Paris 2006
Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas and greetings from Finland! The Finnish Department of Tourism would like you to know that Finland is the official home of Santa Claus, although we call him "Joulupukki", which means "Yule Goat". This article is my Christmas present to you. It's like that inevitable pair of woolly socks that you get from your grandmother. It might be a bit boring but will keep your toes warm! Don't worry, even I'm not sure what that was supposed to mean. Just grab a mug of your favourite holiday beverage and get reading!
By now everyone probably knows that Worlds 2006 was one insane, record-breaking event. Over 800 side events with 2500 unique participants [Fourteen THOUSAND entries. -Seamus, slack-jawed] over five days makes it the biggest Magic event ever. It's probably impossible to give you a good picture of the craziness, but I shall try anyway. This is going to be a fairly straightforward "What I did at Worlds" type of thing, with some name dropping, some descriptions of meals, and other typical judge report stuff. I'm not going to talk about my tired feet, but just assume that there's a "and my feet really hurt" at the end of each paragraph and you'll get close to the authentic Worlds 2006 experience.
To be honest, it's all a bit of a blur. I have probably already forgotten some of the people I met and many of the rulings I made. I vaguely remember arriving in Paris on Tuesday with some of the Finnish players. I got lost while trying to find my hotel, failed to recognize the great Kelly Digges even after he introduced himself, failed to gain entry to the Louvre (closed on Tuesdays), and took advantage of the free food and drinks at the player dinner, while doing the usual round of handshakes and hellos.
Day 1 (Seminars)
The event started with a morning briefing for the whole staff of 77 judges (except for the Polish judges, whose flights were delayed or canceled because of fog. Like I said in my previous article, in this meeting some interesting new policies were introduced. Unfortunately, I'm still not allowed to talk about them. The policies used at Worlds were experimental versions that will be fine-tuned with the help of the feedback generated at this event. Everyone will get to see them eventually.
We also received our work schedules for the week. Almost everyone had some days in both main event and side events, and a day in seminars. L3 tests and interviews were also marked on the schedule. For the first day, I was assigned to seminars. That was a small disappointmentyou're all excited and ready to do some judging, and then you end up sitting in a hotel bar all daywe couldn't find a good quiet place for the seminar at the venue, so we had to do it at the hotel. The seminar, led by Juan del Compare of Argentina, was quite interesting, although Ryan Dare of Australia was convinced that I disagree with everything he says. Which is not true. I only disagree with Ryan when he's wrong! (Just kidding, Ryan).
After the seminar was over, I headed back to the venue. I was assigned as side events morning shift leader for Thursday, so I wanted to talk to Ingrid Lind-Jahn, the Wednesday morning shift leader, to find out if she had any great ideas I should steal, or if she made any big mistakes I should avoid. I also wanted to talk to Jason Howlett, the side events manager, to find out what he would be expecting from me. I couldn't find Jason, but I managed to have a little chat with Ingrid. She'd had a fun day: 400 players showed up for a PTQ, they could seat only about 250, and she got to announce this to the players. She explained how she had arranged everything, and I did my best to memorize it all. Writing it down would have been a good idea.
Next I attended the main event judge debriefing, because I'd been outside the venue for most of the day and wanted to know what was going on. After that I decided to join some other judges for a quick dinner before bedtime.
Day 2 (Side events, morning shift)
This is how side events were organized at Worlds 2006: the side event staff for each day was divided into three shiftsthe morning shift, starting at 9 am and finishing at 6 pm; the midday shift, starting at noon and finishing at 9 pm; and the evening shift, starting at 5 pm and finishing at 3 am. Each shift had a leader who was responsible for assigning judges to the various tournaments, coordinating breaks, and generally making sure that things were getting done.
I arrived at the site at 8 am in order to get myself organized before my team members started showing up. The side event room had seating for about 250 players, and some round tables that the main event had been planning to use for the drafting. Luckily, they decided to stay in the main event room instead, because having the main event players, spectators, and all the side event players in the same room would have been an absolute disaster. We also had some tables in another space on the second floor of the venue.
