Ask the Judge, 06/16/2006: Feature Friday
Tired in Torino
[Johanna Virtanen, superstar Finn, joins us again with tales of beautiful Torino. I expect that by next month these articles won't have my picture attached to them. -Seamus]
Last month I left you with a mysterious comment: What do they say about Grand Prixs in Southern Europe?
a) GPs in Southern Europe are really big
b) GPs in Southern Europe are "different"
c) GPs in Southern Europe taste like delicious candy
The correct answer, as I already told some of you, is b)some months ago Gis Hoogendijk (European DCI Manager) asked me what GPs I was planning to attend, and I told him that I would like to go to one of the Southern European events, because so far I had only judged GPs in Scandinavia, Germany and France. Grinning, he told me that events in the south are "different". I went to Torino to find out what he meant.
GP Torino was special because it was the first so-called Mega GP - a three day event, with Trials and other side events on Friday, followed by a normal two-day Grand Prix. This made the event particularly exhausting for the staff. The fact that our hotel was 11 km away from the venue didn't help us stay fresh.
At most European GPs, there's an informal judge meeting at the venue the day before the event. Sometimes team assignments are given at this meeting, and sometimes it's just an occasion to meet the people you'll be working with and to eat snacks from different countries. Bringing some food from your own country for the meeting is a fine tradition of the European GP circuit. Cookies and sweets are always the most popular choices. At the Torino meeting we had some Italian sausage, cookies, bread and a bizarre local soft drink called Chino (spelled "Ch1no"). This stuff is the same colour as Coke, but the taste is not anything I can describe. Fortunately, this website says Chino has "an interesting flavour similar to Angustura bitters", whatever those are. I brought some black liquorice for the meeting, and some jelly candy for Richard Drijvers, who is my partner in the DCI Candy and Beverage Exchange Program (also known as the "judge black market", although I'm not supposed to call it that [Naming it after the DCI, however, is fine? - Seamus, who has benefited from the program in the past]). For several years, Richard and I have exchanged candy and/or alcoholic beverages at international events. I bring him something typically Finnish and he brings me some tasty Dutch candy or some weird Dutch booze.
Day 1
The Friday main event was a PTQ for Kobe. The HJ for this tournament was Paul Morris, who came to Torino all the way from the United States with his wife Cari Foreman, the main scorekeeper for the GP. Once the PTQ got started, we opened registration for 32-person prerelease-style GP Trial flights. In these events, the 5-0 player would receive 3 byes, and everyone who went 4-1 would get 1 bye. Oli Bird from Ireland was in charge of the Trial team, and they were quite busy all day. That left me in charge of the 32-person "Free GP entry" constructed tournaments (5-0 gets free entry to the GP, 4-1 gets a voucher for a free side event) and all other events (8-man single elimination events).
Since we didn't expect my events to be very popular at the start of the day, I also ran a short seminar on working in a multi-lingual event. Translators are always needed at GPs and PTs, because even if Magic can often be played with no words at all, communication problems do occur, and not all players can solve them in English. I could write an entire article on this subject (in fact, there already exists an article, but I'm not going to link to it because it is in need of an update), but for now I'll just summarize some of my main points: a translator should not take over a ruling without consulting the original judge, and all judges should be aware that some players might try to abuse the language barrier when interacting with translators. Incidentally, I expected to have more problems with language at this event than at northern GPs, and that just wasn't the case. I remember only one situation where I had to ask another judge to translate for me.
After my seminar was finished, there still wasn't much work to be done, so I asked Frank Wareman (an L3 from the Netherlands) if he could run a short seminar for us. Sure enough, Frank sat down for 5 minutes to put his thoughts on paper, and then presented us with an interesting theory about judge calls, coming soon to a judge article near you. Frank is a useful guy to have around.
