Los Angeles, California | Modern
Time: Friday March 1st – Sunday March 3rd
Players: 1569 Winner: Michael Bernat

Friday – Last chance Trails [Scorekeeping]
Scorekeeping LCTs for the first time was really interesting. Last Chance Trials are single elimination events that award byes, however in WER they're simply input as 4 round swiss events, so to ensure the event runs correctly, every round it's the scorekeepers responsibility to drop players that have lost. It feels a little more similar to running ODEs because LCTs launch every 30 minutes and after the first round they shrink dramatically (or rather, every round they shrink dramatically) so it's a lot of initial input but then very little upkeep, as opposed to a scheduled side, where if an event blows up, it's just 3 hours of gigantic event. I also got to enter infractions, which again, I haven't really done since the PPTQ days (save for the small amount of WLTR I did at MF Toronto)

Friday – Scheduled Sides [Scorekeeping]
Saturday I was on scheduled sides, every other event I've worked as a scorekeeper has been fairly sedated, save for MF Toronto, which was busy, but I ended up not being put on anything too hairy, except for Sunday ODEs. This time, however I got pretty buried, I got in on Saturday morning and immediately had to pick up a large modern event. And, unfortunately, when WER transfers an event it scrambles the table numbers but keeps the matches intact, so instead of searching for table numbers when entering results, I had to search for player names. Then pretty shortly after I launched a 2HG event, as well as a legacy event. Everything was going okay, but for someone more inexperienced it was a pretty hefty workload, and that, coupled with the volume of player questions (as it was a completely packed event) meant that when my round 1 modern slips started coming in I was pretty swamped. Unfortunately, I had the 2pm Sealed Double Up. About an hour before the event, my TL noticed there were already entry slips piling up beside me, I told him I'd be fine, and I'd have everyone entered by 2pm. This was a mistake, the torrent of player questions didn't end and I ended up continually getting swept up in small administrative errors until 15 minutes before the event, when I realized there was no way I was going to be able to enter all these players in time. My lead came over and distributed the data entry task among a few other scorekeepers, and in the end transferred everything to me. But it was still extremely jarring, the event ended up being delayed by more than a half hour, and as compensation CFBE had to offer players a first round bye and organize a “sleep in special” area for players in the 2pm sealed that also wanted to be in the 6pm sealed. It was a pretty catastrophic blunder, probably the largest mistake I've ever made at an MF, and I think the major takeaway was that I should've asked for help when I needed it and not tried to take on more than I could. It was me thinking I could just take care of everything when in reality that was not at all true. It was a pretty brutal lesson and one I won't soon forget.

Sunday – Scheduled Sides [Scorekeeping]
I was pretty rattled from the mistake on Saturday and I think CFB was as well because my Sunday was extremely slow, I was given a lot of lower impact events, and effectively cushioned from making any catastrophic errors, which was probably for the best.

...In Conclusion
Overall I think it was a good experience, if only to see where my limits are, I don't often run into them but this was one time where I really hit a wall, it was both frustrating and very educational. I've thought a lot about the event and am going to take a lot of precautions to ensure an error of that magnitude doesn't happen again.