My staff consisted of about 8 judges. Unfortunately there was only one French speaking judge among them, and he was going to be taking his L3 written test at some point, so the first thing I did was ask Jaap for another French speaker. I assigned a couple of guys, including one of the translators, to the upstairs room, another two as draft runners (the judges who find all the players who have signed up for a draft, seat them, tell them how the draft works, and give them their packs), and the rest would be judging the GP Trial with my bestest girlfriend Richard Drijvers, and helping with crowd control.
The first big event of the day was the GP Trial starting at 11 am. Aside from that, we were only running 8-man single elimination events and some small Swiss format Gateway tournaments. There was a PTQ starting at 1 pm, but that was for the midday shift to worry about. All the other Swiss events, except for a Ice Age Block Constructed event starting at 6 pm, got cancelled due to lack of space.
We used the round tables downstairs for the 8 man drafts. After the drafting was done, the players would go upstairs with their pairing sheet, find a judge, get seated, build and play, and then the winners would get the pairing sheet back from the judge and go downstairs to claim their prizes. Unfortunately, since I didn't write down everything Ingrid said and tattoo it on my forehead with glowing ink, it took us a while to get every step of this process working properly so that the judges downstairs, the judges upstairs, the players, myself and scorekeeping staff all knew what was supposed to happen.
The small Swiss-format Gateway tournaments (Standard tournaments for beginners with some extra foil prizes) were problematic because they needed extra judge attention. Because they were Swiss, I didn't want to just send the players upstairs and let the floor judge crew there deal with them. I had to assign a judge to run a 12 player event, and so I had one less person helping out with everything else, and one more spot that needed covering when lunchtime arrived.
Lunch was served soon after the midday shift showed up, so I started replacing my guys with midday shift people and other random reinforcements, and sent them to lunch. After most of my people had eaten, I went to get some food myself. The food at this event was a bit strange. It was more suitable for a group of art historians visiting the Louvre than for 77 hungry, hardworking judges. We had cold salads, tiny sandwiches, unidentifiable egg-based things on toothpicks, and no hot food. The plates were small and the forks even smaller. The upside was that every day we had two kinds of incredibly sweet dessert, so at least you could get some quick cheap energy from those. It's my understanding that the food was part of the contract, so nothing could be done about it.
There was one interesting situation in the PTQ that day. I was walking the floor when I saw two players discussing something. Any time you see two players doing something other than playing their game, you want to step in and find out what's happening. In this case, the players had misplaced some cards from one player's graveyard. Player A had picked up Player B's graveyard which contained about 10 cards, and accidentally dropped some of them. After picking up the cards, the players noticed that two cards were missing.
We looked for the cards everywhere, but could not find them. Since we had spent at least 10 minutes looking and talking, Kevin Desprez (Head Judge for this event), issued player A a game loss for Procedural Error - Severe, due to the disruption caused to the tournament. We did not believe that he had lost the cards intentionally, and he was in no way unsporting about trying to find them. I had to go deal with something else at this time, but Kevin later told me that he had issued proxies to player B so that he could continue playing. One difficulty about this case is what to do about the lost cardsproxies solve the problem for this tournament, but player B has lost valuable cards (this was an Extended event) that might be hard to replace. In later discussions with certain DCI officials it was agreed that Player A should be asked to compensate Player B in some way.
The evening shift crew started arriving at around 5 pm. I gave Cristiana, the shift leader, an overview of what was going on and told her what events her people would have to take over. Once all my judges were free, I gathered them for a short debriefing. My guess would be that I was the last team leader who could afford such a luxury. Later in the week things were just too crazy. Starting from Friday, we got an extra hall that was several times the size of the room used on Wednesday and Thursday, and that got filled with players too.
After I was done for the day, I went out for dinner with a group of judges. I ordered something random from the menu that was written only in French and bad English, and ended up with three very small sandwiches. Afterwards I went back to the hotel, spent an hour or two on the Internet, and then joined a group of main event people for another dinner. One of them was Oli Bird of Ireland, who'd had the unenviable task of figuring out how to use the same set of tables for both playing, drafting and deckbuilding in the main event. I don't know exactly what he did, but it had been a successful plan and Oli was very happy with his day of work.
