Grand Prix Houston – Jan 26-28, 2018
ChannelFireball | Houston | Sealed
Players: 900 | Winner: Axel Martinez

Friday January 26, 2018 | Team: On Demand Events
Friday was much quieter than expected, I feel like we expected numbers to be much higher than they actually were. It was however a good opportunity for some mentoring. I was working with one of my local L1s who was quite nervous about the event. I tried to give him as many drafts as possible to let him learn the system. I also spent some time speaking with my fellow judges. In many ways I feel like working a GP is almost easier than working a PPTQ. When you're on a PPTQ you're it, you're the final solution to any problem, if something catches fire there is literally no one else to turn to. Whereas at a GP there are multiple people above you to provide support, or offer suggestions, it's a very different environment. In some respects I do like the GP atmosphere because it is much less stressful, but in other ways I really like the independance and autonomy I get at a PPTQ, I kind of like to know all the things that are going on and enjoy trying to maximize efficiency in completing all my assigned tasks.

Saturday January 29, 2018 | Team: Scheduled Sides
Saturday was much busier, I started off the day with a 120 person modern event, which was super fun! They gave me a few extra people to help launch the event, as it was larger than expected. I think old me would've shunned the help and tried to do everything myself, but instead, I welcomed the assistance and gave a task to each of my judgelings. I took care of making the PA announcement as well as making opening announcements, I feel like if nothing else, those are the two things a HJ for a side event should be doing, since they are the most visible jobs and will help tie you to the event in the players minds. One of my main challenges for making announcements was projecting, I've often been told I'm not very loud and my voice doesn't carry well over large distances, its something I've been working on and think I might be improving at. I'm not sure if every player heard me, but their little heads did turn when I began talking, so that is a thing, I also noticed that I didn't get the “can we start” question near the back of the rows like I usually do. Another thing I tried while making announcements was starting with overly dictated preamble “11am Modern players, can I have your attention for a few moments please” this sentence basically means nothing, but they won't hear most of it anyways since they'll still be quieting down as you're speaking. That way you can get their attention without breaking your flow (waiting for them to quiet down) but they won't miss anything.

There were a few weird things that happened in this event. The first was the... concessions. There were at least three tables that, in round 1, had one player concede to another without any games being played. This was super suspicious. I asked another floor judge to watch the a few of the players who did this as they wandered away from the event, to see if there was any kind of bribery going on. But he didn't see anything. I couldn't really leave or devote a lot of attention to this since the floor coverage in my area was kind of thin. It's possible it was something innocuous like players from the same store, or players double queued, but it seemed very, very strange. At the start of round 2 I asked a floor judge to be in the crowd in case anyone said anything.

They didn't see anything really weird happen, but they did bring something else relevant to my attention, my FJ took me aside and said “there is a player over there that just lost to the taking turns deck and looks like he's pretty on tilt, you might want to hang around there in case he snaps” I floated by and watched the match for a bit, the player did look a little on edge and was being a little short with his opponent, I was worried, and thought about talking to him away from the table to see if I could calm him down, however I also weighed this against the fact that I'd be slowing down the tournament and that action might only exacerbate the situation. Luckily, while I was floating there was a call about howling mine that I got to take, I have a generally pretty light-hearted demeanour, and I think that and the fact that the irritated player felt a little silly for making a mistake helped break the tension, because he looked a lot less stressed after that.

In round 2 I was asked to go on break and when I returned there had been an incident. Another judge in the area had sat in on a match going into turns and told the a mills player (Lets call him Nick) to play faster, and had also prevented him from counting his opponents library a second time in the same turn, which from the stories I got both seemed to be reasonable judge calls. Nick finished his match and voiced his grievances to another judge, who did a very good job of calming Nick down.
When I cam back from break Nick spoke to me a little regarding what had happened. One of the more prudent points Nick brought up was that the match the judge was sitting on was between himself and the judge's wife. He felt that a judge making a call on his wife's game was inappropriate. Nick also asked me to speak with the other judge about this.

Largely it seemed that the situation was basically resolved, Nick was still a little mad, but was cooling off. However, I did decide to speak with the other judge, partially because I had made a promise to a player and you never break player promises (never ever). And partially because I felt like the judge's perceived bias was actually something that merited discussion.

I took the other judge aside and asked him to recount his version of what transpired, it was, basically what Nick had told me, I checked to ensure the judge was emotionally okay. I always worry about judge's who have to deal with unhappy players, as I know personally it is very stressful and upsetting. The judge, however seemed totally fine. Then I decided to discuss the issue of him taking calls on his wife's games. I think my syntax was as follows “Look, I know you're not biased, you know you're not biased, but there is literally no way you will be able to convince any player you aren't biased.” At this point the tournament was winding down and we had much better coverage in the area, so I told him a good solution would be to get another judge to take the call, this would help keep both his integrity and that of the judge program away from undue scrutiny.

