GP DC 2016: Getting Started

At around this time last week, I was looking forward to venturing a few hours north for GP DC. It was shaping up to be pretty big, even as far as GPs go. From my comfy seat in the present (which is a couch at a friend's house), it turned out to be exactly that: more than 3.000 players teamed up with their friends to wade into Battle for Zendikar Sealed.

Somehow, I have a habit of finding myself at giant events, which works out: they're way more interesting than smaller events.

The Challenges were my domain over the weekend: along with Meg Stephens, I was on Swiss sides scorekeeping. As was the case in Philly a few weeks ago, we were doing this in WLTR (except for the Two-Headed Giant events, which you'll hear more about later - a lot more).

Meg is fantastic, so I was prepared for this weekend to be relatively easy despite the player count. We had a spot on the side of the Customer Service stage with one seat facing front and one seat facing the side. This gave us enough spaces for laptops, printers, notes and elbows. Meg took the front of the stage on Friday and Saturday, and I took the front on Sunday (because there are only so many times you can tell players that their slip also goes in the box before you go crazy).

Splitting Events

Because no one gets byes in Team Sealed GPs, there weren't any grinders to run. Star City Games filled that spot on the Friday schedule with flights of Team Sealed events and Team Sealed Spectaculars for prize wall tickets. Those events were run from the GP stage, as was the Two-Headed Giant event.

Additionally, the Super Sunday Series events and IQs on Sunday were run from their own mini-stage on Sunday, with Jeff and Kristen scorekeeping. That left Meg and me with the Challenges all weekend, including the team events on Saturday and Sunday. We divided them up between us. On Friday, my event list looked like this:

I swear those last two events are done. Really.

There was some method to the madness: we alternated launching events. I took the first event of the day, which started at 11 am (doors opened at 10), and we went back and forth down the list until we got to the 6 pm Foiled Again event.

SCG's schedule was packed with Challenges, and multiple events were firing at the same time in the busiest parts of the day. On Sunday, Meg had to start two events at once (more on that when we get to Sunday), but we otherwise managed to avoid that.

Splitting Paper Colors

I love colors. If you couldn't tell that by the number of colored pens I have at an average event, you can probably tell by the number of colors that tend to show up in my notes.

Colored paper is the sweetest tech for scorekeeping multiple events. It makes it super easy to distinguish slips from different events, which is extra crucial with how inconsistently WLTR prints match result slips. We had four colors (pink, yellow, green and blue). I had pink and blue on Friday, because cotton candy. Meg had yellow and green, because daisies.

There was some overlap throughout the day. For example, the 1 pm Sealed event was still going on when the 4 pm Standard event started, and they were both on pink paper.

Turns out that the second-sweetest tech for scorekeeping multiple events solved this problem pretty handily: a highlighter stripe down the match result slips for the Standard events until Sealed was finished.

If you don't have a highlighter handy, a sharpie or marker works just as well--anything that can make a bold line will do, and it doesn't necessarily have to be colorful. Unsurprisingly, this also works amazingly well if you only have white paper for multiple events.

Some Technology Stuff

Dropbox Files

This was a fun one! I prefer to scorekeep on my own laptop rather than using one of the admin laptops provided by SCG. It's familiar, I know where my files are, and the keyboard is awesome. It's also a little bit faster than the admin laptops, which I find pretty important. At the beginning of the day, Meg and I needed access to the Dropbox folders that SCG was using for each event.

That sounds way easier than it turns out to be*. See, you have a couple of options when you're sharing files with someone by email with Dropbox. One of them, the one we wanted to use, actually adds the new user to those folders and files, which means their changes and additions will sync across all the computers with access. The other just creates duplicate versions of them for that person's Dropbox that they can see and edit but that don't affect the original files.

Guess which one we started with? Hint: it wasn't the one that let anyone else on stage see my tournament backups or exports. Whoops.

We figured that out, and Kali, the event manger, shared the root folder for tournament files with us. That folder is enormous. It was too big for Meg to add to her Dropbox without going over her storage limit, so Kali made a new folder, with just the files we needed for the weekend, and shared that with us instead.