Day 3 (Main event, Extended)
Friday was my chance to get some main event time. I was assigned to Mike King's deck check team. The most interesting thing that I found during the count was a decklist with very bad handwriting that had 4 copies of "Dark Hall of Famer" in the sideboard. Because of the unclear handwriting, it took us some time to confirm that this is what the decklist said, and even then many judges didn't realize which card it was supposed to be.
When it was time to deal with problematic decklists, I asked Mike if I could take the Dark Hall of Famer case. He said yes, so I went to have a chat with the guy. I took him aside from his table, sat him down and asked to see his sideboard. I wanted to see if he had English language Dark Confidants in there, and he did. When he saw me looking at those cards, he immediately asked if I didn't like his little joke. I explained to him that your decklist at the World Championships is not the place for cute little jokes. He said that he just wanted to honor Bob Maher's induction to the Hall of Fame. He was given a warning for being a joker. Judges don't like humor! We want your decklist to be completely boring!
The main event was relatively calm until the fifth round, when the players suddenly started appealing all over the place and asking for translators. Jaap was very busy during this round, handling many strange situations. During one lengthy investigation, I was asked to sit with a player who was involved in the case, while Jaap was dealing with something else. The player was very upset about a penalty he was about to get, and wanted to talk about it to the Head Judge and anyone else who might care to listen, including me. I made it clear to him that I wasn't going to comment on decisions made by the Head Judge, and that I didn't know the details of his case anyway.
When players asked for translators, it was often the case that a translator for that particular language was not present in the main event at that time. Thus the tournament was delayed when someone was sent to look for a translator in the side event area. Jaap reminded us that players are not allowed to ask for translators; they are expected to communicate with the first responding judge to the best of their ability, and then if that judge determines that a translator is needed, he or she calls for one. Furthermore, the translator doesn't take over the ruling but helps the original judge to make one. This policy worked very well in my opinion, and saved us a lot of time. Later in the week I discovered that a player who asks for a translator will eventually understand English if you say the same thing very slowly five times"I. DECK CHECK. YOU."
After the main event was finished I again had dinner with another group of judges, and then I went back to the venue with Juan to see if we could find a game to play. There was an Elder Dragon Highlander game starting, but I decided I was too tired for my first game of EDH, and just watched the action for a while before going back to the hotel to get some sleep.
Saturday (Side events, night shift)
My shift was supposed to start at 5, but George Michelogiannakis, my shift leader, asked me to report for duty at 4:30. I considered going sightseeing after breakfast, but I didn't want to be too tired at the start of my shift, so I ended up going to the venue around lunchtime and hanging around in the judge room for a while. I also watched the Finnish national team play against team USA. Normally I never get to watch Pro Tour-level matches in spectator modeas a judge you're watching for legal plays first, and you have to forget that you might care about who wins. It was nice to just watch my guys play for once. They finished the day with a 4-0 record (with a concession from Japan). I had lunch around 4 o'clock and then I went to find George.
George told me that I would be head judging a Vintage tournament that was going to start at 5. This turned out to be one of the most... interesting tournaments I've ever head judged. The fact that I know very little about the Vintage format was the least of my problems.
It looked like it was going to be over a hundred players, and the first task was to find some tables for it. I was told to use the tables in the small hall, which meant that my event would be approximately 3 kilometres away from my scorekeeper. But we can deal with that!
George assigned a couple of guys to help me get the event started. Unfortunately I have to admit that I don't remember the names of all the judges who helped me judge this event, because I probably had about 10, but never more than 2 or 3 at the same time. The tables we wanted to use were actually full of 8 man drafts, so I asked one of my judges to start moving the players to other tables. I got the final number of players (146) from the scorekeeper at 16:45. We would be running 8 rounds, so I couldn't waste any time if I wanted to finish before 3 am (that's when security would throw us out).
