to go into more detail than you’ve probably considered, and for the most part, like with Game and Format Knowledge, you don’t need to actively consider these elements - but they are things that you may already be considering. By giving them labels and the context, perhaps you’ll begin to think about them actively and find ways to improve both the efficiency and play experience for your community.
We’ll go over each of the sub-categories and the details within them, discuss what they mean, talk about how you can improve them in a broad sense of the skill, and outline the expectations for judge levels one, two, and three.
Tournament Operations
Let’s start with the first half of the title of the aspect - Tournament Operations! In this conversation, Tournament Operations means anything that you need to actively do to manage the tournament. A lot of this is based on the Tournament Regulations, but most of it is about execution, not the actual regulations themselves. For example, there are instructions that say pairings should be distributed, but not detail on how, or what the most efficient and effective steps to take are. This lesson won’t cover those details, but knowing how to carry out an event is fundamental to, well, running good events.
Announcements
To kick things off, both in this lesson and at your events, you need to make some sort of announcement or announcements. The larger the event, the more announcements you usually need to make, but there’s an art to managing what you say.
Tone, technique, and content (or “text” if we want to remain alliterative) all play a role in how effective your announcements are. Having a very stern and in depth set of announcements may work for a high profile event, but may not work for a prerelease. Similarly, skipping out on details is fine for weekly play with your regulars, but at a Planetary Qualifier with players who aren’t familiar with the space, you may want to include some “obvious” details.
Pairings & Standings
Getting pairings and standings to players has become easier as technology has improved. Most tournament software these days has a digital component and players can access pairings directly on their mobile device.
However, there are often exceptions where players aren’t expected to have access to that sort of data, and being prepared to provide alternate means of getting pairings, whether it’s calling them out for small events, or cleanly prepared pairings boards can be crucial to the smooth flow of events.
Elements of this responsibility include being aware of optimal timing, where in the venue to place pairings if physical pairings are being used, and how to communicate to players that pairings are available.
Deck Checks
To manage a deck check, all you need to do is verify that a deck is legal. While this isn’t something that will happen frequently at Relaxed tier events (and formal Deck Checks shouldn’t occurring), being able to let a player know if their deck is not legal is an important skill.
Knowing when rotation occurs, what cards have been suspended from a format, and what cards simply aren’t legal is important to help ensure an even playingfield.
At higher levels, being able to perform a deck check and verify against a decklist, as well as checking for marked cards is an expectation, and as your level advances, the time expected to perform a check tightens, as you get more experience and repetitions with the task.
Feature Matches
Feature Matches aren’t going to be at every event, but they are a crucial part of the events at which they are present. They’re the perception of the event from everyone who isn’t there, and it’s on the internet, which means it’s the permanent record of the event.
Ensuring quality calls, tracking the time limit exceptions as they apply, factoring in the management of the appropriate tokens, dice, and other elements of the stream (either as a spotter or for the players themselves) are all smaller parts of the responsibility. With more complex set-ups or for higher profile streams, interacting with the broadcast team (providing decklist and pairings access, communicating about featured tables and delays, providing context for time extensions and rulings etc...) are also an expectation, but those are much less frequent, especially at the local level.
Clock Management
Rounds have a time limit, and making sure that there is a clock that’s tracking that is a small but important task. This can come in the form of simply announcing when the round will end, writing the round end time down in an accessible place, using a timer built into tournament software, or a projector linked to multiple displays around the venue.
There’s also the management of time extensions. This can range from simply remembering the one time extension you issued over the course of your weekly play event, or more comprehensive systems for multi-judge events. Keeping players and staff informed of potential delays or of the time they have to complete their match is important for maintaining integrity and for keeping the event on track.
End of Round Procedure
Staying on top of your time extensions ties into End-of-Round procedures (sometimes referred to as overtime). There are a few different responsibilities here, but they include knowing which matches have extensions, determining which matches are priority to supervise during the tail end of the round, and, if appropriate, assigning judges to watch those matches.
Match Results - Ghosts & Slips
Sometimes, however, even with the process of judges watching matches and keeping track of what’s not been reported and who is still playing, a match doesn’t report their match results. Identifying and chasing down “ghosts” or matches that have finished their match, but haven’t reported their result.
While matches in progress delay the start of the next round, they are eventually resolved. A match that is unreported does not resolve on it’s own, which is why this is often a priority task. This task is relevant at all levels of play, but how you manage it changes from the LGS to destination events.