*Okay, it isn't really that hard. We just made it extra hard, because why not?

I moved this sticky note around in 

my notebook all weekend :D

RIP Shift

"Shift" is the name of one of SCG's printers (they're all named to make it easy to figure out which printer you need to set as your default), and before there were event players in the room on Friday, I killed him.

Okay, that might be a bit dramatic. There was still some hope for him last time I checked. (I should have prefaced this story by pointing out that I have a miserable track record with printers.)

We had an all-hands meeting at 8 am, two hours before doors opened. It lasted about an hour, which gave me two hours to fiddle with laptops and printers and paper and whatever else I needed to fiddle with before the first event of the day started. Most of that time was spent updating software, which had to download on super-slow Internet, but I also had to get my computer to print things to Shift.

I succeeded at that, by the way. I installed drivers and set him as my default printer and printed a test page and everything. I was set.

And then I opened the paper tray.

And it wouldn't close again.

And now Shift is dead. Maybe. At the very least, his paper tray is still recovering from having gotten very, very stuck.

*sniff*

Next up: Friday, featuring pairings board signage, events that start on time (and some that don't), and three stories.

Walter, Our New Overlord (SCG Philly Saturday, Open SK)

The SCG Tour stopped in Philadelphia on February 27th and 29th last month, and I was on staff. On Saturday, I was scorekeeping the 755-player Open (details to follow), and on Sunday I was in charge of Swiss side events (which will be its own, separate post).

Scorekeeping the Open was the second chance I've had to work in WLTR, the first being GP Atlanta last November. There's a new build from the one I used in Atlanta, and it made some significant improvements, like being able to print pairings and slips together rather than separately.

Wizards Large Tournament Reporter (WLTR, or Walter)

Since late last year, large events have been using WLTR exclusively for scorekeeping. It replaced the very old and well-loved (but also problematic) DCI Reporter.

There were a two glaring issues with using DCI-R for events like GPs:

1. Events can't be directly uploaded.
2. It's impossible to enroll more than 2,000 players into a single event.

Once upon a time, no one imagined that the second thing would be a problem. A 2,000+ player event? Really?

That's not only a possibility, it's become pretty common. In the past few years, events have grown massively. My first GP ever, Charlotte in 2012, set the record with almost 2700 players, and that was a Big Deal. This past weekend, Detroit capped out at around 2500, and that now seems pretty normal. GP DC is coming up this weekend, and attendance expectations are higher than both of those events.

The Past: Split Grands Prix

The "solution" to the maximum player cap was to split the GPs that had more than 2,000 players. Day 1 ran as two or three (or, in the case of GP Vegas last year, 8) different events, and then the events were combined for Day 2. That's all fine and dandy as a workaround, but it creates some awful tiebreaker situations.

Because Day 1 and Day 2 aren't actually linked, tiebreakers didn't carry over. Day 2 was treated as a completely separate, seven-round* event, which means that only your opponents from Day 2 and their records on Day 2 mattered.

For example, a player who went 9-0 on Day 1 and then from 0-2 to 4-0 on Day 2, for a total record of 13-2 could miss Top 8 while the player who went 7-2 on Day 1 and 6-0 on Day 2 could make it instead.

This isn't how tiebreakers are supposed to work. They're supposed to reward losing to better opponents, which translates to later in the event. But, because of the way Day 2 had to be implemented for these events, it instead rewarded losing later on Day 2 or not at all on Day 2, and when you lost on Day 1 didn't matter.

*Yep, seven. In DCI-R, you could assign any number of match points to a bye. To combine the events for Day 2, every player started with a bye that was assigned the number of match points they earned on Day 1, then "round 2" was paired, which would actually be round 10 of the event, and round 1 of the day.

The Present: Walter

Now, in the Age of WLTR, that won't happen anymore. Since there's no player cap and there's support for multiple scorekeepers at multiple computers to actively work on the same event, GPs no longer have to split.

While WLTR does a lot of cool things and has some nifty interface updates, it's still new. As Patrick Vorbroker and the SCG team described it, "It's a great program with some landmines."

He wasn't wrong.

