Ottawa Regional Championship
Ottawa, Canada
Time: Friday March 24th – Sunday March 26th 2023



Friday – AM Sides Lead

I’d Like Some Events on the Side, Please
This was the first time I’ve been sides lead in a while, and the first time I’ve been sides lead for a Canadian event period. Sides are a lot different in the current era. CFBE definitely did a lot more of the backend when it came to planning side events. Judges would be pre-assigned to certain side events, their start and end shifts would also be determined by CFBE. The only thing I really felt like I had autonomy over in the CFBE era was planning breaks and the team meeting. For Face to Face it was totally different, the TO gave us the ability to hire people and put them into specific roles, as well as set people’s starting and ending times. It certainly was a lot more work than CFBE but it also gave me the ability to really manipulate the process. Which right now, needs a lot of work, Face to Face events still aren’t as large as Grand Prixs and therefore have different challenges. For the first show, in Toronto, the sides leads had judges assigned to individual events. This ended up with a really high judge to player ratio, obviously this isn’t great for Face to Face, and they’ve been wanting to cut back on staff.
For the second round of RCs we brought in event veteran Jonah Kellman who implemented SCGs classic sides strategy, no HJs for individual events, only FJs, Kickstart and a round turnover team. I don’t think I’ve ever actually worked sides under this structure, but wanted to give it a shot for Ottawa. I decided to assign HJs to the larger comp REL side events, but everyone else was on one of the aforementioned teams.
Unfortunately I am human and make mistakes, and boy did I make a lot of mistakes. For some reason I had myself coming in ridiculously early on all three days. I think this was so that I would be in at the same time as the ODE scorekeeper, since ODEs started quite early. But this was pretty unnecessary. Not only do I have no idea how ODE scorekeeping works, but also, realistically, no ODEs are going to start in the first few hours anyways. I also had the Kickstart team come in an hour before the first event, however the first event was the Super Qualifier which not only had a dedicated HJ and FJ, but also had literally every other staff member to help launch it, since all of the side event judges also came in an hour before this event started. Because I had Kickstart come in so early, I had them leaving 30 minutes before the last event launched, at the time I figured things would be winding down and that the side events judges could help with this, but unfortunately most of them were slated to leave around this time as well, and many events were still in full swing.

Paper is Dead
Another thing I did was make up event cover sheets for the paper pairings boards, but by the end of the night most of the side events weren’t using paper pairings, so I just stopped getting them. I think for the larger Comp REL events it’s necessary, but for the 6 person legacy events, it’s a waste of time and paper. I know in particular one of my events near the end of the day had a bunch of players who weren’t in companion, instead of screwing around with paper, I just called out the matches, old school FNM style and it worked totally fine.

Last Chance Fustercluck
LCQs were a bit of a mess for multiple reasons. First they were initially slated to be launched every half hour, and if they were less than 32 players we would end up front-loading a bunch of byes because the TO didn’t want a bunch of byes in the later rounds. This is fair, though it certainly feels weird. My LCQ team suggested just switching to an ODE model where events launched as soon as 8 players signed up. I empowered the team to do this. However this ended up being a bit of a mistake since I only had two judges assigned to LCQs, and when we hit roughly midday they had 8 concurrent events running which is a lot to juggle on top of the fact that they were also taking judge calls. Further compounding the issue was the fact that for some reason they were placed in the back corner of the room, so the Super Qualifier judges couldn’t even support them. I decided that this needed to be fixed and got them moved closer to the Super Qualifier, but by the time this all happened the damage had been done and the LCQ judges were stressed out and annoyed.

Spies in the Ranks
There was someone in LCQs that was entering simply to concede to their friends and defeat people that weren’t in the friend group. This is.... obviously terrible. Currently in the Canadian system, because we have two events, you are allowed to keep playing in Qualifier events even if you’ve already earned an invite because theoretically each person can utilize two invites. In reality very few people are going to do this, and it’s more likely that the ability to earn a second invite will be abused for exactly this purpose. The current American system doesn’t allow players to play in an event with an invite if they already have an invite, unless that event is a “destination event” such as an SCG qualifier, or an NRG or whatever. This kinda makes sense since it allows players who’ve won their local RCQ to still attend larger events that have substantial cash prizes and also happen to have an invite or two on the line. Notably there isn’t currently a great way to tell the difference between a “destination event” and a random RCQ, but a good rule of thumb is that if the event’s cash prizes are more significant than the invites to the RC, it’s probably a destination event.

