[titlecard] is everyone ready for a sugar rush right before break? If not, too bad you are stuck here anyways! For those of you that don't know me I'm tobi, and I honestly don't know why they're letting me give a talk, but I have been to a few Gps, so maybe that's why. So without further ado Welcome to “how do I GP” Where I talk about a bunch of stuff that may or may not be useful to you if you're thinking about doing GPs [slide in bunny] To provide visual aids will be judge bunny. [accepted image] So, welcome to your first GP! You're accepted, good job. All that cover letter writing paid off. [ok google, plan my trip for me] the first thing you need to know about Gps, and travelling in general is that millenialls have basically solved it. Make sure you have a phone. No seriously this is going to be indispensable, you can literally plan everything about your trip on the internet. [google maps + bunny forest] Also for getting around in the foreign country, province or state google maps is literally the best, it has only led me through a swamp once. [1 slide bring in three images] So how are you getting to the country, state or province your event is in? You could walk if it's close, maybe swim or take a plane, you could also carpool with some other judges, speaking of other judges [bunny texting] What's that buzzing noise? Oh, it's the forums, you were added to an event and your phone has been buzzing non-stop for 20 minutes now as you receive a notification every time someone makes a forum post. Maybe there's a ride sharing thread, [bunny texting irritated] the good news is that there is probably a ride-sharing thread in here somewhere, the bad news is that the other 20 topics in here are about trading boxes and where to eat around the GP [turn off notifications] we can, turn these notifications off, which you will probably want to do if you don't want your phone to be vibrating constantly. Alright so now that that's taken care of, the next thing you might want to think about is where you're going to sleep while you're there. [sleep under main event] No, you cannot sleep under main events stage. [slide in four images five] You could try a hotel, a hostel, a motel or an airbnb if we go back to the forum and sift through all the non essential posts there's probably one about splitting a room with some other judges. [kitty judges on a bed] That might not be a bad idea. I can't really tell you because I'm an antisocial dork. But I've tried everything else. For the others, well, I've rated them personally based on price, cleanliness, location [slide out judges but rate other images] [trophy to airbnb, freddy or jason poking around the back] my personal winner overall has been aibnb, it's been cheap clean, quiet and 0% of my roommates were axe-murderers or convicted felons. That I knew of. [slide in pictures] okay you picked a place. Now how are you getting to the venue? you can either do public transit taxis, uber or lyft. [trophy] Personally Uber/lyft get my stamp of approval, especially if the climate where you are going is not very hospitable. [bunny in hall] alright finally somehow, you got to the hall. Check your schedule. This should tell you what you're doing You got it in your email. Yes it's in there somewhere. If all else fails go to judge apps and check the GP forums. Maybe it says something weird on your schedule, like on-demand events, or scheduled sides, and maybe you don't know what those are. Check the schedule again and find out who your team lead is, you'll need to check in with him when you get on shift so commit his name to memory. [bunny on judge apps] At this point you should realize that you probably don't know anything about your team lead. That's okay. If you plan ahead you can check him out on judge apps and he might have a picture but if you're like me or bunny you don't really like to plan ahead, so I've found a really good way to find people you're looking for at a GP is to ask random judges if they have seen [so and so] eventually someone will either point at them [team lead slide] or you will ask the person you're looking for where you can find the person you're looking for. [thank you slide] They should tell you everything you need to know at that point. Team leads are a deep unending well of information. But that was kind of only 10 minutes and I think David would feel kind of gyped if I ended it here, so let's go over the different area. [flag slide] The first thing you need to know is that the areas are color coded, Red for Odes blue for scheduled sides and black for main event [nicol bolas] this color scheme is because CFBE is secretly run by nicol bolas [ODE slide] we're going to start with ODE's which stands for on-demand events. Like you probably guessed these are launched when enough people become interested in them. But how is this organized? Well that is what you are here to find out. [side events stage throw money] How it works is like this, you will be standing by the registration desk, talking to the person keeping track of on-demand drafts and a player will come up and throw some money at them and demand to be placed in a draft. The person on reg will take the money and give that player a red buzzer. Then the player will wander off to go look at singles or whatever. [bunny running away with buzzers] now if you are at all like me the first thing you probably thought is “wait, can't I just take the buzzer and walk away” and yes, yes you can, for the price of a draft and by forfeiting any future events with CFB you can steal buzzers, [bunny questioning her life choices] But why would you want to what is wrong with you? [buzzer] But what if I don't want to steal buzzers, how do they work? [buzzer buzzing] well, when 8 buzzers have been given out the person at the reg desk the person there will page them, which means they will all start buzzing and if you read the buzzer, you will know what to do. Like with any magic card, reading the buzzer, explains the buzzer. Unfortunately we know as judges that reading palm sized items is not a strong skill for players. [players by flag] Inevitably you will end up with 7 