I ran into three WLTR-related issues over the course of the day:

1. Some Bye Issues

These always come up, but the ones from Philadelphia were of a slightly different flavor than normal. At GPs, some players inevitably think they should have byes but aren't listed with them. This can be the result of a number of things:

• A GPT wasn't uploaded by an LGS
• A Last Chance Trial winner wasn't communicated from the side events area
• Planeswalker Points weren't updated
• There was a typo somewhere
• The player registered with no DCI number or an incorrect DCI number (usually online)

That last thing was the source of the bye issues in Philly. SCG Tour events have a preregistration site that players can use if they want to sign up in the weeks leading up to the event. This form asks for DCI number, but it can be left blank.

*Unlike in WER, you can enter a player with a "Joe" DCI number in WLTR. It serves as a placeholder, and you can change it later on in the event to the correct number. This means that we can fix missing or invalid numbers after the event has started, and we don't have to track players down before we can pair round 1.

For Philly, a few players who should have had awarded byes registered online without entering their DCI number. When that list was imported into the platform SCG uses to manage event registration, it didn't flag those sign-ups with byes because it checks DCI numbers to do so.

Fast forward to the beginning of the tournament. The player list was imported from that platform, and those players weren't assigned the correct number of byes before round 1 was paired. We didn't realize this was the case until partway through round 1, when the judges started issuing No Show penalties.

Fixing It

The fix here was straightforward: since their opponents had already been told they'd won their match and we were already 10 minutes into the round, the best thing to do was to split those matches and award the opponents byes manually in the pairings screen (this works basically the same way that it does in WER, but things look a little different). Then, we'd make sure those players who should have had byes to begin with had them now.

Everything worked beautifully.

At least, I thought it did. I started entering results, and Everything Was Wonderful.

Fast forward to the end of round 1. According to WLTR, there are about six matches outstanding. The EoR lead only knows of three that are still playing. The other three tables are clear.

Well, that's a problem.

I looked at the names of the players at those tables, preparing to have announcements made for them to come to the stage. Except I recognized them: each of those three matches was one of the ones where a player should have gotten byes.

So, the changes just didn't take, right? Not quite :(

Those three matches were still waiting for results, but the three opponents (so not the players who should have received byes at the beginning of the event) are listed with their assigned byes in the reported matches column. Yep. They were in the round twice.

Well, that's a much more interesting problem.

Ward and Patrick remembered something about a similar issue that had happened at the last event with re-paired matches not saving, and they had to manually edit the tournament file to fix it. Patrick got on the phone with Jason Flatford, master wizard, to talk him through the changes that needed to be made, but it was taking some time and it sounded like they were having issues with that approach.

So I started fiddling with things. I found a solution (which involved deleting the table they were paired at and not just the pairing), but it added a few minutes to the round turnaround time.

2. The Unsticky Re-Pair

At the beginning of round 2, I had to switch two players, a la Editing Matches. But, no matter how hard I clicked the button to assign them to their new seats, it didn't save. It looked like the swap was complete, but if I tried to move to a different process, like entering results, those players magically unseated themselves.

Thinking the problem was something like the one I ran into while fixing the byes, I went through a few iterations of deleting the pairings and tables and recreating them, but nothing stuck.

In WLTR, you can't start entering results until all the players are paired, so this meant that I couldn't, well, start entering results. With about 20 minutes left in the round, I had to find an interim solution, and that turned out to be assigning byes and losses to those players. This cleared them from the list of unseated players, and I could go back to it when their slip came in and adjust which player won and which lost so they'd have the correct match points.

It's not an ideal solution; it means that they won't show up on each other's tiebreakers.

3. The Floating Player

After the first two rounds, everything on the software side was pretty smooth. There was one more wonky WLTR thing, but I couldn't figure out how to fix it and it didn't seem to be impacting the tournament. It was, however, pretty amusing:

A player was dropped in round five. Except...he didn't appear to actually be dropped, according to WLTR.

His name showed up every round after that, in the list of unseated players for the round. Normally, an unseated player means that you can't move to the results entry screen, but this one didn't cause that problem. He just hung out, spying on the pairings, for the remaining four rounds of Day 1. He didn't even show up anywhere on the results entry screen.

