Good morning to everybody,
I would like to introduce to you a new initiative to learn our tournament policy: IPG by example.
Tournament policy (IPG and MTR) are very important in our activity as judges, and I am currently trying the approach of “Learning by teaching”.
In the last couple of months, I have been studying each sentence of the IPG and I have been trying to add comments and explain them in the simplest and clearest way possible; for this, I chose as audience the readers of the Blackborder.com website.
Here you can find the first articles:
Introduction of the section and IPG title http://www.blackborder.com/q/node/16287
Effective date and introduction http://www.blackborder.com/q/node/16360
Framework of the document http://www.blackborder.com/q/node/16427
General philosophy, part 1 http://www.blackborder.com/q/node/16466
General philosophy, part 2 http://www.blackborder.com/q/node/16513

In each article I copied and pasted half a page of our IPG and I added comments to explain it at my best.
This helped me to make a significant effort to understand the philosophy behind each sentence, and I have the feeling that I am getting more skilled on it, thanks to this effort.
My plan is to continuing this analysis for the entire year and even in 2014; when I will finish, I am sure that I will be more confident about my rulings at tournaments; I expect the improvement to be much bigger when I will finish the general part and I will start with the categories of infraction, as I will try to find as many real examples as possible of infraction that might fit in more than one category (if I don’t know the IPG well).
If you want to join me in this analysis, please send me a private mail (riccardo.tessitori@gmail.com) and we will coordinate our efforts.
Anyone, of any level and with any experience, can contribute.
The time commitment will be chosen by each of you and you will be free to join and leave the group, to have an intense or scarce contribution, accordingly to the time availability you have and to how much you like the different categories of situations we will discuss (content part).
You can also contribute by helping us to transfer the original content to a single centralized platform, whose content will be able to be updated (technology part).
You can also contribute by modifying the content to make it easier to understand or to correct any language mistake (language part).
In any case, my desire is that people who will join this initiative will enjoy it and will learn something from it, and also people who won’t join will be able to get something useful from it.
Thank you.

Riccardo