Jeff Darran: Let's Talk Slips

Today's post was written by Level 2 Judge and North Carolina veteran Jeff Darran. Follow along for some stage perspective on result slips at large events :D

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Let’s talk result slips and dealing with your scorekeeper!

Hi there! I’m going to talk about some of the experiences I had as a scorekeeper at GP Vegas. I was scorekeeping Swiss side events for the first three days of the event, and I was one of two scorekeepers for the Super Sunday Series event on Sunday.

I’d like to talk with you all today about what to do with result slips. Result slips are a big deal as a single missing slip can hold up an event and cost everyone precious minutes. When there are multiple scorekeepers for the side events, getting the slips in the correct result slips box can be tricky. At GP Vegas, there were no less than 8 other Swiss scorekeepers on any of the four days, meaning there were eight people sitting at a stage with a result slip box sitting in front of them.

 So, how do we get the slips in the right box? How do you know which box is yours? There are a couple different answers for this.

Side Events

In Vegas, each scorekeeper had a sign taped to their box with the event that they were scorekeeping listed on it.

On Thursday, I was the scorekeeper for three events:

•  4:30 pm Legacy #2
• 5:00 pm Modern Masters Sealed #3
• 5:30 pm Modern #2

To make it easier for the players, I had taped a sign to my result slips box that listed each event on a single line, but in big bold face print. When you’re playing in a side event at a Grand Prix like this, the result slips will most likely (maybe not always though) have the actual event name listed near the top.

In Vegas, they didn’t print with the event time, but my slips did say Legacy #2, Modern Masters Sealed Trail #3, and Modern #2. This should make it easier on the players when they come up to the stage and see a box with these labels to identify which scorekeeper has which events.

Sometimes there is only one scorekeeper for all the Swiss side events. Generally speaking, this is what happens at Grand Prix presented by StarCityGames.com, and Jenn is often that scorekeeper (I’m most likely the one you gave money to in order to sign up for the event).  There’s a sign sitting near her that says something like “Sides Result Slips.” If you are playing in a side event, please put your result slip in that box. That’s all you need to do.

I realize these two situations are not always the case. Before asking a scorekeeper – who is usually swamped -- where the result slip in your hand goes, look at the box to see if there’s a tournament listed there and see if that tournament matches the name of the tournament on your result slip.

“Main” Events

Getting main event result slips to the right place can be tricky too. There were two of us scorekeeping the Super Sunday Series. We were sitting next to each other and we each had our own result slips box. My event was on blue paper: pairings were blue, result slips were blue, and the sheet that said when the round ended was blue. There was blue paper on the result box indicating that the blue result slips went in that box.

All my partner’s paperwork was on white paper. Sounds easy right? Nope. I easily had 50 players with result slips ask me if their slips went into my box. The only other choice was a box all decked out in white paper.

If there is a way to make result slips easier or clearer, please feel free to comment and let me know. I’m always interested in things being easier.

Thanks for reading!

GP Vegas 2015: Saturday and Sunday

Scheduled side events on Saturday and Sunday in Vegas, for me at least, were a little different from the Bounty event on Friday night. Over my shift I was responsible for 2-3 of the Swiss side events, which were firing every half-hour and were each five rounds. I had done some work with them on Friday before the Bounty started when I was covering other scorekeepers for breaks, but these two days were my real tastes of scheduled events.

Each event started off the same way: a radio message from registration that the player import was ready in Dropbox. I got a little impatient and refreshed the folder around ten minutes before the scheduled start time because I like starting events on time.

The biggest challenges for these events were the large-event logistics kind:

• How were we managing result slips across half a dozen scorekeepers and a dozen events?
• How were we squishing all these events into the hall?
• Why is running Two-Headed Giant events so challenging?

We had a pretty snazzy solution to the first problem: rainbow colored paper!

Colored Result Slips

When a single scorekeeper is managing multiple events, they'll often use colored paper to easily differentiate one event's paperwork from another's. This is secret tech I'll talk about a bit more when I post about GP Charlotte, because I had almost all of the Swiss sides at that event.