During rounds six and seven, I kept trying to drop him. Nothing worked, and he didn't seem to be causing any problems for the rest of the event. He dropped with three match points, so he wasn't going to make the cut to Day 2, and I decided that doing too many weird things to try to fix it might cause more substantial problems.

It also seemed likely, based on the fact that he wasn't paired and wasn't preventing the tournament from moving forward, that, as much as WLTR wanted me to think he was still enrolled, he wasn't really. I shrugged it off.

At the end of the day, there was a clean cut to Day 2 at 64th place. I performed the cut in WLTR with the place rather than the match points because it was so neat and tidy: 64 players into the next set of rounds.

Guess how many players were active in the event after that?

65. Obviously. And one of them had three match points.

I laughed, and then I went back to my hotel to sleep.

WLTR and Penalties

WLTR's penalty entry interface is very different than the ones from WER and DCI-R. In fact, WLTR has two different penalty entry interfaces.

This means that the preferred format for writing penalties on the back of the slips has changed. This is what's been used at GPs and SCG Tour events recently, and it seems likely to stick:

[Table Number] - [P1/P2] - [Judge] - [Infraction] - [Penalty] - [Description]

Of note here, you don't need to write the player's name anymore. Instead, use P1 for the first player listed in the slip and P2 for the second. Beyond that, the rest is pretty much the same.

Being An Effective Line Captain

Judges interact with scorekeepers and stage staff at many different crunch times throughout a tournament. For some of these interactions, the urgency is readily apparent: pairings or result slips are printing and need to be posted or someone has a problem that only someone on stage can help them with. In these cases, the impact of not approaching these tasks with purpose is evident. Pairings don't get posted. Players are left waiting and wondering who's going to help them.

There are some interactions that don't have such an obvious impact on the event, though, and these are equally important. Line captaining seems simple enough, but the difference between a good line captain and a bad one can be the difference between the event starting on time and starting late.

What Do Line Captains Do?

As a line captain, you're an ambassador to the players who are registering (or collecting prizes or filling in tax forms). You're their gateway to signing up (or picking up prizes or whatever) in as little time and with as little fuss as possible.

Your job is to help keep the line at registration (or maybe prize payout or some other function that requires a bunch of players to talk to a few people on stage) moving quickly. You'll wrangle players into a single-file line or guide them to the appropriate line if different stage stations are managing different processes. Essentially, you're directing traffic.

You're also often the first point of contact a player has when he or she walks into an event, which means that you'll have to field common questions like "where do I sign up?" and "where can I get a deck list sheet?" It's important that line captains are equipped with the information they need to answer these questions or point players to the person who can.

As with many kinds of choke points, having ineffective direction can be worse than having none at all.

So, what makes a good line captain?

Find Out What You Need to Know

I asked Eric Dustin Brown, whose line captaining abilities I respect immensely, what he would tell a judge line captaining for the first time if he could only tell him or her three things. His answer was pretty telling:

1. Learn who is signing people up for what.
2. Learn which way the line forms.
3. Learn what information the players need.

The most effective line captains are equipped with information. It's hard to direct players to the right place if you don't know where the right place is. The first thing you should do when you're asked to line captain is find out what the players need to know so that you can tell them.

Learn who is signing people up for what.

If multiple events are open for registration, such as On-Demand side events and the main event, different people may be taking registration. There might be a dedicated registration person for side events, but he or she might also be taking main event registration while there's no one in the side events line.

The more you know about the registration process from the stage side, the easier it will be to direct players to the correct spot. No one likes being bounced around from station to station to do what they're trying to do.

It also may be important to find out which stations can take credit card registration, if that's an option. Many organizers only have one or two credit card machines, which means that not everyone can handle those registrations. The same is true for DCI number look-ups or special kinds of registration, like vouchers or players with byes.

Learn which way the line forms.

In some venues, there will be rope lines and stanchions to make a neat and tidy line, but that's not always going to be the case. If you're tasked with line captaining when a line has already formed, it's better to work with what the players have set up (unless it's getting in the way of something else, like the door to the room or bathroom). Otherwise, you'll have to devise a plan for the players who are waiting.

