Jan 19-21, 2018
ChannelFireball | Indianapolis | Team Sealed
Players: 1542 | Winners: Fei Xinyu, Yeh Chih-Cheng, and Zhou Zirui

Friday January 19, 2018 | Team: On Demand Events
Friday was extremely slow, on demands were rather dead, I feel like we launched about 10 drafts and turbo events in total. There was some talk of launching a gentrification program to revitalize our underpopulated Turbo Town.
It was my second experience using Kefka, which I had used a lot in GP Phoenix, but hadn't really touched since, so there was a little re-learning involved there. For the most part it felt kind of boring, I used this time to chat with a few of the other judges around me, but I have to say, I greatly prefer busy environments.

Saturday January 20, 2018 | Team: Scheduled Sides
Saturday was fun, my team lead, Graham Schofield was super organized, I had a 2pm and 7pm legacy event, both events ended up around 20 people, which engendered a rather casual feel. I used the opportunity again, to speak with some of my fellow judges, clean up garbage and to hang out with some of the players. In one of my Modern events a player left his deck on the table, I scooped it up and riffled through it. There were a few things I could've done, I could've taken it to lost and found, or I could've cross-referenced his name with the seat number and paged both players. Instead I held onto it and during my round 2 announcements let the players know that one of them may be sitting down to play without a deck, and to come see me about it. I had them describe what the deck was and the sleeves it was in before I gave it to them. I felt like this was the least disruptive option to both the player and the rest of the event.

Sunday January 21, 2018 | Team: Scheduled Sides
Sunday was by far the most exciting part of the weekend, I started out lurking some 2HG sealed and shadowing an L1 HJ. A while ago in Toronto I had an L1 I was working with on the PTQ, I remember I really badly wanted to do a good job training him but was kind of a disaster, and ended up stealing a lot of his calls when he began to flounder. I decided to approach this differently, I followed him to each call (mostly because there wasn't much else to do) but let him take the call and didn't say anything unless asked. Afterwards, he told me he really appreciated the fact that I didn't come over and steal his event. I generally work alone, so mentorship is not something I get to practice a lot, I was really grateful for the opportunity, and really glad I didn't destroy this L1's experience! The next thing that happened was I had a team trios event. Or rather I had one team signed up for a team trios event so I didn't have a team trios event. Instead I was moved to helping out with the MONSTER PAUPER EVENT with 300+ people in it. And which previously only had 2 judges assigned to it. We met in a small team with the HJ and went over everything that was going to happen to help this event launch. I was on cutting slips. So I waited for slips. Unfortunately when we printed pairings we realized we had a gigantic problem on our hands, 30+ players were entered in the system as “unknown, unknown” this was... well, the term 'not good' is an egregious understatement. At first we had players line up and we asked them for their DCI, manually scanned a list, took down their name and told them their seat number. This was... super inefficient, as the list we were looking over wasn't in DCI order, pretty quickly, the scorekeepers organized a system to look up people by DCI on the computer. This was way faster, but still time-consuming. I wasn't terribly useful at that stage, I chatted with players and ensured them that they would be playing magic soon, and helped route the large line as we opened up additional terminals to lookup information.

After about a 20 or 30 minute delay we were able to get pairings out and seat the players. Near the end of the round as I was collecting slips I noticed that a few slips still said “unknown, unknown” on them, I told the players to write their names on them just in case. I wasn't sure if this was necessary, but felt like it might save time in the future, I was also worried about additional fires, there was so much confusion in the initial fix that I felt like we might have more problems in round 2.

Lo and behold, we did indeed have more problems, having players write their names on the slips helped a lot, but a few people didn't get the memo, we had to call these people up again, some of which were super upset at this point. The second round was only delayed for about 10-15 minutes, but combined with the first round, the event must've surely felt like it was crawling along. I recall when I finally announced that the second round was going up over the mic there was a loud cheer from the crowd of people clustered around the pauper pairings board. In response to the malcontent felt by many players, CFB decided to give away a free mat to each player in the event. During the second round I helped with this distribution.
The third round launched smoothly (thank goodness) and the event landed surprisingly smoothly.
The rest of the day went quietly, I didn't have a designated event, so I stuck around the legacy and modern areas, taking calls, and covering breaks. Overall I really enjoyed Indianapolis, but I also felt like I didn't really learn too much.