We quickly set up the table numbers that George had found for me, and posted the pairings in the small hall after making some announcements in the big hall. I wanted to start round 1 at 5:15 at the latest, and I think we managed to do that. I had to make my opening announcements without a microphone, so I kept it as short and simple as possible. At this point, I had two floor judges. We started collecting decklists, but one of my floor judges was constantly called to answer rules questions or resolve other issues, so it took him a very long time to get all the lists from tables 60 to 73. I couldn't assign anyone to count the lists at this point, because everyone was needed to answer judge calls.
When pairings for round 2 were posted, we found out that there were several problems with the pairings. Some people had an incorrect number of points, someone had been dropped even though he wanted to play, and a guy who had a bye in round 1 had a bye again. I grabbed the bye guy and the two guys with incorrect points, and ran the 5 kilometres back to the scorekeeper. I made the scorekeeper fix the incorrect result and swap the pairings. We decided that he probably couldn't do anything about the bye, so I told the player that he got lucky. Then I made new result slips (with a pen and some blank slips) and took the other two players back to the event. Then I went back to the scorekeeper to find out what had happened with the bye.
On my way there I saw Kaupo the Estonian Organized Play manager. I'd met him 10 months before at an airport transfer centre, when we both missed our flight to a Wizards of the Coast distributor meeting (but that's another story). He was just hanging around in a hallway with some friends.
Me: Hi! I need another floor judge for my event, want to help?
Kaupo: Okay!
Me: Excellent! Follow me.
George had told me that he would be reassigning some of my floor judges, so I wanted to recruit someone who could count the decklists and wouldn't be reassigned. Kaupo did a good job and stayed until the end of the tournament, so I was really happy to have him around.
We found a shirt for Kaupo and sent him to the floor, while I asked the scorekeeper about the bye. For some reason, this player had been given three awarded byes. The same thing had happened at a Legacy event on Friday, but the scorekeeper didn't know exactly why. He could, however, remove the third bye, so that was okay, sort of.
Soon after I got back to the tournament floor, I was approached by Jerry, the guy who is in charge of venue setup and things like that. He wanted me to move my tables because they needed the space for the spectator area for the Worlds finals. I wasn't very happy about this, but it had to be done, so we agreed to handle it at the start of the next round. We waited until the players got seated and then asked them to help us move the tables. We got it done quickly and for a while everything was alright.
However...during the next round I was again approached by another WotC guy. He told me that my tables were now too close to the 2-Headed Giant tournament that was happening on the other side of the hall. The aisle between the events was too narrow and 2HG players couldn't get to their tables easily. Could I please move my tables back towards their original positions?
Well, of course.
We can do that. We moved the tables between the rounds, again getting help from the players. Of course, during the next round Jerry came to see me again. He looked like he was afraid I might bite his head off, and yes, he wanted me to move my tables again. This time we had to combine several short rows of tables to make some longer rows. I guess I looked really angry about this, because Jerry reminded me several times that we are in the same team and he's just doing his job. I tried to be positive about it with the players and thanked them for their help. Jerry, I don't hate you!
Because our scorekeeper was so far away each round took at least 70 minutes total for the official roundtime, extra turns and the trip to the scorekeeper's table. When Kevin Desprez was starting the 2HG event, he told me that he would be running it on his own laptop in the small hall, and that we might be able to put the Vintage tournament on the same computer. However, for various reasons we couldn't do thisKevin had enormous problems with his event, including a crashing DCI Reporter V3 and a printer that burst into flames (it was an American printer that didn't like French electricity). So we kept running the ten kilometres (uphill in a snowstorm) to the big hall.
The ever-changing staff was another problem. Some of my judges got reassigned to other events, and some of them left because their shift had ended a long time ago. Falko Görres came to work for me after passing his L3 interviewI have never seen anyone glow with happiness like that before. Jason Ness joined me for a few rounds, and it took me a while to realize that his other assignment that day was Head Judging the main event (Jaap had the day off, and he played a couple of rounds in my event before leaving for the judge dinner).
Andy Heckt showed up sometime before 2 am. Kevin and I told him our horror stories and had a good laugh about it all. What else can you do? The site was going to close at 3 am, so Andy stayed around to the end.