players and 7 buzzing buzzers for your 8 man draft. Asking reg to activate the buzzers again in case the player missed the fact that it was buzzing. If after a minute or two your guy doesn't show up you might need to explore some other options, [bunny stage] one of these options is calling the players name over the microphone. Something you might say is “player name here your draft is about to fire” can anyone tell me what is wrong with this statement? --audience response yes! Saying fire to an auditorium with 2000 people in it is a very bad idea. [not checking facebook] now that you have 8 players and 8 buzzers you need to take out your phone and not check facebook. [kefka not kefnet] You need to go to kefka.io (not to be confused with kefnet). You will find your draft in there. [kitty asking about wwk] You can click on it and it will have all your players names, you'll want to quickly do a roll call to make sure that these are all the correct players. You want to make sure that none of these guys are here for something else like a modern masters draft or whatever. [table layout] so now that you have 8 people all wanting to draft the same thing, where are you going to put them? In the on-demand area instead of individual table numbers, there are letters and numbers associated with 8 man clumps of chairs. A1, A2 etc. a good strategy is to check what is open in kefka, and then check to make sure it's actually open in real life. Then you just key in the table number and your draft will take care of the rest. [bunny addressing the draft] the other cool thing about kefka is it also sets up your matches and seating as well, so just check out the software and tell the players where to sit. Now you're at the easy part. Here you just need to tell them the normal stuff you tell them when setting up a draft. Except for two important things it's single elimination (someone will be upset by this) & to call a judge to report results this is because we do all ODE reporting in kefka. [WER in garbage] we don't use WER for.. reasons [giant tablet] now by this point you're probably thinking, “geez, it sure seems like I need a phone and a data plan to be able to work ODEs!” What if you don't have a phone? What if you don't have data? What if your data costs a billion dollars? this is ok, you can ask to be issued a tablet. The only problem is that these take three arms to wield and weigh 100 lbs. [turbo town image] so that's drafting, but wait, there's something else in the ODE area, this weird thing called turbo town. You (and players) might have questions like What is turbo town? Why is it in my way? Who is the mayor? These are easily answered. Turbo town is like an on-demand constructed event. It's where you pick a format and sit down to play one match (not one game) But how do we play in turbo town? Well that is easily answered! Players will be able to buy turbo town vouchers at any reg desk for $5, then, they'll wander into turbo town and pick a format and sit down in the area for that format. [lock eyes] Eventually another player will wander into turbo town, and they'll lock eyes like in pokemon and call a judge [SB] you'll walk over, have both players present their 15 card sideboards face down [tix] and then drop 40 tix on the table *note tix at your gp may vary 10 for the loser and 30 for the winner. And that's on demands but wait, what if you're not working on demands? What if you're working scheduled sides instead? [blue flag] Scheduled sides scheduled sides are blue because you need to plan and have forethought to play in a scheduled side. Also they are slower. These are pretty easy if you've ever run a magic tournament before. [10 minutes late] Your event will have a scheduled start time and it will start 10 minutes after that time [kickstarter logo] to help you with your event there is a kickstart team for reference this team is totally different than this [kickstart team] they're more like this, they'll be the guys who prepare your product, your promos. they will also probably tell you which scorekeeper is yours and where your starting table number is. Communicate with them and make sure that there is a person assigned to all the activites associated with launching your event. Otherwise a thing won't get done and it will be your fault. [bunny carrying flag] The next thing I need to mention are these giant flages. In on demands the flag was fairly stationary, this is because players will always gather in the same place for a draft. However, the scheduled gathering point moves around, this is because while having 8 people gathering for a draft and then walking 50 feet to a table isn't a big deal, having 200 people gather for a modern event and then walking them 50 feet is a big deal and inevitably you will somehow lose 10 of them. So once you find out your starting table number, move your flag over to that general area. You can actually do this by yourself, it's like a bazillion feet tall but is lighter than you think it is. [bunny under flag] but if you need help ask for it! It is embarrassing to drop the flag and it is even worse if you drop it on players. [bunny actually judging for once] after you launch your event all you have to do is time rounds and be in your area. Moderate matches with time extensions and tell people where to drop off their match slip. Regular tournament stuff. Scheduled sides are comparatively very easy, no weird software, no strange anomalies. Just regular events [Prize tix] sometime during round 3 player will start asking you about prize ticks. This is because all CFB scheduled sides are only 3 rounds, even if you have like 400 people. And standard protocol is that for the last round the players take themselves. Their opponent and their match slip over to the prize tix station where they will be issued there prizes. [prize wall] Wait, but what is a prize tick? What does it do? How do I use it. Well it's affiliated with the commonly overlooked “prize wall” basically you can spend tix here on stuff. There's some cool stuff here, packs, boxes, big cards, regular sized cards, t-shirts. All kinds of stuff. And that's about it for