Burnaby, BC, Canada
Time: Saturday July 21 – Sunday July 22nd 2023
Saturday Modern Main: 62 | Winner: Shawn Boshuis
Sunday Modern Main: 26 | Winner: Markus Thibeau

Saturday RCQ HJ – 62 players

A Local Void
Something interesting that I've been seeing more of lately is smaller Tournament Organizers trying to break into large(ish) events. I'm honestly not sure why this is. This might possibly be due to the fact that any organizer can now “purchase” more invite slots, meaning they can make their event more grandiose by paying a little more, whereas in the PPTQ days you only ever had one invite. This might also be a byproduct of a void left by Grand Prixs. The Regional Championship only happens twice a year and is invite only (and will soon be moving to once a year) but anyone could play in the Grand Prix and it was a great time to hang out with your friends. “Summertime Spellfest” sure felt like it was trying to be a small Grand Prix. On Saturday they sported an 8-slot RCQ along with a rebound event after round 3, and a few 1ks. On Sunday there was a four slot RCQ.

Scheduling Woes
Scheduling an event is tough, and when you also want to balance cross-posting that schedule as early as possible and making changes based on feedback, what you end up with is a schedule that says different things in different places. I noticed this ahead of time and confirmed the final schedule with the TO a week or two in advance. However, lo and behold something changed without me noticing, and much to my chagrin on Sunday the staff was coming in an hour after the start of the first event! Luckily this was noticed a few days before the event by a team member who brought it to my attention. We projected the event would be small enough that myself and one other judge could probably handle it, so the adjustment had very small ramifications.

A Buzzing Success
You may recall that a few reports back I mentioned purchasing a set of ODE buzzers after working a string of events for newer TOs that didn't have a good grasp on how to run On-Demand events. Well, once again I found myself working with a TO that didn't have a great On-Demand system in place. There was a little confusion here too though, I confirmed beforehand that the store would be taking payment and doing event registration, so I instructed them on how the ODE buzzers were going to work, but then when we arrived it became clear that the TO didn't really have a plan in place for registration. I shrugged and the judge staff took control of that. Luckily I had a few judges on staff who had worked for the TO in-store before and were somewhat familiar with the POS. This still caused issues since the system timed out after a period and initially we weren't given a password to login with. This also meant we had to deal with pre-registrations, which was another thing that we didn't have access to until Sunday, so I simply had those players show me the email confirmation they'd gotten from per-registering and used that.
The registration workflow was as follows: AP would walk up and ask to be in an event, we'd run his payment and then get him out of line and show him the companion code so he could get into the event. This was a little clunky, and I think a better method would be to ask players to first enter the companion code, then come up and pay, and at that point we'd move them from the lobby into the event.

Well Laid Plans
The expected player count of the main event on Saturday was 100(ish), and I didn't think this was unreasonable as the previous week's large event had been 70 players and this location was easier to reach for a larger number of players. I organized my judges into three teams to account for this:

Deck checks (2 judges)
Floor & paper team (2 judges)
Side events (1 judge)

I had the intention of moving some main event judges over to sides as the player distribution changed. This got a little thrown off when my deck check judge got eaten by registration, but it worked out okay because that meant they could do checks and also keep an eye on the till as they were in the same place.
The other awkward thing about this schedule was the fact that the two 1k side events both started at the same time, 1pm. I'd known this in advance and told the side event judge to loot a member of deck checks if he needed support, since both events were likely to be relatively small. Unfortunately he was also in charge of launching ODEs and since it was some kind of Commander Party weekend, there was a special Lord of the Rings variant that required ~5 minutes of explanation.
All this meant that both events were a little delayed, which wasn't terrible seeing as the morning event hadn't finished round 3 by 1pm, so we needed to delay the 1ks anyways.
Staffing is awkward with these small to mid size events because realistically you kind of need a minimum amount of judges to run an event with deck checks and side events, and oftentimes what ends up happening is you have a bunch of half-jobs that require half a judge, but you kind of can't give two half-jobs to someone, so everyone is a little bored or a little stressed depending on how which way you do the staffing. I still think in retrospect a better plan would've been to have a specific judge assigned to each 1k as well as someone in charge of ODEs, and they'd just peel away from the main event whenever those tasks happened.