When you're trying to figure out where to have players wait, keep the layout of the room in mind. Where are they least likely to get in the way of other traffic? How long do you expect the line to get, and will the space you have accommodate that line easily? Will stage signs still be visible to other players in the room?

Learn what information the players need.

When they get to the stage, what should they have ready? This list almost always includes their DCI number and their event entry fee. Some organizers use registration slips, in which case players will need to have those filled out before they get to the stage. Other organizers just have players type their DCI numbers into a keypad.

Beyond just knowing what players need, it's important to make sure that they have those things ready before they get to the stage. If someone has to dig out their DCI number, it's better to send the person behind them to the stage while they find it. A player digging through their wallet or bag in front of a registration computer delays the entire line; a player digging through their stuff off to the side delays only themselves.

If a player doesn't have something that the need, be prepared to help them get it so they can get through the registration process. For example, know who can help them find their DCI number and where the closest ATM is.

The Two-Player Rule

This is one of my pet peeves, so it gets an entire section all to itself.

When the front of the line is a few steps from the registration stations, keep two players in front of each station. Yep. Two.

Why?

It takes time for a player to walk from the front of the line to the next available admin, and that's time that could be used to register someone. Two-person lines aren't going to make things significantly messier in front of the stage, but they can drastically speed up the registration process by maximizing how much time each of the stations can use to actually get people signed up (or prized out, etc.).

Responding to the Needs of the Stage Staff

Sometimes things happen on stage. Someone has to deal with a laptop that isn't working or step away talk to the venue representative. When something like this happens, I try to let my line captain know as soon as possible, but sometimes noise, distance, or the urgency of the issue get in the way.

As with most other judging tasks, awareness is key. When you're line captaining, this is awareness of players, the stage staff, the clock, and any other judging obligations you have, like team meetings. If you think something weird is going on that might affect who can take registration, just ask. If you think there's a better way to be doing something, suggest it. If it's simple, you can probably just do it.

Awareness is more useful when it's paired with communication, and that goes both ways. If you need something, like to step away from the line for a minute, or notice Something Bad happening, say something.

When I'm on stage during registration, I'm in a tiny little world that consists of my computer and the player in front of me. Sometimes that world includes the other people on stage or a player sneaking past the line to ask a question. Sometimes I have time to glance up at the line, but I'd prefer to spend that time with my head down, signing players up for their events. The more time I can spend doing that, the less time they have to stand around waiting.

And the less time you get to spend line captaining.

Matt Braddock: EE 5k Satellite, Baltimore

Today I have another guest post for you. Matt Braddock, L2 from Maryland, also moonlights as a scorekeeper for organizers in and around the Mid-Atlantic region. A few weeks ago, he traded his judge shirt for a staff one at an event organized by the folks at Tales of Adventure. The beginning of his event was full of printer challenges, and Matt's resourcefulness with technology was instrumental in finding a way to minimize the delays.

***

I recently worked an Eternal Extravaganza 5k Satellite event at the Baltimore Convention Center. Having acted as scorekeeper for this organizer more than once, I was anticipating bringing my laptop and having my own setup. The night before the event, I got a message asking if I could bring my own laptop: bonus points for prior experience!

I have my own checklist for items I need to bring with me, since the first event I worked I had forgotten my charger (and subsequently spent $70 at a Staples on the drive). Most of it is stuff I carry with me daily for teaching (laptop, Bluetooth mouse, mini mouse pad, charger, display adapter), but I also pack a few extra items for scorekeeping (mechanical keyboard and USB hub).

I arrived at the venue around 8:50 a.m. Players would start arriving around 9 a.m., and the player meeting was at 10 a.m. I immediately got everything hooked up, and because I know how fragile technology can be, decided to try out the printer. Now, this is the exact printer I used for a previous event with no problem. The computer recognized it, and the driver was installed previously, but it wouldn't print.

As I started to register players, I kept messing with the printer. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling device drivers and running troubleshooting prompts, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, it was almost 10 a.m., and there was no fix for the printer in sight. The organizer came over, who also has a background with computers, and we tried a few more things.

