Ask the Judge, 04/28/2006: Feature Friday

Another spring, another prerelease. As much fun as I had, it was difficult to occasionally pop outside and see the nicest weekend that Portland has had in many months. We seemed to have turned the corner into the good weather. Everything that isn't flowering is green; our hops are shooting up the trellis at a prodigal rate; and the lawn needs mowing every time I blink.

But I digress. Nice set, eh? I don't know what you Constructed folks are thinking, but I can't wait to get my packs for working this weekend and start arranging drafts. I wasn't playing the last time we had a multicolor block (though I've drafted IPA a few times since) and I'm looking forward to finely honed-manabases and careful guild coordination. Or, perhaps, the old five-color everything-you-passed-me special.

It's my feeling that our prerelease went well, but there were a couple of hiccups. Our 45-team-strong Saturday Two-Headed Giant event got bogged down in the swamps of How Do You Work This Computer and Please Renumber The Tables Again. The software we have to run tournaments is adequate (usually... ask level 3 judge Matt Tabak about his Team Pro Tour Qualifier at Pro Tour San Diego sometime) but changes and additions are invariably a little lumpy and take some time to even out. In the end we started maybe two and a half hours late, which was long enough that we had a few teams drop out. To everyone who was inconvenienced by the delay, I apologize: we took too long.

The good news is that (so far as I am aware) was the only major problem we had on the weekend. We had a sane room setup, good help, lots of happy players... It was a good event.

The most interesting situation for me of the weekend came up towards the end of our Day 1 2HG flight, when a series of rulings (over the subject of what can be responded to, and what can be responded to effectively) led to an increasingly agitated team. The rulings they were getting were correct, but the team felt that the rulings were inconsistent, and they were starting to get very agitated. The floor judge who was handling the situation was in over his head—he's a fine L1, but he hasn't had to deal with many confrontational players before—and I decided to step in and explain the interactions of the cards. At a prerelease, I'm willing to spend more time on this than I would at a PTQ.

So I started to offer a comparison of why the effects in question work differently from one another. He wasn't buying it. I shifted to trying to walk him step-by-step through each scenario, but he was convinced that his formulation of the issue ("So they can respond to our effect, but we can't respond to theirs") strongly suggests a fundamental hole in my understanding of Magic. What's more, each attempt to start over after one of his interruptions was met with another, somewhat louder interruption.

While I'd had very little opportunity to say much of anything, the problem was clear: I'd had no chance to establish my authority with this player. I didn't recognize him from past events, and I'd wager that it was mutual. It's highly likely that he doesn't read StarCityGames. I had a number of viable options for dealing with matters here, but all of the good ones involved finding a way to establish my authority (not only my authority as the head judge, with the power to take the needed steps to make sure my events weren't full of players hollering at the judges, but my authority as someone who knows the rules and can be trusted to present and apply them fairly).

The reason I find this interesting, and worth writing about, is that it reminds me that judges must proactively build their reputation with the players they work with. This is obvious, in a way (certainly it is for any L0 or L1 who has recently been appealed, just because), but when you're a senior judge, certified by the DCI and highly visible at local events, it doesn't come up all that often; the hard work on that front is mostly in the past. I find that these days, when I present a ruling, players are generally happy to trust that I know what I'm talking about, because they have plenty of past data to establish that this is likely.

But I can't take advantage of my relationship with anyone else here. This is a player who probably doesn't know if an L3 is more impressive than an L1. I can't use my name, rank, or serial number (DCI number?) as a shortcut.

This situation, then, is to find the right line of verbal and non-verbal language to convey something along the lines of, "I'm in charge here, and that's no accident." There are many, many ways to do this. Some judges are excellent at conveying this through body language alone (every day that Sheldon doesn't give me The Stare is a good day...). Some judges primarily use rhetoric to make it clear that they know what they're talking about. It's one of the things that an aspiring judge has to learn about him- or herself: what are the ways that I can effectively convey my self-confidence? For some people, the key can be acting serious; for others, acting casual can be effective. If you are a judge looking to develop these traits in yourself, I'll shamelessly crib a bit of advice from Mr. Menery: find a more experienced judge who reminds you of yourself, and try to figure out what they do and how you can use it.

So how did it play out? Fine, though I'd do it differently if I had the opportunity. Eventually, I managed to get enough of a sentence out to make it clear that I'd made my ruling, and he could either sit through an explanation, or get back to the game. He verified that there was no one else to talk to about the matter, asked to see the rules (to be precise, "the Big Book of Rules"—which I am uninclined to read through with a player while they are in a match), and decided to accept his fate. After the match, the judge in charge of the flight sat down with the other player on the team to explain the ruling in more detail, and the loud player apologized to me. We then got on with our lives, and the tournament, which suited everyone.

If I was to do it over? I'd probably pull the player away from the match and attempt to have a quiet and brief discussion about the various roles of tournament officials at a Magic tournament and his options for how he could choose to continue in this particular tournament. We all make mistakes, though, and the best we can do is try to identify them and move on.

I'll be back next week with some announcements about changes to Feature Friday. Until then, keep shufflin'...

Seamus