In Vegas, we had to institute a slight variation on the theme: with multiple scorekeepers each managing multiple events, each scorekeeper was using a different color.

While this isn't quite as easy on us — we have to read table numbers or the event name from the slip instead of just remembering which event is which color — the slight inconvenience is outweighed by not having to run all over the stage to figure out who has which event.

Seating

We also had a pretty snazzy solution to the second problem: a Google Docs spreadsheet.

It columns headers something like this:

Using Google Docs is great for this kind of thing because multiple people can edit the spreadsheet at the same time, and changes update across all the open versions immediately.

All of the scorekeepers, stage managers, and sides team leads had access to a spreadsheet that was updated each round as events shrank. At the beginning of the day, seating events was easy: start at table 1 for the first event and fire subsequent events where the previous one ended. Eventually, though, the side event areas ran out of space, and we had to consult the spreadsheet when we got final player counts from registration.

(As an aside if you weren't in Vegas for the GP, the room was organized into ten sections with different colored tablecloths and iconic Magic characters, eight for the main event and two for side events. We quickly outgrew the side event areas and had to start using the main event tables. Yay!)

Two-Headed Giant

WER, DCI-R, it doesn't really matter: Two-Headed Giant is always kind of a pain. Wonky things happen with the software when you try to tie players together in teams, and Vegas was no exception. One of the 2HG events exceeded its registration cap by a little bit (read: a lot) and split into two events.

As a consequence, the player/team list took a little bit of time to get ready and the players were seated in their play area by judges to start building while we worked out the kinks. We printed team lists during build so teams could verify that they were on the list before the first round paired...

...Well, we tried to. One of the two events alternated between printing its own player/team list and the player/team list from the other split, somehow. The pairings and result slips were fine, though, and once the event got started (a little bit late), it was smooth-ish sailing from there.

Moral of the story: sometimes the best approach to 2HG events is crossing your fingers, pressing buttons, and hoping for the best. It works out. Most of the time.

WER: Backing Up -- Importing and Exporting Events

(It's been a busy few weeks! I still have some posts coming about GP: Vegas, and Charlotte last weekend. Additionally, look forward to a guest post by judge and registrar extraordinaire, Jeff Darran!)

Your probably won't need to make use of back ups much for your run-of-the-mill Friday Night Magic events, but for PPTQs, IQs, or other larger events, they can be invaluable.

At larger events, the scorekeepers make a back up every round. This does a couple things:

• It's a reset button if things break. Instead of rebuilding the entire event, you get to start from the most recent round.
• It makes a copy of files available to other staff members, which can be useful for referencing pairings and standings.

Some independent event series qualifiers, like StarCityGames.com Invitational Qualifiers, also require tournament files at the end of the event to verify the results. That file is basically a back up, and the process for creating it is the same.

Export

To export an event, find the Save menu from within the event. There's only one option under this menu: Export Event. Click on it.

You'll see a familiar save dialogue. The default file name is [Event Name in WER].wer. The default event names are based on the type of tournament you're exporting and will be very similar. If you're creating back ups of multiple events in one place, you should rename the file to something more distinguishable. I like to use the date and format, and when that's not enough (like at Grand Prix where they may be two Standard events on Saturday), the event's start time.

Import

The option to import a back up isn't available from within the event, You'll need to go back to WER's main screen, the one from which you usually schedule and start events. This time, you're looking for the Open menu:

Click Import Event. (Restore Backup is NOT the option you want here. That's looking for a .dat file that has all of the information from all of the events you've run in WER on the computer you're using.) Similar to the dialogue from above, you'll be asked to choose a .wer file to import. If you changed the file name, you shouldn't have much trouble finding the right tournament ;)

Once you choose the file you want to import, you might see a warning like this:

Any file with the same sanctioning number as a tournament that's active under your WER login will prompt this pop-up. If you're importing a file in a different state -- in a different round, with different players, or before whatever exploded that necessitated restoring a back up -- it will completely overwrite the file that WER is currently accessing. Most of the time this is a good thing.