Eventually, around 10:15 a.m., we discovered that the problem was a USB 2.0 device being plugged into a USB 3.0 port. My Surface Pro 3 only has one USB slot, so there was no alternative. Even though this exact printer had worked with this exact computer months prior, an update to Windows 10 likely changed something that made it incompatible.

The organizer and I attempted to find an alternative for getting seatings and pairings out to start the event without a printer. First, I printed the seatings for the player meeting to a PDF and hosted it on Dropbox. Then, I used tinyurl.com to create a custom short URL, which was distributed to judges. However, the Dropbox link made them open it in the app, which not everyone would have, so this wasn't going to work.

The organizer then tried to get the text from the PDF I had created into a text file to post on Pastebin; this ended up being fruitless, since the formatting was not very pretty. Then, he attempted to get it into an Excel spreadsheet, but again, the formatting didn't work.

Having now almost reached 10:30, I took back over and decided to convert the PDF to a PNG file (using GIMP), host it on imgur.com, then make a custom short URL to distribute to the players. There was initial concern from the organizer with how images look on phones, but this option would only take me 90 seconds to complete and give the players something functional.

Being creative with the event name, I used "ee5kmeet" and "ee5kr1" for the custom short URLs, and the HJ read off the link to the players. We also ensured all judges could pull it up, and they spread out among the players to help them. In the meantime, the organizer sent an employee out to obtain a new printer, which, after Round 2 had started, I was able to set up wirelessly with very little fuss.

While there are benefits to newer technology, it can sometimes come with a price (incompatibility with older hardware and software). Being able to think outside the box with prior experience is an essential skill when technology does everything it can to stop you from doing your job.

John Brian McCarthy: Judge! My Points Are Wrong!

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about editing matches that included this line about whether or not to fix pairings for players who had misreported their match result:

Make sure the Head Judge and/or tournament organizer are on board with what you want to do. They might have concerns that you haven't considered.

 When I shared the post in the Mid-Atlantic Judge's Slack, John Brian asked if I could write a follow-up article on what sort of things might play a part in the Head Judge's decision. I thought it was an interesting and useful topic, so I asked him if he would be interested in writing it as a guest post.

And here we are.

***

“Judge, I think my points are wrong.”

These are among my least favorite words to hear as players are hustling toward their seat during round turnover. When a player believes that his or her points are wrong, there are three things we need to discover:

1. Are the player’s points actually wrong?
2. When did the mistake happen?
3. How did the mistake originate? 

First, let’s find out if the player’s points are actually wrong. One common source of this concern comes from printing pairings and standings at the same time. If a player receives a bye, he or she will already be awarded the points for his or her win, which might cause some confusion. If the player’s points are correct, we’ve got no problems.

Once you’ve verified that the players’ points are truly wrong, it’s time for the players, head judge and scorekeeper to have a conversation. You need to find out when the mistake happened. Players will often be able to tell you the results of each round, which makes finding the errant round faster — if they tell you that they won round two, and you have it marked as a loss, you know where reality diverges from software. If the player can’t remember, you’ll have to go round-by-round to find the mistake, which can be time-consuming — one way to speed up the process is to ask the player if he or she still has his or her life pad from the previous rounds, which can often jog his or her memory. If the player has already torn off the sheets and stuffed them in a table tent, you might ask what matchups he or she played.

Once you’ve identified the match where things went wrong, it’s time to find the match slip. Fortunately, you’ve been sorting and banding the match slips from each round (right?), so you can quickly find this player’s slip and check the entered results against what the slip says. If the slip is correct and it was mis-entered, fix the results in WER, then get the player paired and playing — I can’t think of any scenario where we would not fix a data entry error.

If the slips all match what was entered, you’re generally going to need both players from the round in question — if you can’t get the player who was recorded as the winner of the match to confirm that he or she lost (perhaps because the player went home, thinking that he or she lost), you probably don’t want to change the result. If you’ve got the player marked as the winner insisting that he or she lost the match, but can’t find the other player … thank them for being honest and fix it.

So what if the slip is wrong? That’s what the rest of this post is going to address.