scheduled sides. But what about that giant event over there? The one with all the serious looking players that would be.... main event [slide with different sections, pairings, end of round, slips, product, deck checks, top 8] it's split into a lot of different components. you'll be one one of these teams. You'll have a meeting with your team lead in the morning who will explain everything to you. For the most part it's like taking one part of a regular tournament AND ONLY DOING THAT ONE THING. Like slips. Your regular tournament has like 30 slips so you can have basically one guy doing that and it is totally fine [bunny holding 30 slips] but this tournament has like 3000 slips so having one guy do that is kind of not reasonable. [bunny buried under 3000 slips] we're just going to go everything a little bit. [product bunny] Each GP starts with product/swag team, if it's limited, or Canadian. Basically everyone is on product team during the player meeting because deck check team and coverage team aren't doing anything else during the player meeting. The job of this team is to ensure that all the product gets to all the players, be this packs or promos or mats or what have you. [pairings Team] the next thing that happens at a GP is pairings! team will take care of this. I know this doesn't really sound like a job, but you are still thinking about it like a small tournament, there are multiple pairings boards that all kind of need to be posted to semi-simultaneously. These boards are organized alphabetically by letter ranges. Because 2000 people all clumped around 1 board would be kind of dumb also because of millennials, the pairings are also posted on pairings.channelfireball.com after pairings have been posted and everyone has, for the most part found their seats, it's time to give out the slips! [slips team] if you're on slips team, it's your job to ensure slips get cut in distributed as quickly as possible. Nothing too crazy here. You'll grab the slips out of the printer, give a chunk to each member on your team and distribute away. Next is deck checks! deck checks this team's job is to check decks and organize decklists. At a GP the method of organizing decklists is to have each player write their round 1/player meeting table number on the sheet, these will (hopefully) be collected in order and will be kept in numerical piles at the back. Then when decks are brought back for checking, you can use the players last name to determine where they were sitting in round 1 then you will know where in the piles their stuff is. After that it's a fairly standard deck check. The only difference is that each round your team will be checking anywhere from 5-10 decks. Now throughout the day you'll be doing your thing, slips or papers or whatever, but you will probably also have to take some calls, at a PPTQ your syntax for how to write your infractions is not that important, but at a GP when the scorekeeper is entering hundreds of these things it is pretty essential that everyone is doing it the same way. [syntax] for the most part we want it done like this, with the WALTR slips there are these like.. circles by the players names. Make a mark in one of them to let the scorekeeper know there is something on the back of the slip. Maybe give them a time extension then you want to write your name, the players name, table number, infraction category, subcategory penalty and what happened. sometimes players will not agree with what is happening and will demand to appeal. What is an appeal? [appeal] It's when a player is unhappy or thinks a ruling is incorrect, the procedure here is to run to the nearest red shirt judge and drag them over for an appeal. If you get appealed that is fine. Sometimes players just appeal because they think it will get them the answer they want instead of the right one. Or sometimes you are actually not right and the player knows it. If you do get appealed or issue a detailed infraction, you may need to enter a time extension, like we showed on the slip earlier, it's good practice to write it there, but we also need to enter it into purple fox. You'll go to this url here and click this button, you'll enter the table number and extension in minutes. This becomes super important at end of round. [EOR purple fox zones] so let's look into purple fox some more. The first thing it will do is ask you for a zone, the GP floor will be split into zones, and people will be assigned to various zones. [color coding] Then in the zone you're in, you'll see something that looks like this, it'll show the tables with time extensions, it also codes things by colors, Green means the slip is in and no action needs to be taken, yellow means they're being watched by a judge, and red means there is no one on the match and you should probably go check it out. You can click the boxes to change the color, so when you go to watch that red match, make sure you change it's color to yellow to let the other judges know what's going on! The next team I want to talk about is Floor Features/top 8 this is kind of cool, you get to be in the camera area. This is probably both the most boring and nerve-wracking job, because if you make a mistake the entire internet will see you do it. So be very careful not to make a mistake. Mostly though, you will probably just be helping players keep their permanents on camera and standing there looking important. So, you made it through the event. But you are tired and thirsty for some reason. This is because you forgot to take breaks and drink water. Take breaks and drink water! [Take breaks & drink water] Also if you didn't turn off forum notifications like I told you to, you may notice there is a judge party. Go to the judge party. Seriously. Even if you are like me and have the social skills of a wet blanket inside a paper bag, [wet blanket inside a paper bag] still go, there are awards and will be at least 1 draft. There is also food. [Thank you & Q&A slide] And that is all me and bunny have to teach you this time! I've left lots of time for questions, so if there is anything that is wrong, or that I didn't cover feel free to ask now!