And that's it! The process for exporting and importing events is from WER is fairly straightforward, and having a back up can save you quite the headache :)

GP Vegas 2015: Friday

I had the late shift on Friday. For those of you who have never experienced the 2 p.m. call time, it is glorious. I woke up early to have breakfast with some people on the 9:00, went back to bed for a few hours, and got up at noon with time still to kill. Late shift is, by far, the best.

Late shift on Friday was particularly nice as I got to dodge the madness that was 3500 Mini Masters players.

Three thousand, five hundred. Just think about that for a second. If the scale of Vegas hadn't set in for the staff yet, it did when a Friday side event ranked in the top 5 largest events of all time.

Instead, I got to sleep in (sort of), come in at 2:00 and break the scorekeepers on the early shifts before my Foiled Again Bounty sealed event at 6 p.m. The event was capped at 1200 players, and the original plan was to split it into two separate events.

We ended up with what we thought* was just under 1000, so we didn't split. It was all mine. Mwahahahahaha! Because of the size of the event, we were using DCI Reporter, which is the same program that the main event scorekeepers would be using the next day.

WER and DCI-R are fairly similar. WER's big advantage is that it's connected directly to a live player database and tournament uploads. DCI-R lacks that connectivity but trades it for some stability and flexibility — there are some things WER won't let you do, but there's a way to do pretty much anything you want in DCI-R. As it turns out, that was about to be a problem.

*This was the fun part of my day. Seatings went up for deck construction. I expected a few people not on the list due to illegible registration slips or name mix-ups, and those are easy to handle, especially in sealed. When someone says their name isn't on the seatings:

• Check the player list to make sure they didn't just miss it. If they're registered already, send them to a table. If you don't have many people with issues, you can look up their seating, otherwise just send them to a table at the end.
• If they're not registered (or if you'd rather skip the part where you scroll through or search the player list — you'll get a pop-up that they're already entered in both programs), enter their DCI number. Send them to a table at the end.

Some organizers have a process to verify that players actually did sign up for events. In Vegas we had a spreadsheet with notes about invalid DCI numbers and illegible names that we referenced.

I expected a few problems, but ended up with about 200. Fortunately, 95% of them I didn't need to solve right away:

• If a player's name is on the seating twice, tell them to go sit at one of those tables, and figure out how to fix it later.

Yep. The file merge for DCI-R works a bit differently from the player list import in WER. You don't do it within the program, but instead edit the files to which the program writes tournament data. These are .dat files, but you can edit them in Notepad and/or Excel. Each file contains a different piece of the puzzle, and the one I find myself playing with most often is the 302 file, also known as the player data file.

It contains player names, DCI numbers, assigned seating information, and some other stuff that I try really hard not to mess with. To merge multiple registration stations, you just open the 302 file from each event that was used to register players and copy and paste them into one big 302 file.

Unlike the WER player import, there aren't any checks on this process, so if a player was in multiple files before the merge, they're now in your tournament multiple times.

This is exactly what happened to the Bounty event: when we started entering the slips from on-site registration, both computers started with the file that contained those players. When seating for build was posted, those 200 players were on the list twice.

Whoops.

Fortunately I'd have about 20 spare minutes to fix it while those players were constructing their awesome Modern Masters 2015 sealed decks at whichever of their two assigned seats they liked the most.

Also fortunate, this was DCI-R so I could open the aforementioned 302 file in Excel, click the "Remove Duplicates" button, save it, and pretend those players were never in the event twice. It took about two minutes to fix instead of however long it would have taken to manually delete each and every one of them.

When everything was said and done, about 650 players were paired for round one.

A Quick Note on Back Ups

I write pretty frequently about editing files and experimenting with things to see what works and what breaks things horrendously. If I'm working with a live tournament, that is, one with actual players playing actual matches of Magic: the Gathering, I don't do anything dangerous without making a back up first. Sometimes two. Occasionally three.

