Hello Everyone!

Last weekend I attended GP Toronto! My first ever GP! (I will try to upload a report this week)

On Sunday, I went upstair to the judge room and I found a couple of fellow judges discussing some tournaments operations that they witnessed and practiced which were really good, in my opinion. In particular, since this was the first GP this particular TO organized they pointed out some things that could have be done better (I am not going into details in this post as I believe that this feedback should go somewhere else). Then I had this idea for a blog.

We have tons of resources for rules and policies and such. However I believe that there's no blog or resources that talks about efficient tournament operations or Good practices in Tournaments. Of course that this could have been discussed in some forum here and there but I do not think it has it's own thread or even blog! The intention of the blog would be that different judges from around the globe post their experiences with different organizations from different tournaments from a local FNM to GP operations.

The aim of this blog would be from and to all the judges that have to run events as well as for Judge Managers on larger events that need to organize these tournaments. Also I think is a good way to summarize the experience and wisdom of some of the top tier judges out there, which I think is very valuable information that should not be kept and instead be shared with the community.

Before starting anything else I would like to know your opinion about this project: Would you be interested in writing? Would you be interested in reading it? Do you think it would be useful? etc…

Ferran

I think that there are some articles on the judge wiki on tournament operations. I am not sure if they are up to date. Nor do I think that the wiki itself is known and used. I do not know what is our current strategy on such resources.

Milan, thanks for your response. I looked at Judge Wiki and even though it seems out of date, my idea was more about HOW to run tournaments and how to do stuff around. For instance, a friend of mine told me a way of sorting the lists which I found to be very intelligent and very useful, but when I judged with other judges as a FJ, they did not appear to know the technique and I had to sort the lists in another way.

The objective of the blog is precisely explain these practices so that all judges car read and know and even apply them. This could be also a place for discussing different mehtods for running some kind of tournaments and such.

This is a very broad topic - since a significant part of what judges do is judge events, I feel like a blog that's devoted to “how to judge events” would have to either skim the surface or put out a massive amount of content, much of which would get outdated quickly (“How to quickly count all the decklists at an event!”) or be the subject of considerable debate (“The best system to manage ODEs at a GP!”).

Fortunately, there's a great place to obtain a ton of logistics advice: the Tournament Report forum. Here, you can read an arbitrarily large number of reports about logistics at real events of all sizes, and see the feedback that judges provided on how logistical problems were solved. If you've got questions, you can (and should!) ask them - the writers of reports put a lot of hard work into writing them, and they'd love to see that people are finding them useful. If that looks a little intimidating, QJ Wong and his team at Battlefield Forge regularly post some of the best reports on their blog for you to review.

A place containing an arbitrarily large number of long reports to sift
through may contain a great amount of useful information that could be
condensed into Ferran's blog form, but it's certainly not a great way to
obtain logistics advice, especially compared to Ferran's suggested blog. I
would look forward to reading more articles in this form.


2016-05-04 21:44 GMT-04:00 John Brian McCarthy <

Thanks Dominik, that was precisely my point.

The idea of the blog is to condense all this information and sort it by categories so it's readable, easy to find and search and useful. I feel like with long reports some things might go unseen.

The good thing about a blog like this is that you can have categories and, of course, the idea is that you might find different ways to run tournaments and some articles might be just a few paragrafs long explaining how to do the australian deck check or a more in-depth post about philosophy or how to run friday's events at a GP.

Edited Ferran Jovell Megias (May 4, 2016 10:26:42 PM)