WI States - Scorekeeping

States has a place for everyone, for one reason or another. From a player perspective, States is the largest "pure" tournament that is held in the US; no money on the line, and no route to larger events directly from it. One of the local players compares it to a family reunion, as it is probably the event with the highest casual-player-to-player-count ratio in competitive Magic. From a constructed perspective, States is the flagbearer of the new Standard, eight days from release to event causes all sorts of interesting tech at these events, and some of the best deck stories come from these events.

From my perspective, States has always been something that's somewhat special, just from a judging perspective. States '04 was my first major event, and where I certified. States '05-'07 were always the first times that I came home from college in the semester -- a particularly poignant point during my freshman year. 2008's shakeup was seen from abroad, and 2009 I wasn't able to drop down and help, so States '10 was the first time in a while I've been able to be around and help. This year, this was a new first, as this was the first major event I was (officially) scorekeeper rather than judging.

Normally, coming into an event as a judge, you brush up on rules and penalties, and make sure you have everything you need. With scorekeeping, most of the work is just interfacing with a pretty flexible program. The nice thing is, this is a program I know quite well, thanks to months of testing events through it. You see, about six months ago I began development of a program to replace a tool used at Legion Events for many years, which was most apparent in the scrolling pairings you see if you're familiar with them. The development has gone far beyond the original scope of the program, and has also had the nice side-effect of becoming probably one of the most familiar users with DCI Reporter, and especially the back-end files.

There was a nice coincidence between programming and scorekeeping as well, as in the weeks prior to States I was finishing work on a new program feature: web pairings. In short, you go to a website, enter in your DCI number, and get a ton of event information about the event right there, from round pairings to match history and other cool things. This event was the chosen event to debut this setup, mainly because I wanted to be running the system the first time it was used live, to handle any issues that could occur.

As an aside, I wasn't worried in the slightest about the system having issues: everything being done has been used in other parts of the program without issue. There were two other issues, though. For one, this was being run on my website, which is essentially hosted on a free provider and randomly craps out. They do a really good job for being the kind of provider they are, but the downside is you occasionally deal with random blackouts. The other issue came from my experiences as a judge: nothing similar to this (outside of SMS pairings) has been tried before, and the amount of information here has never been so freely available. The big point of contention is standings information, something that is pretty tightly controlled by staff at large events. The setup right now was simply an option to mask tiebreakers, which would be used in the final rounds to keep that information only to the printed standings.

As this was my first full event scorekeeping, Steve Port, the head of Legion Events, was around and took the lead during registration just showing the way to do things; I took a side and took care of DCI number lookups, as well as doing some traffic work. We ended registration at 145 players, at which point I took the helm and ran through the debut of the web system, with Steve watching and waiting to see just what this web thing could do. Now, from my standpoint at this event, my job for pairings was four steps, in order: setup pairings in Reporter, generate and upload the web pairings file, setup the scrolling pairings system, and print result slips. (no paper pairings, though!) Occasionally, this also included determining tables and getting names for random deck checks. Despite this seeming like a good bit of work, it's pretty straightforward and you can go from the last slip to players sitting within 30 seconds. (1-2 minutes if you use paper pairings)

The web system wasn't advertised prior to the event, and the only way someone would've known was through slips at the registration desk. The system wasn't really "known" until Pete Jahn's announcements as head judge, and quickly about 20% of the players looked into and started using it. Throughout the event, the praise for this was nothing short of amazing, and the reaction probably moved it for me from an interesting side-tool of the program to a full-on glaring advertisement avenue. Also, expect to see this very quickly at other events in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and possibly elsewhere.

The event itself actually was pretty uneventful, with the only issue from my end being an incorrectly-placed drop on a result slip that I should've looked into; thankfully, this is among the easier fixes for issues in scorekeeping. Another minor issue shows where my experience with the program, though. When I was entering in a penalty early in the event, I thought that I accidentally added two penalties to one player, and that Reporter wasn't allowing me to undo the problem. Instead of trying to find a fix, I closed the penalties window and opened the file system, opening the back-end text file that holds penalties with the intent of just manually changing that line to fix the issue. The file didn't show two penalties, and the problem was fixed when I reopened the penalties window.

We also used this event to try out another of the random features that this program has, in that it can print match result slips in a more compact and detailed form than in what Reporter produces. I shifted over to this starting in round 3, and it worked perfectly for what we were looking for. It also produced a great example of an issue that you would never think of in the abstract, but becomes quickly apparent when actually using the system. If you have ever cut several pieces of paper on a cut machine, you know that the paper shifts a bit when cutting, and you don't get the exact same place cut between sheets. When I made the slips, I didn't put enough space between pairings to account for this, and it made cutting a much more careful job than it should be. This is an easy fix from a programming standpoint, but also something that you would probably never think of in theory.

The worst problem of the day was simply a combination of bad luck and Wisconsin weather. At the store, there'd been occasional issues with the A/C system. The past couple weeks in southern Wisconsin have been a relatively cold October, hitting freezing in the night and not going past the 50s (10s Celsius) in the day. So, of course, today was 75 and sunny, and the A/C was pretty much dead throughout the day. The saving grace was that another part of the building was open in case we were in the 200-player range, and due to the player count this turned into a cold area for players to head over to between rounds, also benefiting by cooling the main room through fewer players. Also, we just did the entire top-8 in the other part of the building.

Overall, it was nice being on the other side of the event from what I was used to. I'm the kind of person that would rather judge than play, but I'd also rather scorekeep than judge. You stay more in the background, and just keep things going in the event. The downside is that I really am not in touch with the event; for instance, I was wondering why rounds were taking much longer than I thought they should, but since I wasn't on the floor watching matches I didn't see that they were W/U Planeswalker Control mirrors. I watched one match the entire day in any kind of judging capacity, that being one of the semifinals between handing out typing decklists and finishing entering results.