After the second seminar was finished, there still wasn't much to do in our quarter of the room. I told my team what we would do with the "Free entry" events once they got started: I'd assign one or two judges to each flight, and I would float around helping with deck checks and handling appeals if necessary. Then I sent some of my guys to the PTQ to help with counting the decklists, and some others to help with the Trials. Oli was using a slightly different system, which was definitely better for the Trials. He assigned a judge to each flight, and had a single deck check team that handled counting and deck checks for all flights. After an hour or two, the first Free Entry flight still wasn't full, but we decided to start it anyway, so that the players wouldn't have to wait too long. At the end of the day we only ran three flights (and only the last one was full), and most of my team spent a lot of time helping out with the PTQ and the Trials.
While I was having lunch, I got the strangest assignment of the weekend. One of the side event scorekeepers asked me to take a look at their printer and make it stop speaking... Danish, which it had somehow learned during at another GP. I don't speak a word of Danish, but the Finnish school system made me sit through several years worth of Swedish classes, so I thought I might be able to work through it, as Danish is, after all, a closely related language. After a few minutes of cycling through all the menus, I gave up and decided to find me a real Dane. The PTQ scorekeepers informed me that they had two, and I called both to the judge station. Unfortunately, not even Tomas Enevoldsen of Denmark was able to make the printer speak English. But hey, thanks for trying!
At 5 pm, the registration for the "Free entry" flights was closed, and I thought my team was free to go help other teams, because I had been told earlier that we were not doing any 8-man tournaments after all. However, soon after 5 o'clock the scorekeeper informed me that he had three 8-man tournaments ready to go. Oops! I took a good look at the room and tried to remember which judges were working for me. I grabbed a judge who was not too busy with anything else, and I burrowed into the giant pile of product on the side of our judge station to find the appropriate boosters for the event. After the first 8-man draft was seated and ready to go, my day finally got quite busy: I was calling up players for the 8-man events with a microphone that would randomly cut off parts of every sentence; I was asking the other team leads to send me back some of my judges; I was battling with a pallet of product trying to find Russian Guildpact and Japanese Dissension; and I was also judging two 8-man constructed events while doing all of this. Things got easier after some of my judges came back to me and I could delegate some of these tasks.
The Trials and other side events were all finished some time before midnight. The Swiss rounds of the PTQ were also done around the same time. A couple of judges were going to stay around to run the top 8 draft, while everyone else took a bus ride back to the hotel. Due to some unfortunate "miscommunication" between the WotC guys and a travel agent, we stayed at a hotel that was a 30 minute bus ride away from the venue. Although the bus rides were quite fun, I think I would have preferred an extra hour of sleep every night.
Day 2
Saturday started with a short judge meeting followed by registration. My team (Paper team, led by Barthelemy Moulinier) was assigned to crowd control, but since there wasn't much need for us to control the slow trickle of players, I just grabbed a chair and kept Cari company. Most players had decided to register on Friday, which happened to be a public holiday in Italy.
We had prepared for a split tournament, but with less than 700 players, that wasn't going to happen. This meant that we now had an extra HJ, extra scorekeeper, extra stage and two of each judge team. I admit that I was not at all disappointed: there would still be miles and miles of judging ahead, only with more breaks.
For the paper team, the day was rather uneventful. Posting pairings and standings was about as exciting as taping pieces of paper on a wall is ever going to get (it's slightly more exciting if you're wading through a crowd of 150, instead of 30), and we couldn't get the result slips out as fast as I would have liked, because we were using an old, slow backup printer that had a fist-sized hole on the side (why? I don't know). The team took one break for lunch, and another one for a meeting.
If I had to make any sort of sweeping statement about the local players vs. the northern players I'm more used to, I'd say that we had more problems with careless players at this event. I don't think the number of illegal decks was anything out of the ordinary, but the number of decklists without a name was unusually high, and the deck check team spent a lot of time fixing these problems (which was, to be fair, also a judge problem, since we are supposed to check lists for names when we receive them). We also had players leaving their table before a judge could collect the result slip. Sometimes this meant that we couldn't confirm the result because the opponent had already disappeared, and sometimes we just never got the result slip at all, and had to call the players up at the end of the round. I believe this is part of what Gis meant by "different".