Product Distribution
At many events, there’s something to give to players. Often, it’s just a participation promo or pack, but for limited events, you need to make sure everyone gets their packs to play at a minimum, but there are often other goodies.
Distribution at the start of an event is a barrier between players and their opportunity to play the game - but you also want to make sure you’re thorough - a player not getting their promo can start off the event on a poor note. Balancing the demands of precision and efficiency only becomes more challenging as events scale up in size.
Sealed Procedure
Sealed procedure is something that every almost judge is going to have a hand in at some point, whether it is at a prerelease or a smaller event. Making sure that people have the instructions they need to build their decks is an important stepping stone to having a good event. Players who are given poor instructions may have additional stress going into deck construction and become confused or frustrated.
Draft Procedure
Draft procedure is very similar to Sealed procedure, and is mostly autonomous; however, cards are changing hands very frequently, and so it’s more likely that an error occurs. Because of the nature of draft, this errors are often undetected and are very difficult to resolve if too much time has passed. Resolving complicated draft errors is not an expectation of most judges, but the basics of zone drafting and getting players from being seated to deck construction are key.
Deck Construction & Registration
For limited events, before players can really engage in the tournament, they need to present a deck. An analogue to deck checks, you need to help ensure that players have legal decks, and follow the proper steps to building their deck - using only authorized cards. Some events require a level of registration beyond construction and managing that process, as well as collecting those deck lists and maintaining tournament integrity can be a significant hurdle.
Relaxed Events
When you’re running a Relaxed event, there should be an intentional energy to the event - this comes through in your announcements and how you handle yourself at the event. Being more casual and interacting more with players, talking more about their experiences and the game are all strongly encouraged at Relaxed.
Relaxed events are about a communal experience, and growing the community together, and it’s important to keep that in mind while running these events.
Competitive Events
Competitive events should also have an intentional energy, but one that is different from Relaxed-tier events. While being comfortable in your role and interacting with players is important for developing a welcoming and accessible atmosphere, you also want to remain professional, so that players who are less familiar with the space are more aware of the boundaries that the event sets.
Competitive events can still be great for developing a community, but there’s more of a focus on process, procedure, and consistency to help inform a competitive environment.
Single Elimination
Single elimination, whether it’s the overall event format or just a portion of a tournament, changes the dynamic in some ways - knowing how to manage a top-cut is a key skill for competitive tier judges. While it’s not difficult to fill out names on a bracket, the attitude of players can be different when a loss removes them from the tournament, even if they’ve already played games or matches that have progression in the tournament on the line - and being aware of that difference is an important step in finding success.
Scorekeeping
A lot of what we’ve talked about so far is about keeping the players moving and on track, but there’s also a technical component. Scorekeeping and maintaining tournament integrity are a necessary part of any tournament - determining matches and keeping track of players' records is what people want out of an event, and scorekeeping handles that.
Of course, sometimes someone does something weird, and the software does what it was told to do, or was configured in a strange way that didn’t reveal itself until later in the tournament. Managing the scorekeeping software as well as helping to manage any incorrect results, helping players drop (or undrop in the case of accidents), and a slew of other tasks fall into this wheelhouse.
While being an expert scorekeeper isn’t an expectation for judges, familiarity with the tools and processes means that when an error does occur, you’re better prepared to handle it.
Re-pairs
One of the most common scenarios to encounter with scorekeeping mishaps is needing to adjust two matches due to an incorrectly entered result. Knowing the steps and processes to maintain tournament integrity while you disrupt matches that have potentially begun, how to triage the needs of a potential re-pair agains the progression of the rest of the tournament, and how to manage it if multiple tables need to be re-paired are all great bites of knowledge that can make what can be a very intense and time-sensitive surprise become something a bit less daunting.
Prizing & Prize Wall
At the tail end of an event, players want their prizes! Sometimes, this is handled by the tournament organizer without judge intervention at all, other times, the judge is the responsible party. There are also “Prize Walls” where players earn tickets or points that they can spend to customize the rewards they walk away with.
Distributing prizes is a customer service role, as it is often one of the last things a player interacts with - like how announcements and the start of the day can help set the tone, how a player receives their prizes and leaves the venue is influential in how they think about their event experience.
Flex & Breaks
We’ve talked about many teams and responsibilities throughout this section so far, but sometimes you need to do everything. As the sole judge for LGS-level play, this is something that’s going to come up frequently, and if you’re working larger events that take the better part of the day to conclude, taking a break is fundamental to having a positive experience and staying on top of your game.
