Vancouver, Canada | Sealed
Time: Friday December 28th – Sunday December 30th
Players: 960 Winner: Jason Fleurant

Friday – Saturday - Sunday


A World of Sides Scorekeeping
I was on sides scorekeeping all weekend. It was a bit of a change of pace, I don't do a lot of operations type stuff and I've only done scorekeeping once before, and that was the ODE end, which is actually a pretty different job, on ODEs there are a lot of new skills you need to learn and there are a lot of moving parts. With sides it felt a lot more similar to running a regular event, but you know, just more of them. So the learning curve was a lot smoother.

What Is Sides Scorekeeping?
Sides scorekeeping had a few main parts, many of which will be fairly familiar if you've ever run a PPTQ or even a prerelease before. The first part, was entering DCIs from registration slips, and gathering DCIs from the online registrations. Online registration closes 15 minutes before each event, and the on site registration closes 10 minutes before the event, so there's a nice temporal buffer between large chunks of players that you need to enter. Additionally, if everything is running smoothly at registration you will periodically have bundles of slips given to you (or you may need to ask for them) from the front to again, abate the need to input 80 DCI numbers in the last five minutes before the event is supposed to start. Once all players are in, you can start the event, you'll need to adjust the number of rounds, otherwise you might accidentally find your 3-round legacy double up running one or two rounds too long! After you've adjusted the number of rounds and put in your HJ, don't forget to change the starting table number, it's highly unlikely your side event will actually be starting at table 1, and if you forget to change this you'll probably be sending random sides players into the top tables of the Grand Prix. After you've done this, you can make pairings, and print entry slips. Finally the last step (after you've given the paperwork to the HJ) is to post the pairings online, without visual aids it's kind of odd to explain in detail but you basically find the event in RTools and once you've done that each round you just need to click a button and boom! Your pairings will be on the CFB website! After the event has started you may get a few late entries, registration should let you know whether to enter the players with a loss, a bye or who to pair them with if there are other late registrants.

What's Ops Without a Little Paperwork?
Another large part of the job was utilizing the spreadsheet, kickstart can't figure out where to place the event if the spreadsheet doesn't have accurate and up to date player counts, so a challenge is to figure out when it is appropriate to be entering people and when it is appropriate to be entering player counts into the spreadsheet. The rest of the challenges of the job consisted largely of remembering many small tertiary things such as uploading and saving the event files, and printing the players by table sheet for prize tix. And then remembering to go bother prize tix about getting your round 3 results slips later so you can actually finish your event.

Player Questions are a Universal Constant
Something I've come to realize that no matter what position you're working, no matter how busy or not you look, players will ask you ops questions. “How does prize support work?” “Where is my gathering point?” “Does the venue have wifi?” and scorekeeping also begat this torrent of questions, I feel like my previous GP experience really kicked in here and allowed me to answer player questions quickly and easily, rather than having to bother the more experienced members of the staff. My previous experience as a FJ also helped stymie the amount of logistical questions I had to ask, such as how to deal with late entries, or when I had to explain to FJs how to deal with them. There was also an incident where someone was a late add, was entered with a loss into an event and then was also not on the pairings for round 2. the idea of breaking up another match was discussed but unfortunately the players had already begun playing at that point, it was the Canadian Highlander event, which was highly anticipated and sadly, there was only one of throughout the weekend. So we ended up escalating the situation to a CFB employee who I believe threw some tix at the problem and maybe got the player into some turbo town games of Canadian Highlander.

...In Conclusion
Overall it felt very similar to scorekeeping an FNM or PPTQ. If you've ever been a floor judge of a side event that's gone wrong, then scorekeeping isn't too challenging. Also, seeing how scorekeepers interfaced with kickstart kind of closed my “side event loop” of knowledge, which was kind of nice, I've now seen side events from the registration end, from the judge end, from the kickstart end, and now, at long last, from the scorekeeping end. I feel like I should be getting an achievement or filling out some kind of stamp card for this :/

In my opinion scorekeeping is not the most exciting or interesting designation, I really like interacting with cards and players and scorekeeping is an area where I don't get to do a lot of that. But it was still a lot of fun, the people I worked with were fantastic, and even just interacting with players from a service perspective behind the stage was nice. I think that it's a great job for some people, but those people and me are a little different. I will enjoy future scorekeeping designations that I am offered, but I feel like more than that, working the position really reaffirmed the fact that my place is, and always will be, with the players.