I Did it For the Tix!
A fellow judge overheard AP mention to NAP that they should concede to them and that they could split the prize tix at the end during the third round of a 3 round side event. AP was 1-1 but NAP was 0-2, the prizes for 1-2 were much worse than the prizes for 2-1 such that the split would benefit both players, however the way in which is was said was very.... not ok. When I confronted the players afterwards AP said that the “offer” was only a theoretical statement of what they should’ve done after the match result had already been entered, and AP insisted that everything was okay and was a little cagey when I first spoke to him. The judge that had initially overheard the incident then took over the rest of the investigation, and determined that AP was simply quite clueless and didn’t actually know this wasn’t okay. Personally while I didn’t do the investigation the whole thing feels quite fishy to me.

Saturday – PM Sides Lead

It’s Called a Trading Game for a Reason
Everything is better when its collectible and tradeable. Even shifts! I ended up trading shifts with the other sides lead to allow them to make evening dinner plans, this was, in retrospect, a bad idea. I’m used to the AM sides lead taking charge on breaks for all judges and whatnot, but I didn’t communicate this clearly to the lead I traded with, which resulted in some embarrassment as PM judges came to ask me when their breaks were, and I was blindsided by the fact that it wasn’t already taken care of. In addition to this I was still in partial AM sides lead mode which meant that both leads were assigning tasks simultaneously, which can cause the same FJ to be assigned to multiple tasks, and some tasks simply being forgotten all together.

Risk of Re-Pair
So, as it turns out, Eventlink has some stability issues. I’ve taken to understand that whenever you do something odd with your tournament in Eventlink, it has a small chance to eat your event, and the more odd things you do, the higher this collective chance gets. Odd things are defined as, changing your starting table number, repairing your round and adding players in after the event has started. Unfortunately our scorekeeper low-rolled on one of the RCQs and Eventlink decided to completely delete the event from existence after we’d painstakingly put 70 players in. Because of this we ended up putting them all into a new event manually, since we didn’t want to deal with having 70 players re-enter the event via Companion. However, this meant that those players no longer had the ability to get their pairings on their phone. This meant that the event had to be run old school, with slips and pairings. While nostalgic, it reminded me of how logistically taxing slips and pairings can be, and made me a tiny bit thankful that we now have online pairings.

Sunday – AM Sides Lead

Iterate and Improve
For Sunday things were a lot better, I clearly communicated responsibilities and expectations with the PM lead and nothing critical was missed. Breaks were assigned correctly, and overall the day was significantly less stressful. The only real issue was some poor communication on my part, at the end of main, judges were sent to sides, I let those judges know they weren’t needed on sides. I can’t specifically recall what exactly I told them at that point, but it was interpreted as telling them they could go home. You can image how annoyed Face to Face was when they came to me a little while later and asked me where all the main judges had gone, since they needed them for teardown, and I shrugged and said I didn’t know. I assumed they had gone back to main, but clearly something was lost in translation. Luckily most of them hadn’t yet left the venue. I apologized for the miscommunication and politely asked them if they could help with teardown. They agreed, and it wasn’t a huge deal, but it certainly doesn’t come across great.

...In Conclusion
I learned a lot from this event, and was certainly knocked down a peg or three. It’s easy to watch someone else do something poorly and think you could do a better job, but it’s a lot harder to actually get in there and do a good job yourself. I haven’t done sides lead in a while and Canada has some unique challenges. While I much prefer other roles over it, I kind of want to take what I learned this weekend and iterate on it to see if I can make the next event better. Currently I don’t think we need two sides leads, I think that makes things unnecessarily complex and frustrating, I think kickstart and round turnover are in a good place, but for the morning I think you need a sides scorekeeper who will manage ODEs as well, then you’ll have your individual event HJs. Then at about noonish you’ll have a PM omni lead who can take care of any registration-related tasks, coordinate ODEs and prize wall. Basically a closing manager. This model cuts out some PM prize wall and registration staff, as well as the ODE lead job entirely, which currently isn’t really a job anyways. Also I feel like the current model has sides lead and Open HJ have a higher rate of pay than other leadership positions. While sides lead is more challenging than the other positions, I think that Open HJ is not significantly more challenging than most other leadership roles. Instead unified deck checks should be getting a higher rate of pay since it requires a lot more logistical prowess. In addition to these staffing and payment changes, I also think the schedule from this weekend could use some serious overhaul in the times that I had people come onto staff. A lot of that is too granular to go over in great detail here, but in short, while this event was frustrating and something I’d consider a bit of a “face-plant” for me, I do think I walked away with a lot more knowledge than I went in with, and would be happy to take another crack at it in the future.