That way, when something does break — when, not if — and you can't undo whatever you did that broke it, you can just pretend you never did it in the first place. I'll go through backing up and importing back ups in WER in a future post.

WER: Importing and Exporting Player Lists

Being able to take registration for an event on two computers, or a computer that isn't the one you're running the event from, can be the difference between starting on time and starting late. It's also how we manage to use separate stations for registration and scorekeeping at larger events.

Imagine Friday Night Magic at your FLGS. For many stores, their register and tournament computer are the same thing, and between getting players registered in WER and their last-minute card or pack purchases checked out, things can slow down to a crawl. Even if you need to run the event from the register computer for whatever reason — it's the only one connected to a printer, or close to the play area, for example — you can enter players on a different computer and import the list when it's time to pair round one.

The buttons you need are on the same screen you use to enter players:

One very important thing to note: if you press "Enrollment Complete" at any point, the Import and Export buttons will disappear. You'll still be able to add players to the event, but you won't be able to export the player list.

Click "Export." You'll get a dialogue box asking you where you want to save the exported list:

I usually prefer a cloud storage folder, like Dropbox or OneDrive, that I can access from the computer I'm going to be using to run the event. You can also save to a flash drive or a network folder if your store has that kind of thing set up. Note that the default name for the file is "EnrolledPlayers.xml" that you'll probably want to change it to something more specific, like MMDDYYFNM.xml.

One note on file types: WER uses two kinds of exports:. wer files and .xml files. For backing up and re-importing complete events, it uses. wer, which contains all of the information about the tournament. For player list and completed event copies, it uses .xml. If you're saving a. wer file for the player list, you clicked the wrong button.

When you click "Import," an identical dialogue pops up asking what file you want to import. You'll only be able to select an .xml file. Select the file for your event (which you named something more specific than "EnrolledPlayers.xml" so you could tell which one is the correct file), and click Open.

WER will do some stuff. If you're importing a few players, it processes very quickly. If you're importing more than about 50, WER will take its sweet time, and on my computer it likes to flicker, just to make me worry that it's doing Something Bad. When the import is complete, you'll see this:

The number of players added to the event should match the number of players from the file you imported. If players weren't added to the event, you'll see how many next to "players skipped." The most common reason for the import to skip players is because they're already enrolled, which might happen if you're importing multiple files or if you started to register players with this computer before you switched.

As long as the number of players in your event matches the number of players you're supposed to have, you should be good. Yay!

I mentioned in the beginning that you can also use the player list import and export to take registration on two computers and combine them. This works because the "Import" button doesn't disappear after you import one player list, and you can import as many additional files as you need. The process is the same:

• Take registration at both registers/computers.
• A few minutes before the event start time, hit "Export" to save the player lists from both computers. Make sure that either each file name is different or the files are exported to different folders.
• Open the event on the tournament computer. Hit "Import" and select the first list. Wait for WER to do its thing. Hit "Import" again for the second list. You may see some skipped players that were accidentally registered into both files.
• Click "Enrollment Complete" and pair round one! 

It's very important that you don't click "Enrollment Complete" before you're finished exporting or importing files, because those buttons disappear as soon as you do.

Hopefully this saves you some time and frustration getting those larger in-store events started :D

GP Vegas 2015: Thursday

Over the past few days I've read some other accounts of last weekend's Grand Prix and a common thread through them is the long waits for On-Demand Events (ODEs) early in the weekend. I was one of the ODE scorekeepers when the madness started on Thursday, and hopefully I can share some insight on what caused those delays and what we did to try to solve them.
Drafts.

Wednesday evening the side events scorekeepers got together to talk about the plans for the weekend. Most of the details were pretty standard — what software we were using for which events, where backups were being saved in Dropbox, and who was responsible for uploads. Outside the ordinary was the plan for ODEs.

