Hi all,
You are right; I was not at PT Berlin.
There were no Italian judges in Berlin (but we had a few spies infiltrated… the SK Federico Calò and the HJ Sheldon Menery ^__^) and today I will tell you where we have been.
What is “My PT Berlin”?
The biggest Games Convention in Italy always takes place on the weekend of November, the 1st and is located in Lucca, a very nice town in Toscana.
Here you can find a few information about the Convention (there are several pages translated to English):
http://www.luccacomicsandgames.com/page.php?page=103
What kind of tournaments are there? How big is this Convention?
It was a long weekend of tournaments.
Thursday and Friday were very rainy and not many people dared to swim to Lucca.
48 people participated to a Sealed Deck trial; 11 teams participated to the “Boys and Girls” Two-Headed Giant (a tournament that admits only teams made of a men and a woman and has a price of “weekend for two people in a beauty farm” ^__^) and only 20 people participated in the traditional Halloween Mono-black Legacy tournament.
Saturday and Sunday were very sunny and we had the two main tournaments:
Vintage (a kind of National Championship), with 139 players
Junior (the National final), with 34 players
The scene was completed by 94 8men tournament, for a total of 612 unique players.
Magic was just a droplet in the ocean: the Games Convention had an impressive number of visitors: 130,000 ! ! !
A little work
The most interesting aspect of judging in Lucca was the small amount of tables, compared to the high number of players wanting to play 8men tournaments.
The most important role was the “Tetris-judge”, a person who had the responsibility to move players to find free tables for new events; most of the tables were able to sit 8 players, most of the tournaments were drafts and most of the time there were 8 people waiting for a free table.
Not moving any player would bring to a huge loss of space for new players; here comes the Tetris-Judge!
If you haven’t heard the name before, here you can discover what Tetris is:
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And a lot of fun
The recipe is simple: old good friends, new friends, games, restaurants, a common passion… a great weekend is guaranteed!
If you want to see more about Lucca (and PT Berlin, too!), just search on Facebook for photos and videos; you will find plenty of people who share your passion for Magic and enjoyable weekends.
Special for Italian speakers: if you want to see the goliardic version of most of “those serious judges”, search for Simone Zanella (zizzu79) videos on YouTube (just write the non existing Italian word for Facebook: “faccialibro”) and enjoy it.
New judges here and there… and a quite weird L2 test
Congratulations to the new judges (Fabio Vegnuti and Nico Bohny) and to the judges who advanced this weekend (new L3 Jurgen Baert; new L2 David Lyford-Smith and Matteo Callegari).
Now, it’s time to describe what Matteo Callegari found in his L2 practice test:
In the last 6-12 months, Matteo has been a reference for rules and policy on several forums, travelled to a dozen of PTQs, prepared summaries of judges mailing list, brilliantly passed the written test… and then approached the tournament he was about to HJ, a small GP trial with 48 players and with an impressive staff of 1 L4, 4 L3, and other L2 and L1… nothing could go wrong with a staff like this!!!
Deck swap: the judges weren’t fully briefed on how to perform the deck swap and accidentally waited for the HJ to react.
Deck construction: the judges put the box with lands on one table, the HJ requested to “put lands into piles”, meaning to “sort lands and put them into piles”, and the judges accidentally just put lands into piles and looked smilingly at the HJ.
Round 1 - Decklist counting: a few times, the judges accidentally counted 39 where there were 40 and weren’t able to recognize many numbers.
Round 2 – Decklist penalties: the HJ instructed on how to check for illegal decklists and how communicate penalties to the players and to write “Game loss” on the result entry slip; at the end of the round, the SK showed to the HJ that on the results entry slips it was accidentally just marked “Game Loss”.
Round 3 – Lunch time: the HJ had to run after all the judges who accidentally left him alone, going away for lunch.
Round 4 – Clock problem: the clock accidentally stopped working.
Round 5 – Drop: a player at table 2 was accidentally dropped by the SK.
Round 6 – Disagreement: at table 1, both players started arguing and accusing each other because of a misunderstanding during the last game; the judges were accidentally smiling and waiting for the HJ to solve the dispute.
Please note that every line contains the word “accidentally”; nothing was planned, not even the dispute in the last round… if you are testing for L2 and you have a total higher than 20 levels in your staff, there’s nothing to worry about ^____^
Congratulations to Matteo Callegari, who brilliantly passed his L2 test… and this is my final ruling!
Riccardo Tessitori
