Have you ever been in charge or involved in a Sleep In Special? I'm not sure all Sealed Grand Prix tournaments have them, but with a Sleep In Special players open a preregistered pool and build it. There will be multiple rounds of this for players with 0, 1, 2 and 3 byes.

I think I could have done a better job with the Sleep In Specials at GP Vegas so I'm thinking of writing an article or at least compiling tips and tricks and what to watch out for. I'd love your suggestions. Or if you know of an article on the subject (or have already started to write one or want to help with this one) please let me know.

Thanks,
Martha

A key thing for me is to liaise with the deck check folks to make sure there is a good filing system for the lists. The best I've seen is when the VIP/SIS players are not included on the standard seat all players but instead assigned virtual numbers well clear of the ranges in use. For example if your event has 1,400 players and hence tables 1-700, use the 800 range for Sleep Ins and the 900s for VIPs.

Adding onto Thomas's suggestion, if those additional tables aren't available, you could instruct the players to write “SX <Table Number>” where X is their number of byes.

If you're looking for ways to improve SIS in general, consider what would make the player experience better. My thoughts on what players would really like:

1. Starting on time and with an easy to find location
   
2. Concise announcements
   
3. If there is a problem with a pool, it is fixed quickly
   
4. Lots of space to build
   

Basically, remember that these players are paying extra to save a few hours of their own time. They value that time highly, and shaving a few minutes off the process while making it easy is what they want.

Edited Joe Klopchic (June 3, 2015 12:19:51 AM)

What we did in Utrecht, is letting the people that register the pool also doublecheck the pool done by someone else. In 500 pools, there were 2 reported incidents of misregistered pools. Still too high as a goal, but passable. About 10% of the pools had errors after the first registrant was done with it. ( We registered 500 pools for this )

Getting proper head counts earlier would allow for a better experience. If you know that you need X prereg pools and there are Y people in the event, then communication gets easier. For example, there could be signage for X0 (X players with 0 byes) to report in at table (Y - X)/2 + 1. X1 then reports to (Y - X + X0)/2 + 1 and so on.

For this Vegas, we had two main events subdivided into quadrants. Accurate counts of how many players were in each of the eight quadrants and how many applied for each bye wave meant space and product weren't synched well. We predicted issues would arise and preregistered 100 extra pools, and this helped. However, judges grabbing prereg pools for players a few minutes late to registration rather than making late players register quickly meant we burned through those extra decks right away. Luckily, we had enough visibility into the counts that we could get judges to register another 100 pools before the last bye wave arrived, but that was a lot of extra work for the judges.

In the future, I'd suggest two major points:
1) Accurate and timely data. Juggling data leads to data loss, and that introduces problems.
2) Greater caution in handling pools and not look at them as the “easy fix” for whatever issue a player may have. In their haste, judges just grabbed pools without asking first if their was a reasonable solution that didn't require 10 or so minutes of judge work.

That said, this Vegas preregistered 3,000 pools in the days prior to the event. A smaller crew registered 100 overflow decks Thursday night, and judges registered a replacement 100 Saturday. That's 3200 preregistered decks (800 boxes of Modern Masters 2015 and more than 6 reams of paper).

Carter,
So do you think that more extra pools should have been preregistered? Also do you feel there could be issues that come up in normal registration that would require to use a preregistered pool?

Since all registration for the GP is done the day before, Friday night the pools should be able to be set up for the morning. That should help save some time.

In Liverpool there were some issues with the sleep-in. At a certain point the players received their goodie-bag, with the pool in it, at our ‘desk’, and then were told too wait until a judge showed them their seat. This caused confusion and delays and players would walk away being impatient.
Also I'm still suspicious of the player that said his bag didn't have a pool.

-In my opinion the players should be seated ‘right away’ after their name has been checked. If that is not possible the next point still stands.
-Receive the pool at the table from the judge who writes down the end time.
-The goodie-bag should be handled separately.

We also didn't have enough judges. The argument was ‘there’s only xxx players' but you're doing a lot more work. 2 judges for a 100 players is not enough.

Another thing that happened: some players with VIP/SiS were seated for registration. This was known and it was supposed to be that they would all be together at the last tables. Which sort of happened, however there were big gaps and there were some players in between who didn't have VIP/SiS.
First. This shouldn't happen.
Second. If it does happen, grab those players and get them in your area together.

And.. we ran out of pools.. :/

Originally posted by Jasper Overman:

What we did in Utrecht, is letting the people that register the pool also doublecheck the pool done by someone else. In 500 pools, there were 2 reported incidents of misregistered pools. Still too high as a goal, but passable. About 10% of the pools had errors after the first registrant was done with it. ( We registered 500 pools for this )

Doing this also added very little time to the registration - maybe 2 minutes at most :)

Edited Matt Crocker (June 8, 2015 12:50:07 AM)