Ask the Judge, 11/11/2005: Feature Friday

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the next installment of Ask the Judge: Feature Friday. It's been a hectic two weeks for me, mostly due to my attendance at Pro Tour: LA and my temporary stint as your feature editor for StarCityGames.com.

On the subject of editing the site, first off. I've always been a big fan of the people who edit this here site here, but let me tell you, I've graduated to respect. The amount of effort that goes into even just a day's editing is incredible. When you add in the work before you get down to editing (reading submissions and choosing your content) and the work after you edit (page markup, which I actually do concurrently with editing for syntax and readability, but it's really a separate task), and you have a truly Sisyphean labor.

I did a rough word count on the articles I edited for Friday's content. Sixteen and a half thousand words. That's a third of a genre paperback, or a NaNoWriMo novel. Every day.

Things, for the most part, went smoothly, though it has been made abundantly clear that there was room for improvement, here and there.

By which I mean, "the Ferrett sent me a 28-page document identifying one hundred and thirty places in a single article where he had suggestions for improvements."

No, I won't tell you which article. There were no complaints about the quality of the writing or editing in the forums, though.

Monday was the exception. Things were... bumpy. Mistakes were made. Cold sweats broken into as midnight loomed on the East Coast. Colder sweats as problems were discovered after midnight. But eventually, the 'i's were dotted, and the 't's crossed, and we moved on with our lives.

Bottom line? I learned a heck of a lot (mostly from T.F.'s incredibly detailed critiques), I worked my tail off, and I'm pleased as punch that Ted Knutson's back behind the wheel. Buy him a drink or two next time you see him—he's earning it. Ditto for our editor-in-chief.

As I said, I spent the long weekend before that down at PT: LA. Unlike every other player, judge, staff member, and mom at the tournament, I did not dine at Fogo de Chao, so all of you are spared yet another rehashing of that madness. I'd have liked to have gone, but perhaps the one downside of working side events at the tournament was that my evenings were not nearly as free as the rest of the staff.

Thursday night, the Last Chance Qualifier ran until nearly 4:30 in the morning. Our massive PTQ on Saturday (at 205 players, the biggest I've worked) kept me around until about 1:30 am. And I'm sure the Sunday Qualifier went fairly late as well, though, truth be told, I snuck off to the judge dinner, since a) the tournament was going well, in the capable hands of NetRep, solid L2 judge, and all-around Good Guy Russell Linneman, and b) I was hungry. Friday, I was unscheduled, to recuperate from the LCQ, but I seized an opportunity and schemed my way into an L3 interview.

As Lee mentioned last week, the L3 interview process is fascinating. It's also much less stressful, and more fun, when you're not sitting on the candidate's side of the table. The bottom line is that for anyone who really cares about judging, you are getting to spend two to four hours talking about what makes an expert judge, how to communicate that, and debating the fundamentals of DCI policy. It's a fantastic learning experience, even when you've been through it before, and one I look forward to repeating regularly.

This is not a new thought, but it is worth repeating: some judges, and some players, think that judges in the side events area at the PT are there because they are somehow unqualified to work on the main event. There is a general requirement that main event judges be at least level 2. But beyond that, there are a large number of reasons—some interesting, some mundane—why a judge is working in sides. As a player, you can trust that your staff is qualified to handle the issues that come up. You may not have a level 5 judge taking your floor calls, but the bottom line is that there is very little chance of a serious problem arising and going uncorrected.

What you may run into is judges who do things differently than you are used to. An issue that came up in the final round of the LCQ was players who wanted to see the deck lists of their opponents. While it is policy for professional events to share Top 8 deck lists with all competitors, and some judges carry that policy to their local events, there is no policy that mandates sharing lists at PTQs or Grand Prix Trials. I choose not to share lists, and while my local players don't seem to have a problem with that, two or three LCQ competitors took strong issue with it (my feeling is that the kind of scouting that goes on at a GP or PT is much less common—as far as I could tell, nonexistent at 3 am at the LCQ—and unnecessary sharing of information penalizes legitimate play skills). At any rate, part of the value of organized Magic play outside of your local area is that the judges have opportunities to share with one another different ways of doing things.

While a sides assignment isn't punishment, it's also no accident. A remarkable amount of planning (on the part of DCI Judge Manager Andy Heckt and the head judge, generally) goes into figuring out where people will be best placed. The Saturday and Sunday PTQs at PT: LA were head judged by main event L2s on whom the DCI wanted feedback. As I've noted before, my goal right now at big events is to gather better data and feedback for judges, so assisting at a pair of large events as a shadow for the head judge (meaning my primary job is to watch them, help ensure that nothing goes radically awry, and collect feedback) was nearly ideal.

Working with Brazilian judge Henrique Amigo on Saturday, and the aforementioned Russell on Sunday, I think we met all our goals: we ran some good events, we talked about DCI policy, and we came up with good points to work on (I say 'we' because this is very much a collaborative process. Feedback is as much a process of asking someone to tell you what they need to work on as it is a process of observation. The interesting thing is that often the judge may not be aware that they already know what their weaknesses are). PT competitor and soon-to-be-L3-candidate Kevin Desprez joined us on Sunday for some excellent chats about judging theory. It was a good weekend.

I've been telling people this for a long time: the PT is a great place to judge, and in a lot of ways it's a great place to learn about judging, due to the massive numbers of experienced judges present. But in a lot of ways, it's a poor place to practice the craft of judging, because things go too smoothly. Side events can be the best of all worlds; there are tons of events that need judging, constant judge calls and Stuff Happening, and yet you still have the benefit of a large portion of the senior judging staff, to help you understand the policies and procedures you're tasked with administering. This was my first time working in the side events area of a PT. I volunteered for the assignment, and I certainly expect that I'll do so again in the future.

I encourage everyone to play in the worldwide Two-Headed Giant tournaments that are coming up. North and South America's are this weekend. It's a great format, and the environment of the tournaments will reflect that. It's important that all of us, including the seasoned veterans of the Pro Tour, take time to remember that this is a game, and sometimes you've got to play for fun.