Detroit, Michigan | Team Unified Modern
Time: Friday September 7th - 9th 2018
Players: 1600 players (533 teams) Winner: Courson, Lopez and Perez

Friday, Saturday & Sunday On-Demand Event Scorekeeper


Score Status: Kept
I was on on-demand scorekeeping all weekend, which was a new experience for me, I've never done a scorekeeping position beyond a relatively small PPTQ so there was a lot to learn.
The first thing I learned was that WER has a Side Event reporter, which in conjunction with WER is affectionately known by those in the judging realm as WERSE, I believe the phonetic connotation is intentional to at least some degree.
That being said the software didn't give me a lot of problems over the weekend, inputting on-demand events is fairly simple since there are really only four different kinds of tasks, input a regular draft, input a core draft, input a turbo draft or input a commander pod. There were some naming conventions to consider as well as a few other nuances associated with setting up each event, buzzing the players and addressing DCI errors or name issues being among them.

However for the most part it almost felt easier than doing regular scorekeeping activities during a smaller self-contained event. To be perfectly honest, while I was really excited about learning the ODE backend, it proved to be a lot less mysterious and a lot more monotonous than I had initially presumed and after Friday my weekend kind of became a little boring. To fix this, due to my proximity to registration and prize tix (at this particular GP the registration booth and prize tix station were glued together, and customer service and prize wall were also glued together) I decided to learn those areas as well so I would have something to do in my downtime. I feel like scorekeeping is a role where it's more fun if you are good at striking up conversations with your colleagues and enjoy a highly social role, however, I am much more task oriented, so it was a little weird for me.

Does This Even Count as a Tournament Report?
This report is going to be very brief, since the single most exciting and anomolous thing to happen while I was on scorekeeping was reading players DCIs wrong, and report two events as “league play” instead of... not “league play”.
So I'll use this extra space to go through a little bit of the process of entering and scorekeeping an ODE.

All the side events at a GP are handled through WERSE, what you do is open the program and select the GP you are at, this will file all events you report under that GP.

To set up an event you select the button that says “start event” or something. And you get a screen pretty similar to your regular WER. It has some large grey, space-consuming boxes on the right hand side that aggressively tell you in large text how many people are currently registered in your event and how many it expects (8 for sanctioned core drafts and 2 for casual events) I don't know why they are so big and in the way but there isn't anything you can do about them. You have to select a judge, which ends up largely just being side events lead, and he'll stay in there all weekend as your HJ for every event (which probably makes their event history hilarious to look at, “you ran 200 commander pods last weekend?”).

Then you select an event type “side event at Grand Prix” or “magic casual event”. And start inputting names. You get the names from registration slips collected by front desk. The only thing that wasn't classified as casual for me were the M2019 Core drafts. Turbo drafts, chaos drafts and commander pods are all considered casual events.

After you have entered all your people you select “begin event” for drafts and export your file. Open Kefka up and import the file you just saved and select the event type and you're good to go.

On Friday I didn't really internalize how important having a consistent naming scheme is, so some of my files were named kind of weird, this became problematic when I was importing events in quick succession (resulting in two Core Draft 8's), so on Saturday and Sunday I made sure to name all my files the same way.

...In Conclusion
I'm glad I had the opportunity to do scorekeeping, and would like to give it another shot on scheduled sides (and hopefully a busier GP), however I don't think it's going to be something I'll want to do forever. One of the main things I enjoy about working events is getting to interact with people just as excited about magic as I am. When you're scorekeeping you are kind of isolated, and this is a problem, since my regular job lends itself to isolation, GP's are kind of a nice break for me. I feel like if I also have an isolated role at a GP I might end up becoming very depressed. I think it's a great permanent position for some people but for me it's just not totally my thing. I think part of the reason I started bleeding into registration roles was simply so I could interact with some players for a little while to break up the data entry. That being said it I still enjoyed the learning experience a lot and would enjoy doing it every now and again. It also grants me the ability to be able to help out on ODE scorekeeping if the need ever arises.