Balancing your priorities is an important skill to develop, and is something that will be touched on in the Logistics and Autonomous Operations sections of this lesson as well.
Level One
There are a lot of skills on this list that may seem foreign to the local game store level, but the vast majority of them still have some presence. There are so many subcategories here that it’s going to be a little bit more brief than the rules and policy explanations (for all levels), but should still be a good place to start developing your understanding.
In general, an L1 should be prepared to handle a relaxed event of sixteen to thirty-two players. This may mean being comfortable shouting to get the attention of a somewhat full room and running a tournament of that scale on their own.
That includes (but is not limited to) identifying whether or not a deck is legal when asked for assistance, making sure that match results come in and pairings get to players, getting packs and cards into the hands of players (whether its for limited events, promos, or prizes), and striking the right tone for that type of event.
Level Two
An L2 should be able to run a competitive event up to thirty-two players on their own, or up to about sixty-four players with the assistance of another judge.
This is often a much more complicated procedure, as it’s likely to have six or seven rounds, in additional to three rounds of single elimination. Managing decklists and deck checks, as well as spending more time in calls that are likely to be more contentious forces you to develop a stronger ability to triage and prioritize.
An L2 should be able to complete a deck check in about six minutes, for a nine minute time extension. They should also be comfortable with basic scorekeeping tasks.
Level Three
Level three judges should be able to lead a team of two to five judges on competitive events up to about one hundred twenty eight players.
While there are some expectations that an L3 is able to handle a deck check in under five minutes (with four being aspirational), has more polished announcements, and can handle basic scorekeeping troubleshooting, the real difference for L3 is in being able to not do things.
As events get larger, it becomes impossible for one person to handle all of the tasks and responsibilities. Being able to delegate, and critically, provide clear instructions, is fundamental to higher levels. Understanding the tasks and responsibilities at a level so that you can ensure that they’re done to your level of expectation without being directly involved is key. Doing so without making your team members frustrated with you is covered by the Leadership, Management, & Command aspect.
Improving Your Tournament Operations
You can study the lessons we provide on logistics, and you can observe how events run by other judges operate, but the best way to learn these skills is through practice.
You can make choices and see the consequences of your decision. Tournament Operations are usually relatively objective (at least compared to many of the aspects we’ll be getting to). You’ll be able to identify if you screwed up handling out product or if a deck check was very fast and efficient. A lot of metrics of success in Tournament Operations are regarding how much time they took, compared to the work put in and whether or not what you did worked. That lived experience is going to inform you what works best for you and how you process information. While there are best practices, and staying up to date with those and understanding why things are often done in a particular way, identifying how you are most efficient and how you can get the events your community wants is even more valuable - and you’ll only be able to identify that through practical experience.
A way to find that experience is to ask for new roles, ask to be on different teams or for different responsibilities, if you’re judging solo, focus on one task for each event - don’t forget the others, but give one more attention, and examine the choices you’re making. You can even ask for feedback from players if there aren’t any other tournament experts around. While most players don’t have the same level of insight as another judge, many players travel to more events than judges do, and so can talk about what they’ve seen work and what they’ve seen cause issues for other tournaments.
Logistics
Logistics is a close twin to Tournament Operations, however, tournament operations are a bit more active - it’s managing players or software or documents or getting someone or something to behave in a particular way.
Logistics, as we discuss it here is more internal evaluation and conceptualization. Rather than try to explain that more, let’s just dive on in.
Room & Event Layout
Considering the room and event layout isn’t likely something you do particularly consciously - but if you’ve been to multiple game stores, you’ve likely been to a location where the play area is in a different room than where registration occurs, and where the one employee (who is also acting as the judge) sits - and you can see how the judge being in another room can have an impact.
Similarly, if the event is split across multiple rooms, floors, or even buildings (it happens more than you’d like to think), that’s going to have consequences.
But smaller things are also factors that you may not realize - there’s a rambunctious TTRPG group that plays in the same space, or the snacks are right next to table one and people keep bumping into it, or even some of the tables are near the door, and so those players are assailed by the weather more frequently than other players.
At a larger scale, knowing where vendors are, where the scorekeeper is, where feature matches are... these all have a small impact on the event - you don’t want your features too far away, so you can keep an eye on them, but you want them at least a little bit separated so that players aren’t knocking over cameras.
All of that is to say - there’s not often a lot you can do about the venue layout, but it is something to consider. As I mentioned at the top of this lesson, this is probably one of those things you already do subconsciously - now the challenge is to start considering it actively.