During the late rounds I took another short break for food, and invited myself to a meeting that Adam Cetnerowski (L3 from Poland, who would have been our second HJ, if we'd had more than 800 players) was having with Paul Morris and Philipp Daferner (L3 from Austria). They were planning a workshop on investigations for Sunday morning, and invited me to play the part of Naive New Player in a roleplay scenario they were going to do. Naturally, I accepted.
Again, it was close to midnight before we could leave the site. This time, the bus took a different route and the ride took 45 minutes instead of 30. There seemed to be an awful lot of traffic for a Saturday night.
Day 3
My Sunday had a bad start because the hotel breakfast buffet did not have fruit salad, the essential component of any meal that is followed by 14 hours of judging...
I was assigned to the Logistics team under the leadership of Kevin Desprez of France. However, after setting up the table numbers, I ran away to do the seminar with Adam, Paul and Philipp. We started with a practice run of the roleplay scenarios, and then moved on to the real thing with the side event staff as our audience. Both of the scenarios I got to see involved players who were cheating and lying. In the first scenario, I was Naive New Player, Adam was Sketchy Player and Paul was his Sneaky Friend. We showed participants exactly what had happened before the Diligent Judge (Philipp) was called, and then their job was to figure out how the judge should find the truth. In the second scenario, the participants did not get to see everything that had happened before a judge was called. There was a complicated game state and they had to figure out who the liar was. There was also a third scenario that I didn't see because I had to go back to the main event. Again, this seminar could be the subject of a much longer article, but it's not my article to write.
In the main event things were pretty quiet. The event was well-staffed and we were all doing the Slow-Walk of Pain around the playing area (that's the walk that judges do when their feet hurt so much that it's easier to walk slowly than to stand). I spent a lot of time talking to other judges, talking to some players whose faces seemed familiar, and chasing players out of the main event area when it got too crowded (I seem to be very good at this. Usually a "Hi guys...!" and a smile is enough to chase the players behind the tensabarriers, where they belong. I wonder why?).
Before the second draft I was asked to watch a player who was suspected of peeking; another judge observed him doing this during the first draft. I kept my eye on him, and during the first review period I saw him take two quick looks at the cards of his right-hand neighbour. I alerted the HJ quietly, and kept watching the guyhe didn't do it again. After the draft was over, we took the player aside for an interview. Based on his reactions and answers, it was decided that he had not done it on purpose. He was given a warning and some extra time for deck construction.
During the final Swiss rounds I was really feeling tired. A relatively simple question about layers (yes, there is such a thing) managed to confuse me thoroughly, and I had to consult both Adam and Riccardo before giving my answer, only to find out that the player actually wanted to ask something completely different. At another table, player were disagreeing on whether combat damage had resolved and I tried to find out what exactly had been said, until I realized that what I was asking wasn't really relevant and the answer was simply "you indicated that you were passing, he indicated that he is passing, therefore combat damage resolves now". I wasn't the only one who was tired; everyone seemed to be ready for the tournament to end.
After the Swiss rounds were over, I called the top 8 draft before joining Adam, Paul and Philipp for a second run through the investigations seminar. This time we had a much smaller group, since some of the main event people were tied up in top 8 matches. It was interesting to see how differently the investigation played out with a different group of judges performing it.
A three-day GP, even with a relatively small number of players, seems to be much more exhausting than a three-day Pro Tour. A first day full of side events was more stressful than the first day of a Pro Tour, especially because most European judges are not used to running flight-style events. The last day of a GP is usually much longer than the last day of a Pro Tour, because you have three drafts and nine rounds. It was a fun tournament, but I'm not in any hurry to do another three-day GP soon.
Next month: Those who worked with in Torino might notice that I didn't mention a particular incident that made me a somewhat uncomfortable during this tournamentmy meeting with Creepy Italian Guy. I am going to talk about gender issues: what it is like to be a woman in this game. Send all your stupid questions to "Ask A Girl Who Plays Magic!" at flame (at) bore () org !
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Johanna Virtanen
DCI Level 3 Judge
flame- on #mtgjudge
flame (is at) bore () org
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