Monday, February 2nd – When you judge seven large multiday tournaments in one year, you tend to make friends quickly. These connections come in handy when you’re in need of some highly talented and motivated individuals to assist you on a special project…
Monday, January 26th – A Disqualification is the worst possible way for a player’s tournament to end. Check that. Getting dragged out of the tournament site in handcuffs by the police is worse, which I have seen happen, so a DQ is at the very least second worst.
Monday, January 19th – Battlestar Galactica kicked off its final half season yesterday. Unfortunately, I missed it because I was in Los Angeles as the Magic Pro Tour kicked off its hopefully not-final season with an Extended Grand Prix. But before BSG started its historic final run, the Sci-Fi channel ran a half-hour special with the top ten things to get new viewers caught up on the show. Let’s see if we can do the same with Magic…
Monday, January 12th – Slow Play is one of the most difficult calls for a Judge to make because of the subjectivity of the infraction. The truth of the matter is that Slow Play happens a lot more often than it gets penalized for. Too many Judges are reluctant to pull the trigger on giving the penalty, figuring the player is “just about to make a play. I’ll give him just a few more seconds.”
Monday, January 5th – The Judge seminars were all informative, with some good clean fun mixed in. The high point for me was during John Carter’s “Q&A with the New Judge Coordinator†seminar when Paul Smith from the UK asked Carter what he thought of my column. The response was pure gold: “As it turns out, Riki does in fact rule.â€
Monday, December 29th – I don’t remember exactly when I decided to Judge at Worlds in Memphis. Given the pace I’ve been on this year, it might seem like a no-brainer to attend a domestic Pro Tour. (Is Worlds a Pro Tour or not? I’ve heard it go both ways.) But with Kyoto being the first Pro Tour of 2009 and me with some relatives that needed visiting in Japan, vacation days were looking tight.
Monday, December 22nd – I’ve been bombarded with a variation of one question all week: “What do you think of Zac Hill’s article?” Zac’s article, “Sealed Redux, and a Little Bit of “Judge!”” lit a firestorm of discussion and controversy that followed me all over the Internet, where I’ve had e-mail exchanges, PM exchanged, IM chats, IRC discussions, and even a Facebook chat on the subject…
Monday, December 15th – Obviously, everyone knows that lying to a Judge is a seriously bad thing. What sometimes slips through the cracks is how equally serious it can be to lie to your opponent or to intentionally ignore infractions until it is convenient to do so. Like a broken record, if you discover something wrong, you need to… (wait for it)… call a Judge.
Monday, December 8th – Since the very beginning of my run here at StarCityGames.com, I have been bombarded with the “spectator question.†It basically boils to some variation of “If I’m watching a match and I witness them make some kind of mistake (rules-wise, not strategic), what can I do?â€
Monday, December 1st – There was a DQ in the last round of Day 1 involving noted Brazilian Pro Willy Edel and a local player. The issue at hand was that his opponent claimed he had dealt damage to Willy with Exuberant Firestoker, something that Willy denied. Enter a Judge, and in fact, enter Head Judge Seamus Campbell as the dispute got that big and convoluted…
Tuesday, November 25th – At Thermopylae, 300 Spartans stood their ground against 200,000 invading Persians. At California States, 4 Judges stood their ground against nearly 300 invading players. It was 273 to be exact, and it blew most estimates by a hundred…
Tuesday, November 18th – Elves! with a capital exclamation point was the story of the tournament from a player perspective. The supposedly secret tech only surprised people with the fact that everyone seemed to have it. As I mentioned previously, the Judging staff got the first hint that something was up when we heard about the dealers selling out of Glimpse of Nature the night before.
Tuesday, November 11th – This is the story of my Pro Tour in Berlin. As I come close to finishing this article, I can tell that it will be the first of two or three on the tournament. This one will follow the tournament in a mostly linear fashion, hitting on some of the fun short storylines of that weekend.
Tuesday, November 4th – As the Monty Python boys taught us, three is the number of minutes thou shalt have to shuffle before each game, no more, possibly less. At the three minute mark you must present your deck. If you delay in presenting your deck after three minutes, you should receive a Slow Play infraction. I say “should†because this is one of those penalties that will almost never be given out.
Monday, October 27th – Head Judging a PTQ. Didn’t I say that I wasn’t going to do this again? Despite, the rhetoric that I may spout at times, I did enjoy my first turn as a PTQ Head Judge and am always looking for opportunities to further my experience and give Jeff “Judge of Currents†Morrow a break, especially from having to make the drive from Oakland to Sacramento.