Event-UnLink
Another weird hiccup that occurred was a new and strange “feature” in Eventlink. Apparently if your system time is different than the timezone you are in, it causes a strange bug where the round timer gets locked at -99.99. My best guess for this is that for some reason the EL round timer dials into the internet as well as the system clock to double check its timer for some reason? And I assume if the system clock says that negative time has elapsed it just implodes in on itself. I dunno why it's coded in that way, but, well here we are.

Sunday – RCQ HJ - 26 Players

Restructuring
Based on the numbers from Saturday, I adjusted the scheduling for Sunday. One of the judges had mentioned he really only wanted to work Saturday so I gave him the option to not work Sunday and he took it. I also changed the schedule around so instead of having most of the team on the main event, I assigned a judge to ODEs, and a judge to the 1k. Having more dedicated judges “in-charge” of specific things worked a lot better with the numbers we had, and Sunday ran a lot smoother. This was also due to the fact that we had a better handle on registration and that nothing needed setting up the morning-of.

Being a Head Judge
Being in leadership is a lot of things, and to be fair, I'm not particularly good at many of those things. Each time I do it, I encounter new and exciting challenges. Early on in my judge career one of my team leads told me “Tobi, I'm really happy that you did everything I asked you to do today” and I looked at him like he was an idiot, because, well, of course I did everything I was asked to do, why would I do anything different? I'm now beginning to understand why he said that. One of the challenges of this event is that there were a few times I asked a judge to do something, they nodded and agreed then.... proceeded to do something else because they thought that was a better idea. This is awkward because sometimes this is fine, maybe the situation changed, or something unexpected came up and your team lead is busy. I know I excersize a little autonomy when I go to events because sometimes it's just not practical to check every little thing with your lead. However as a lead it's really annoying when you consider Process A and Process B and after much deliberation decide that Process A is correct only to have your FJ implement Process B without discussing it with you.

I think whether or not you should double check a process change depends on a few key factors:
-How available is your lead to double check the change
-How experienced are you in this role
-How big of an impact will your change have
-How time sensitive is this change
Overall the FJ changing things wasn't a big deal and only caused some minor delays, it was also a good learning experience for the both of us.

New Blood
The judge situation in western Canada is quite grim, for this event I called in two people that are semi-retired as well as a rules advisor to work, due to lack of judges. I think this issue stems from three major factors. The first factor is something that plagues many regions, and that's Covid. The judge program, like any workplace has a constant turnover of judges, and during Covid our recruitment and training was... non-existant due to the fact that there were no events running (for good reason). But that means that in the post-Covid world we're left with a gutted program with a small top end and almost no middle. The second factor is the fact that the current judge culture in Canada is that of excellence and hard work. We have a great crop of enthusiastic judges that want to be great, but from the outside it doesn't look very.....fun. And that puts a wrench in our plans to recruit new people, so one of the other things I've been doing lately is injecting giant dollops of “fun” into my conferences. Finally the third nail in Western Canada's coffin is the lack of active recruitment from it's L2s. This isn't a hit against those L2s by any stretch, there are only really two that are active and they only levelled up shortly before Covid and are still trying to find their way in the L2 world, and are a little ways from being able to dedicate any time to mentoring! One of the things I did at this event was put a call out on Facebook for anyone interested in being a judge to speak to me. The Rules Advisor I hired was one of those that contacted me, and several other people contacted me and I invited them to come to the Stronghold event on Sunday so I could speak with them and help guide them in their process. Only two people came out, but I was able to give them a solid and clear path to L1. I'm not sure if they'll make it, but I intend to give them as much support as possible!

....In Conclusion
Overall I had a good time at the event. I think the big takeaway is that scheduling and staffing for events is harder than I thought it was, and I have even more respect for those that do it. I'm excited to do more things like this in the future and get better at it! I also would've liked there to have been more players, but it's tough to estimate player counts, and even tougher to figure out what entices players to these kinds of events.