The Disruption Calculation

At this point, you, the head judge, have two options:

1. Change the results of that match in the computer
2. Don’t change the results of that match in the computer

So take out your official Player-caused Match Slip Error Scale (you should have been issued one when you were certified, but you might also get an SCG-Branded one with enough Judge Reward Points)* and start putting weights on each side of it.

The “change results” side is usually going to have a pretty consistent weight: two players have match results that are wrong, which is a pretty big disruption for them.

So let’s calculate the other side: how much is it going to disrupt the tournament to change the results? Weights here include:

• What will happen to opponents’ tiebreakers?
• How far did a player made it in a weaker bracket?
• What delay will be caused by fixing the error?

Here are some factors to consider when calculating the weight on each side:

How long has it been since the error occurred?

If you’re seating round five and the error was in round four, you’re looking at a lot less disruption should you choose to fix it than should you choose not to, because no one has yet played a player whose record doesn’t match their own, but they will if you choose not to fix it. Your delay is minimal, because you’re probably only switching the two players whose result was wrong.

Now let’s change the situation: you’re seating round five and the error occurred in round two. You’re still looking at quite a bit of disruption to the players whose match results are wrong if you choose not to fix it — one is going to be up three points while the other is down three points.

But look at the disruption caused if you do change it: one of your players has played against two weaker opponents while the other has played against two stronger opponents than their point totals will reflect after fixing them. If our player who lost the match goes on to face stronger opponents than he or she should in rounds three and four, he or she is more likely to accrue additional losses, while our winning player who is now playing against losing players is more likely to win and have an easier path to the Top 8 than he or she should.

Switching the results is disruptive to everyone. You’ve also got the potential to have to break more pairings, if the two players’ records diverged since their match. For example, let’s assume that these players left round two with AP at 2-0 and NAP at 1-1. AP goes on to win her next two matches, putting her at 4-0, while NAP loses both, putting him at 1-3. If we fix the pairings from their mistake in round two, they’d be at 3-1 and 2-2 — we can’t just swap their assignments for round five or we’d be create more pair-ups and pair-downs. Instead, we now need to find existing pair-up/pair-downs (if possible), break those matches and re-pair them — that means sending out more judges to stop more players from playing, and writing extensions on more match slips.

What round are you going into?

You’re going into the penultimate round, standings have been posted and players are going to be making decisions to draw in. While they’re doing that, you’re considering whether to change a player’s results, which has an effect on OMW%, the first tiebreaker. While this can be disruptive, players generally don’t draw in during the second-to-last round unless they’re undefeated. Making a change here has the potential to be more disruptive than in earlier rounds, but not by much.

On the other hand, during the final round, the pairings are generated with a “greedy” algorithm that takes tiebreakers into account. At this point, adjusting the pairings could mean a significant number of re-pairs (causing major delays), or disruption to the top portion of the room as players make decisions to ID based on incorrect information. Even if you’re looking at a player near the bottom of the standings, there’s a chance that he or she played a player near the top in an early round and that his or her results will have an effect on final standings and tiebreaker math. If your scorekeeper advises you that a change will likely result in a full re-pair, that’s a lot of disruption to balance out.

What REL is this event?

My willingness to fix pairings is greater at Regular than it is at Competitive. First, many Regular REL events don’t cut, but pay out based on record instead, in which case tiebreakers matter less. Second, because there are fewer prizes on the line, I’m less concerned about the potential disruption to the remainder of the event. Finally, the MTR specifies that players at Competitive REL events are expected to “be familiar with the policies and procedures” — that includes how to correctly fill out a match slip.

Make Your Ruling

As soon as a player lets you know that he or she believes that his or her points are incorrect, the wheels in your head should start spinning to determine the total disruption with each option. You and your scorekeeper now each have a job to do, and you’ll ideally do them at the same time. By the time the scorekeeper has verified for you that the result is wrong and how long it’s been, you should be ready to have an answer for him or her on what you want to do about it. The clock is ticking on at least one match’s extension, so make your decision quickly, especially if you’re leaning toward fixing the result, because that operation will take longer to execute.