Given the number of players we expected, firing a draft as soon as eight players signed up would stress even the absurd number of judges on staff. Instead, the plan was to keep registration open and fire events every half-hour, with Modern Masters 2015 drafts at: 00 and: 30, MM2015 Sealed at: 10 and: 40, and Dragons of Tarkir drafts at: 20 and: 50.

The registration staff (who were fantastic) would create events in WER with all the players who signed up in a given half-hour and export the tournaments to a Dropbox folder for the scorekeepers, who would open it all the way across the hall, create pods, and hand the event off to the judges.

Some of this is going to be a little technical, so if you want to skip the software stuff, head down to Revising the System.

Here's a screencap of where to find the Import Event button:

In theory, this plan was awesome.

In practice, it didn't work out so well. I imported first batch of drafts and saw this:

Something wonky happened with the event import, and while I could see that there were supposed to be 65 players in the first batch of drafts, WER refused to show me who those players were, and I couldn't make draft pods or pair them.

The first troubleshooting steps were (and usually are):

• Restart WER.
• Re-import the event (or redo whatever it was that you were trying to do).

Many times, that will fix whatever the problem is. It didn't. By this point, between a small delay getting the file from registration and trying to fix this issue, we were about ten minutes past when we meant to fire the first draft. Jeff Phillips, my buddy on ODE scorekeeping for the day, also jumped on his computer to fiddle with the files to see what we could come up with.

I decided to try to re-enter the players into the file to see if that would get them un-phantomed. The easiest way to do this, with the registration slips halfway across the room, is to open the. wer file for the event (the one we unsuccessfully tried to import) in Notepad and look at the players. That file looks something like this, but note that I've removed actual names and DCI numbers:

With the file open in one window and WER next to it, I entered the first player. I expected his name to just show up in the player list, where it was missing above, and that happened. But, the player count for the event also went up by one. Uh oh.

Having the same player registered in an event twice, even if one is a phantom, is Not Good. I closed the file and re-imported the original, nonfunctional one.

Something strange happened. Now, the player whose DCI number I entered was showing up in the player list, but no one else. The number of players was still correct at 65. This was a huge hint about what was wrong: the only thing that changed since the last import was that player was now on my Local Player List from when I manually entered his DCI number.

I radioed to the registration guys for an upload of their Local Player List thinking that if I could import it and reopen the tournament, everything would be fine. It probably would have been, except that for some reason* WER crashed every time I pressed "Import" on the Local Players Tab.

By this point, a few more minutes had passed and we wanted to get people drafting, so I decided to do it the hard way. "Hard way" here, of course, meaning that I created a new event and manually re-entered all of the players from the. wer file. Even copying and pasting that many DCI numbers takes a little time, and the software issues combined to cost us about half an hour.

Pods were printed for the first event about the time we got the files for the second event, and there was some scuffling while event managers tried to combine the two events to one and judges sat players for their drafts. When everything was said and done, the first draft of the day was starting an hour behind schedule :(

(*It turns out that one of the registration computers was running an older version of WER that caused some compatibility issues. Yay!)

Revising the System

For the rest of the day, instead of trying to import full events, we imported lists of players (which explain that in my next post in detail, because it might be super useful to you at busy Friday Night Magic, Preliminary Pro Tour Qualifier, Invitational Qualifier, or other such events), and that worked out much better. It still had downsides, so we adapted the system even further for the rest of the weekend.

Instead of firing drafts every half-hour, I suggested that we launch them in 32-person flights. Thirty-two turned out to be the perfect number because we could fit four drafts at each row of tables and put one judge in charge of them, balancing wait times with demands on staff.

I didn't get to see the new system in action from a staff perspective because I was on scheduled events for the rest of the weekend, but I did get to test it out on Sunday night when I sneaked into one of the last draft flights after my shift ended.

It's very important to be able to adapt on the fly to adverse situations, and changing the way events were being run after the first day vastly improved the player experience for ODE events. The 32-person system still wasn't perfect — the eight guys who just wanted to draft together all weekend for sick prizes didn't always end up in the same pod — but it turned out to be much better than what we started with.