Later I was working the chaos sealed, I was not the HJ but was covering someone's shift when the issue occurred. We had a player that was legally blind, we gave the player fixed seating so she didn't need to go up to the pairings board each round, and assigned a judge to help her deckbuild. Things went okay for construction and round 1, where she got a bye. Unfortunately we started to run into some issues in round 2 when she had an actual opponent. One of the FJ's brought it to my attention that her game was going extremely slow and her opponent was starting to look a little visibly irritated, I swung by and saw that in 15 minutes they had made it to turn 2 or 3, this was.. a problem. I was concerned because not only is slow play basically the hardest thing to deal with in Magic, but we were also dealing with someone who was disabled. I did not feel culturally sensitive enough to handle this in a tactful manner and I immediately escalated it to another judge, he thought about it and got a CFB employee to look into it. The CFB guy sat in on the match and told the three of us, me, my FJ and the HJ of the tournament this, “It looks to me like the blindness is not the implemented here, but the fact that she has no idea how to actually play the game. Treat it like you would any other slow player at regular.” and then stood to the side, the three of us exchanged a glance, having expected the CFB employee to then explain how exactly he wanted us to do that.
At Comp REL we have a nice prescribed fix for it, eventually you start accumulating game losses. At Regular you can only give a player so many “I need you to play fasters” before it becomes completely obnoxious and only exacerbates the situation. That being said, I felt like an “I need you to play faster” was not going to really do anything to remedy the situation.
At this point, it had been about five to seven minutes of judges congregating, and basically nothing happening. There was me, the floor judge, the HJ of the event, the judge that fetched the CFB guy, and the CFB guy. I felt like one of us needed to start off by saying something to her, so I asked the HJ if he wanted to talk to her, or if he would rather I did it instead. Clearly, neither of us wanted to address the situation in fear of destroying a player experience. The HJ said he would but was dithering on verbiage. I nodded and left it to him, I wandered around the rest of the event for a little while, and noticed the HJ talking to the CFB employee, then I noticed another, different FJ sitting in on the problem match. I groaned internally, at this point, other players were starting to talk, literally 6 judges had all watched this match for a duration of time, and yet no action had been taken.
I feel like too many people got involved, if I was that player, I would've felt super uncomfortable and awkward, when dealing with an issue like this, I think it is best to minimize the social impact for the player who is committing the infraction, and what we did, by having a million people look into the situation is basically point a giant neon sign at this match and tell the rest of the tournament “THERE IS SOMETHING GOING WRONG HERE”
At the time I was pretty out of ideas, but reflecting on it, I feel like perhaps taking her aside and speaking with her immediately when we determined there was a problem would've been a more discreet way to handle it. Then if nothing improved, an escalation could've occured.
I was pulled off the event to go on break so I didn't see the conclusion in person, however when I returned, I heard it was that the match had been allowed to drag out to a draw, her opponent then played his next match, won, and when he went to get his prizes the CFB employee gave the guy prizes for a 3-0 record instead of a 2-0-1 record. Basically letting the player know that he should've won that match had his opponent played at a reasonable pace.
I also heard that she was pulled aside and spoken to, and then dropped from the event before the third round. I am not entirely sure how I feel about this, this is a situation where I feel like Comp REL is equipped to handle much more succinctly than Regular. I feel like in the future I will be a little more pro-active in addressing this kind of thing. At the very least the situation gave me something pithy to ruminate on between now and my next event.

Sunday January 28, 2018 | Team: Scheduled Sides
I got the Modern Double Up again, which was even bigger than Saturday! 130 players! Wow! I was really excited! We had three players with fixed seating, a father-daughter combination and a man who was legally blind. As I was waiting to get my pairings my scorekeeper informed me that there was a problem in WER and the fixed seating wasn't working, so we had to change the pairings on the sheet manually with sharpie and pen. This ate up some time so I ended up launching 10 minutes late, luckily after that the event ran pretty smoothly.
I recall one amusing situation where I was floating at the end of the round picking up match slips. At about 10 minutes to time I usually start collecting match slips to help expedite the round, and I swooped in on two guys who were just packing up I grabbed their slip, but then noticed something very strange, beside them, on the table, was a completely empty match slip. I looked at it, and asked if this was theirs, somehow. They shook their heads and pointed to the slip they had just given me, I then, still kind of shocked that there was just a completely abandoned slip lying on the table, asked them if people had actually shown up to play beside them, they nodded and confirmed that yes they recalled people playing beside them, then one of the players pointed out a guy walking away from the tournament, and said that he was one of them. I ran over to him and asked “are you [player name 1] or [player name 2]” he nodded and then I brandished the empty slip and said “what is this?” at which point he burst into laughter, realizing what he had done. I took him to the main stage and paged his opponent and got the slip filled out. I kind of laughed to myself and was about to leave when a guy in a CFB shirt walked up to me and said “hey, was I paged?” I looked at him and said “I just paged [player name]” he looked at the slip in my hand and we both started laughing when we realized he had the same name as my missing player.

Overall Houston was a really incredible experience, I got to spend a lot of time with the players and my fellow judges, I got to try out judge tower for the first time, and got to argue about a few policy updates on break as well as run some kick-ass modern events. There were a ton of weird situations and challenges that I got to attack, and I really feel like I learned a lot from this GP. In the end I'm left with a feeling of excitement and anticipation, I can't wait for my next event and am looking forward to learning as much as I can!