Oh, and while you’re doing all this, you remembered to start the round, right? I’ve seen Head Judges (some of whom look eerily similar to me …) get so wrapped up in handling issues like this that they don’t notice that all the other players are sitting at their tables, patiently waiting to begin. You might consider deputizing another judge to start the round — while anyone can keep an eye out for when most players seem to be seated, if you delegate making decisions on whether to re-pair players for slip errors, you’re probably setting up an appeal (at which point you’re writing a longer time extension) or worse, inconsistent handling of these errors relative to analogous situations.

If you choose not to fix the results, be ready for at least one player to be upset. The player who had to take a loss on a round that he or she won is going to be unhappy, and it’s legitimate for him or her to feel that way, so don’t dismiss him or her! Instead, briefly explain why you made the decision you did, and remind them that it’s their responsibility to fill out the match slip accurately. Then get them to their table, issue an appropriate extension, and get them playing, offering to discuss it later if they’d like.

A Word on Cheating

I think players assume that match slip fraud happens approximately seven thousand times more often than it really does. The reality is that it’s really, really hard to get away with it, and that it’s just not an effective way to steal a match. It’s a ton more likely that players just screwed up on filling out the slip.

That said, some players (usually kids) will try it, and I’ve seen some incidents where a player has tried it without considering the consequences. So while you’re considering whether you want to fix the error and your scorekeeper is figuring out the implications, ask some questions. In the event that you’re deciding not to fix it, the player who should have won will often appreciate that you looked into the possibility that his or her opponent may have done something dishonest. Some things to consider:

• Who filled out the win numbers on the slip? If it was the loser who filled it out wrong, that’s interesting**. Were the numbers filled out before the winner signed? 
• Who ran the slip up? If it was the loser, that’s interesting. If it was a judge, did he or she verify the results? If not, you’re going to want to speak to the judge about doing so. If the judge did verify and the loser answered, that’s very interesting. 
• Are there scratch outs or eraser marks? Seeing a slip changed from correct to incorrect is interesting.

If your interest is piqued enough by unusual circumstances, ask some follow-up questions. But remember that the clock is ticking, and if you decide that everything is on the up-and-up, every minute you give makes it more likely that your round will be waiting on this match to finish.

The Result, in Retrospect, Is Wrong

As the head judge, you’re going to encounter another category of decisions that are cousins to the match slip error: the players who come up after their match has been reported and want to change it. One player may have decided to drop and go home, so he or she wants to give his or her opponent the win. Or the players realize, after the match, that one accidentally made an error in-game that caused him or her to win when he or she shouldn’t have.

In general, I don’t like allowing players to request their slip back after its been turned in to make changes. The primary reason is that while this is sometimes the result of one player trying to be a nice person, it’s also sometimes the result of Bribery. At an Open last year, a judge witnessed an exchange between two players who’d gone out to smoke after their match. One of them said to the other, “I’ve got to ask one more time — could I have the win here? I’ll give you half my prize money.” If the judge hadn’t been there to intervene, the opponent could have agreed, gone in and asked the change the results, after taking bribe out of sight of tournament participants.

So, I won’t let players change their results after submitting them, barring significant and exceptional circumstances, like the realization that the result was actually incorrect because they forgot to incorporate the game loss that a player received for tardiness.

Conclusion

As the Head Judge, when the players screw up on a match slip, it’s your call how to fix it. The responsibility for the error is all theirs. But the responsibility for the fix is all yours: make sure that you’ve carefully considered the total disruption and chosen the path with the least net damage to tournament integrity, because you need to own that decision. If you quickly and carefully weigh the disruption caused by both options, you’ll make decisions that you can support to the players and the rest of your staff.

*Not a real thing, but it should be.

**A story for this weekend about how noticing something interesting doesn’t always mean Cheating: Our scorekeeper at the Eternal Extravaganza Satellite in Baltimore called me up to the stage and told me that two of his local players had just played, and the losing player turned in the slip. He thought this was odd, as the winner is vigilant about turning in the slip when he wins. At his urging, I tracked down the players, who were eating lunch after finishing their match, and asked about it — the player marked as losing said, “Uh … oops” and they both promptly fixed it.