On Friday I was on the Foiled Again Bounty Event, and I'll talk about that in a few days, but before then...

Soon.

GP Vegas 2015: Prep Days

Like approximately 700 other judges and scorekeepers, I was on staff for GP Vegas last weekend. Unlike most of them, I was on staff for all seven days. It was a long, extraordinary week, and there's lots to say about the many amazing (and a few frustrating) things that happened.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were all setup days. As it turns out, pre-registering sealed pools for 3,000 players and putting together boxes of packs, playmats and registration forms for the rest takes a little bit of time.

It turns out that the packaging for Modern Masters 2015 isn't very efficient, so the GP hall looked a lot like this after we got the packs out of the boxes:

I started Monday off on Team Sealed Pools with about 40 of my compatriots. I got through 18.5 before a delicious lunch of pizza arrived. (Half because, well, I didn't want my tablemate stuck finishing the pool he had just started before he got to eat.) After lunch, I switched to the box-making team for a change of pace, but I was back to Team Sealed Pools for all eight hours of my shift on Tuesday when I more than doubled my Monday output.

That was fortunate because we had to exceed our Monday total of 1200 pools by a *little bit* to get to 3000 total by Tuesday night. We succeeded, because there were a ton of awesome people working very hard at a pretty tedious task.

A member of the coverage team was taking photos of awesome packs and sweet sealed pools while were registering to post to social media after the event started, and was also keeping track of foil mythics opened. 

I started Monday off with a Foil Dark Confidant in my second pack, and I hit a double-foil pack midday on Tuesday — All is Dust and one of the rare artifacts — but that was the extent of the excitement in my sealed pools.

Well, almost. I also cracked this sweet thing:

Yep, that's a rare. Yep, there are three of them. Yep, I listened to the "Is Finkel playing this weekend?" jokes for the rest of the weekend. And ... I also decided that this was a sign that I need to start collecting MM2015 Shadowmage Infiltrators.

I mentioned earlier that I swapped tasks on Monday afternoon for a change of pace. I joined the team downstairs that was working on these:

Each of those boxes contained a GP playmat, six packs of Modern Masters 2015, ChannelFireball.com tokens, a promo Griselbrand, a publicity waiver, and a deck registration sheet, color-coded by event.

I spent most of my time on Team Boxes folding the cardboard boxes into shape, more because I'm too clumsy to roll packs and papers into playmat burritos without making a mess, and in part because I've had lots of practice and am pretty quick at it.

Wednesday was a completely different beast. Team Sealed Pools and Team Boxes had accomplished their tasks, and all that was really left was setting up the hall for Thursday morning.

Prep staff doubled between Tuesday and Wednesday, fortunately, or we might not have accomplished it all. Here's a shot of the staff room Wednesday morning: 

My Wednesday started off with Team Basic Lands. Wizards shipped ... a lot of basic land for this event, and we had to get it out the land station boxes that were in the inner land station cases that were in the outer land station cases.

I guess if you wanted to say that was code for something, you could say that it was code for making a giant mess:

I rescued one of those boxes to use later in the week for the Modern Masters boxes I was going to open, but the rest were mercilessly stamped on, unfolded, and otherwise crushed into dumpsters.

Tablecloths arrived shortly after we finished cleaning that up, and we spent the rest of the afternoon putting tablecloths on the 10 different sections of the room — 8 GP splits, each color coded and tied to a planeswalker or Legendary creature from MM2015, and two side event areas.

By the time that was done, it was nearly time for my 4:30 sides scorekeeper briefing, which I'll get into a little bit when it's time for the Thursday/Friday post.

The one thing that stood out to me the most during the prep days was the amount of consideration that had gone into the processes leading up to GP Vegas. This was my first time working with ChannelFireball and Cascade Games. The smoothness and effectiveness of the three prep days were credits to the time and effort they put in before the hall ever opened for staff.

Also, the prep days were a blast.