Some players had been complaining that the prizes I had announced (based on what the evening side event manager had told me) didn't match what had been advertized in the side event program. I mentioned to Andy that the players were asking about an uncut sheet of Urza's Something, and he said he would investigate, and wandered off.
In the meantime, I posted pairings for the last round. I told the players that they could pick up their prizes the next day, and if they couldn't be there, we would mail the prizes to them. Table 1 agreed to draw and left the playing area. I explained the prize pickup thing again. Players finished their games and decided, against all logic and reason, to stay around and watch the other matches instead of getting the hell out of the Louvre and getting some sleep. Then...Andy walked in the room holding the very large framed sheet of Urza's Saga (or Legacy, or possibly Destiny). He had checked with the side events manager, who suddenly realized that my event was supposed to get one after all.
Andy: Where is table 1?
Me: Umm....they took an intentional draw.
Andy: ...
Andy: ARE THEY NUTS?
I explained, in a very small voice, that they didn't know about the sheet so it wasn't important for them to play. We looked at the standings and figured that one of the guys from table 1 would be first no matter what, so Andy and the uncut sheet wobbled off to find the guy. He did find the guy, and the guy even had a car for transporting the sheet. How lucky!
The final few games were finished with the burly security guards breathing down our necks, trying to make sure that we would be out by 3 am. The last result slip was filled at 2:56 and Kaupo ran like the wind to the scorekeeping station. We were out of the door at exactly 3 o'clock.
So that was my Saturday. I walked back to the hotel, took some painkillers for my feet, and finally fell asleep sometime after 3:30 am.
Sunday (Zombie floor judging at side events)
On Sunday, I was assigned to the midday shift. I slept until 10 am and went to report for duty at around 11:30. There was a lot of confusion about who exactly was supposed to be my shift leader and what I was supposed to be doing. Frank Wareman, who was the morning shift leader, tried to put me in charge of the finals of Kevin's 2HG event, but I didn't feel really comfortable doing that because I've never actually judged a 2HG event and half of my brain was still asleep. I was not confident that I knew everything I needed to know. I suggested that they find someone else to do it, and I got assigned to help with a PTQ instead.
I don't have much to say about SundayI just posted pairings, helped with deck checks and answered some judge calls, until I was told that I could go collect my compensation and leave for the judge dinner. A second judge dinner had been arranged for those who couldn't be there on Saturday. That was a very nice surprise indeed.
The food at the dinner was very goodthe food was good (foie grasso unethical, so freakin delicious), there was plenty of good wine, and the company was excellent. Everyone was very... relaxed, and that's all I'm going to say about that (I've already beaten Nick Fang's wordcount record. Hi Nick!). After the dinner we returned to the hotel, where the evening shift was enjoying some drinks. That was the time to take some final pictures and say our goodbyes.
Even though it was an exhausting and difficult week, I was, as always, a little bit sad when it ended. After all, I wouldn't be going to Pro Tours and GPs if I only wanted to judge quiet little easy events. There was very limited time for active mentoring and sharing of experiences among judges, because everyone was working so hard at this event. However, I think everyone learned a lot about organization, teamwork, and making decisions in difficult situations. I also gained a lot of respect for my colleagues, because many of them worked so hard, even outside their assigned shifts. Thanks to everyone who worked with me, and I hope to see you at many events in 2007.
Finally, for your entertainment, I provide this picture taken by Mr. Peter Jahn. There were four female judges at Worlds and we really wanted to capture this rare situation. And what could be a more appropriate location for this photo than the statue of Serra Angel? (From left to right: Irina Samonova, Ingrid Lind-Jahn, Cristiana Dionisio, and the author)
Next week: Chris Richter pulls a rare Friday shift to share his thought on the year that we call "2006." Next year: WHO KNOWS! [The editor knows... -S]
Thanks for reading!
Johanna Virtanen
DCI Level 3 Judge, Finland
flame (at) bore dot org
flame- on #mtgjudge (Efnet)
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