Venue & Environment
This is very similar to event layout, but on a slightly broader scale. While room layout cares about where table one is, you also want to be able to take a slightly grander look at the event. Having key information about your venue is important - knowing where restrooms are, where players can get water, and knowing what’s going to be happening in the space, whether it’s natural phenomenon (like a heat wave or a blizzard) or unnatural (another TCG having an event in the same place), can help inform the tone you try to strike with your event.
Timing & Tournament Flow
While most of tournament operations are about keeping the tournament progressing, you’re going to want to have a sense of how long a tournament is going to take. Understanding whether the meta is fast or slow, or if there are other factors in play that can cause delays (aisles are narrow so players take longer to get to their seats, the feature match broadcast team needs extra time to determine the games they want etc...) helps you predict how the event is going to go.
This could be as simple as knowing whether or not your weeknight even is going to end before the store is supposed to close, or letting a kid know when the event will probably end so they can call for a ride. It can also be more complex, when you’re figuring out when players will begin to drop so you can send more judges on break, or what other events are going on that may influence the player experience.
Team & Community Development
Team Development is going to be covered in different ways in both Leadership, Management & Command, as well as in Evaulation & Mentorship of Judges. However, one of your responsibilities when you’re in charge is balancing the success of the event against the growth of either other judges or your community.
You might find steady success running the same event every week, but experimenting more with format, time, or other factors may result in finding something that’s more successful. When working with other judges, you could assign responsibility to an experienced judge who you know will succeed, or give the opportunity to a less experienced judge who could gain valuable experience.
Knowing how to balance the risks of trying something that isn’t as rigorously tested against the gains of that potential growth is a part of long-term success. Identifying the actual risk of those choices is an analytical and logistical evaluation. This is a skill that has a lot of overlap with the Leadership, Management & Command aspect of building a team schedule.
Catastrophic Event Errors
Sometimes, your event will break in a way that you weren’t prepared for. Sometimes you lose power or internet access and no longer have access to create pairings. Sometimes you’re not able to distribute promos to every player during the allotted time, and don’t have a database of which players received their promos, and you have players asking for one. A judge might make an error in a ruling that changes not only the outcome of a match, but the outcome of a top cut.
There are lots of way for an event to go wrong outside of your control, and it’s not something you can prepare for. However, becoming comfortable with adaptation and flexibility are key to working with these sorts of situations.
You need to balance the needs of the various stakeholders, whether it be the players who didn’t get the promos, or the TO who only has a limited supply, and the players who already received them, but might try to get a second.
This can happen on a small scale (so non-catastrophic errors), like an incorrect match result or a player who was accidentally dropped instead of their opponent - many of these can cause a similar spike in adrenaline, but can be addressed in a more routine manner.
Emergencies
Beyond the event errors outside of your control, sometimes there are things outside of the event that can impact it. A fire alarm going off challenges you to ensure as much integrity to the tournament as possible without hindering the players’ safety at all.
Sometimes, a staff member who has been handling a key task will need to leave with no notice.
Similar to event errors, you need to balance the resources that you have against the outcome of the tournament.
Medical Situations
Medical situations are best left to professionals, but knowing when it’s okay to step in is crucial. Furthermore, for minor medical situations (where a small bandage, a glass of water, or even just a few minutes of fresh air can help), knowing where the resources are and how to provide support can hugely alleviate a player’s comfort.
However, there’s still a balancing act with the progression of the tournament, especially as the events become more competitive.
Triage & Priority
A lot of logistics is balancing two or more needs against each other. Sometimes it’s knowing that you have a limited resource, and so you can’t spend it all now on solving the problem, but most often, the most valuable resource is your time and attention.
There’s some old wisdom about identifying which problems are major or minor, and which problems can be resolved quickly and easily, or which would take significant resources. Solve the big, easy problems first, and the hard, small problems last.
Of course, challenges don’t fit themselves neatly into those buckets, and learning how to categorize them is a skill that comes through practice. Furthermore, while you are face to face with a challenge, with your event blowing up, it is exceptionally difficult to step back and not take action, but to instead look at not only all of the challenges you’re facing immediately, but the longer term consequences of letting something go for a moment.
The big problem that might be easy to fix now might not be relevant for a long time, and won’t have disastrous consequences if you don’t address it immediately, whereas a small challenge that you face at the same time may balloon out of control if left untended, even though it feels minor.
Developing the skill to not only identify and categorize your objectives, but to understand the long term consequences of prioritizing one over another, and then acting on them with a plan is what elevates a judge to the level of master.
Level One
As with many of the other expectations for L1, the line here is drawn at the local level. At your local store, you’re already familiar with the layout and the venue; you know which players play quickly, which players play slowly, and which players play control decks and play slowly. You know where your resources are, because you’re already plugged into the community, but if you don’t, going over them with the events manager or store owner can help elevate the experience you offer (although sometimes the resource is just that person).
Level Two
At level two, you’re more likely to travel to stores beyond your LGS - consequently, being able to identify these issues is a key step, as well as developing the toolset to be able to answer the most common of questions (along the lines of “Hey judge, where’s the bathroom” and not “Hey judge, the microwave is on fire”).
Level Three
The next step up is being comfortable resolving the common and even some infrequent situations through having experienced them, and being able to triage and prioritize. Like with what we talked about in the section for L3s and Tournament Operations, one of the most valuable skills is being able to step back. While for Tournament Operations, that step back is to allow other people to handle the tasks that you delegate to them, for logistics, it’s the ability to step back and get the bigger picture of the whole event.
Improving Your Logistics
Like with Tournament Operations, a large part of developing this skill is experiential, especially as you get towards dealing with pressing issues and managing what needs to be handled first. Finding yourself in stressful situations, or worse, manufacturing them, is not something I’d recommend. What I would recommend instead is reaching out your peers and mentors and asking for their insight and for challenging scenarios that they’ve encountered.
It’s also valuable to go back and look at the events where you were stressed or flustered because of the event itself, and figure out why you were run ragged, and what could have been done to prevent that. Some of it is a bit more analytical (like looking at a room layout), while others require you to have had the actual experience (like the power going out). Discussing scenarios has it’s value, but you don’t know how you’re going to react until you’re in the moment.
Autonomous Operation
Every judge needs to be able to act on their own at some point. It’s how most judges work most of the time, without guidance or instruction from the tournament organizer or another judge. However, with that freedom and ability to make the final call comes power over the event - the more freedom you have, the more you can potentially damage an event.
Initiative
The first step to being a great independent agent is just doing things. Without someone giving you instruction, taking responsibility for an event is important. It’s going to be rare that someone tells you that you need to judge, and at the local level if you’re judging solo, you’re less likely to receive feedback to change your behavior.
Taking the time to become a judge or evaluate your own performance is so much harder than not doing that. Not doing anything is very easy, but taking the initiative and handling things is incredibly powerful.
At larger events, there can sometimes be an inherent idea that “someone else will handle that” when there’s a task that needs to be done, but nobody has volunteered. Stepping up to handle tasks that need doing can make everyone’s experience better.
Flexibility
Tied into that, being ready and able to do anything makes you even more powerful. If you’re there to step up and run prereleases, that’s awesome. If you’re there for prereleases and weekly play and store showdowns and demos and organize Twin Suns events... If you are comfortable with deck checks and being on feature matches and helping out with end of round... the more well-rounded you are, the better you can fit where you’re needed, which means you’ll be given more opportunities to demonstrate that flexibility.
Another way of thinking about that - if you’re only comfortable with one task, or ask to focus on something, you’ll probably get that. But if you’re competent and comfortable with everything a good leader will keep you in reserve and have you as their problem solver, and send you out to independently resolve whatever needs resolving.
Awareness
The final step to being a great independent agent is your awareness - knowing what is happening in terms of the tournament’s procedure, identifying where calls are coming, and either identifying issues or anticipating them before they arise are all great ways to demonstrate your individual value. Seeing problems is the first step in resolving them.
At the local level, this is relatively easy because events are smaller and there are fewer people who are interacting with the event. At a larger event, however, it can be tempting to go and solve problems that you see - but often, with a multi-judge event, someone is already assigned ot that task, and you may duplicate work, which can be frustrating and at times, problematic.
Part of that event awareness is knowing if you’re stepping on someones toes, and what’s appropriate. This is a constant challenge, because every judge you work with is going to be different and have different boundaries. Some judges or organizers will be fine if someone handles an announcement for them, where others will be upset or frustrated.
Being able to operate independently doesn’t mean working alone and ignoring everyone else, it means finding your space in the system that already exists, and supporting it with your action and intelligence.
Level One
At level one, you’re expected to be able to operate independently at your local game store - with not really much guidance other than “here’s the product, here’s the event sheet, and those ten people are your players”.
Judging small events at your local game store is the most isolated judges will get from the rest of the community and so your ability to get things done and to identify problems is how things get done and problems get identified.
Level Two
At L2 you’re able to handle more complex and competitive events on your own, and with little guidance, as well as most of the tasks on a team that you’re assigned to at destination events. You should be comfortable handling most calls on your own, and handling the initial steps of calls that you’re expected to consult witha nother judge on.
Level Three
By L3, there’s a higher threshold to clear - a large event HJ should be able to ask you to handle any one thing at a large event, and be reasonably correct in expecting you to manage that task without significant instruction. Furthermore, you’re able to effectively take a team that you’re leading and not only act on your own, but get the team to act without instruction for the betterment of the event.
Improving Your Independence
Working on your own is something that most people do a lot of the time. Even on group projects or working on a team, you’ll often be assigned a particular task or responsibility to handle without further supervision. Definitely part of figuring out how to be more effective on your own is continuing to do that. However, an equally important aspect is thinking about the actions you’ve taken and the consequences.
While other elements of judging you’re going to be able to get feedback on your actions from others, when you’re working on your own, there aren’t as many observers, because, well, you’re on your own. As a result of that, the way that you’re going to be able to get feedback on how you did is going to be through self-reflection and contemplation. You don’t have to start journaling (although taking notes while judging is very helpful and also a thing I should do more myself), but when you’re aware of an action you took on your own, take some time to deconstruct it.
Investigations
We talked about investigations a fair amount in Game & Format Knowledge, but they’re also often a bit more tangible than many other judge calls - they can exist in a more orderly fashion.
Card Counts & Base Damage Discrepancies
Card counts and damage discrepancies are both dependent on game actions, which can be reconstructed - there was a reality that occurred, and you can identify that through other things that you know happened. As mentioned in the Game & Format Knowledge overview, you can get players to agree on what objectively happened in their game. The process of logically going through these steps isn’t dependent solely on game knowledge, but also on the facts of what happened.
Cheating - Opportunistic & Premeditated
For cheating of all types, when you’re talking with a player, you want to look at more than just risk vs. reward, or what makes sense in the game, or even what makes sense in the context of the event, you want to look and see what makes sense in the context of the investigation. If a player tells you that the extra card they drew was a card they didn’t care about, but they just resolved Inferno Four - Unforgetting’s triggered ability and kept that card on top while putting the other on the bottom - what they’re saying isn’t lining up with what they’ve demonstrated previously.
Investigation Triage
The other element to consider is your investment in the investigation. Unless a player confesses, you’re not going to know if they intended to take the action or not. With card counts or other discrepancies, you may get to the point where you have some unverifiable information, and you have to make a judgment call.
At a certain point, you have to determine if spending more time is going to substantially increase your confidence, and if that time spent is worth it. Players at the top table in the Galactic Championship would likely prefer that you spend more time, even for a sliver more of confidence, whereas players at a Prerelease are more likely to shrug and say “eh, let’s say I already drew the card, let’s get back to playing.”
Figuring out the impact your investigation is having on the tournament and the specific players involved is a key skill for these high-intensity situations.
Level One
As an L1, a judge is expected to keep track of the time in their investigation and recognize when they’re coming to a plateau in gaining new information.
Level Two
At L2, a judge is expected to be comfortable identifying when they need to end the investigation, and can do so with only one or two more questions. They’re also able to help provide guidance to others so that they can find similar benchmarks.
Level Three
By the time a judge reaches L3, they should have the above-listed skills, but also be comfortable drawing conclusions from logistics-based evidence for both gameplay disruption focussed investigations and cheating investigations. This doesn’t necessarily mean a high degree of confidence for cheating investigations, but there should be confidence in objective game-focused investigations.
Improving Your Logistics-Based Investigations
This section would basically be a retelling of the same section in the previous lesson - practice your investigations by taking real calls, or as close to real as you can.
However, a particular note here is to ensure that you’re taking good notes - you’re looking for the logic and consistency of the reality you’re discovering, and having good notes will allow you to better deconstruct your investigation later. Taking pictures of the board state, so that you can look and see the exact state of the game when the call occurred, can give you important context that you might forget if you rely on your memory.
Also, as a reminder, don’t just investigate a player to get practice. Being questioned by a judge is a harrowing experience, and putting a player through just to learn a bit for yourself is self-centered and goes against the goals of creating a positive experience for players at your events.
Now that we’re done with Tournament Operations & Logistics, we’re going to start to move to less procedural aspects of judging, starting with Interpersonal Skills & Communication.
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Until next time, good luck and have fun!