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Report 2007 - Worlds New York - Riccardo Tessitori
Articolo del 9-12-2007 a cura di Tessitori Riccardo
Tessitori Riccardo

Well,

GP Stuttgart took all my energies for a complete week, but Worlds 2007 are still quite fresh in my memory; why not writing a report about what I remember? I promised more reports and Worlds are surely a good opportunity!

Compared to GP Stuttgart, you will read more things about the preparation and about what happens behind the curtain; if you ever wondered why the Pro Tour (or Worlds) is more challenging than a Grand Prix, even if there are less players, continue reading and maybe you will find something new :-).

 

General information and result:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgevent/worlds07/welcome

 

So many people in red and black?

Yes, it’s correct, there were several Head Judges. The official Head Judge was the American Mike Guptil, but each format had its Head Judge:

Standard – Riccardo Tessitori

Draft – Mike Guptil

Legacy – Scott Marshall

2HG Limited – David Vogin

In the last years, only the Team day had a different HJ, while this year there were four! Confusing?

Well, surely unusual, but not confusing; judges had the opportunity to see different styles and probably players didn’t even notice it.

Do you want to know how the formats were assigned?

Well, I admit I would have had great pleasure in opening the event (therefore, I replied to the “favorite format” mail after few seconds), and I started playing just before Apocalypse was released and I crossed my fingers hoping that someone else wanted to do the legacy day (thanks Scott!!!) :-).

 

The preparation

Scheduling the event was a good exercise.

My main role at Worlds was managing the L3 interviews (preparing the interview teams, collecting information about the candidates, collecting feedback from all the L3 about the process);

Mike Guptil assigned all the judges to the different event (side events included, of course), and I had to organize the teams, together with Scott and David; my main goal was to make the tournament schedule work well with the L3 interview schedule (interviewers and candidate in the same team, candidates as team leaders after their written test but before their interview); other easy-to-understand goals were to keep in consideration experience, languages, levels…

 

Scared to death

Do you remember the day you tested? Do you remember your first PTQ as HJ? And when you passed your last test?

If you are human, I expect you were worried, excited, scared…. Even if nobody saw it (I hope), I was scared to death!

I was used to run European GPs, I know most of the European judges who travel to GPs, the European scorekeepers, the European reporters; who was in New York? ALL new people, new scorekeeper, new reporters, even new players, and eighty judges… eighty?? And most of them could say “My little brother, who is 7 years old, speaks English better than you” :-)

I can’t believe it, I’m still alive and I’m very happy about Worlds weekend; it means that we are able to overcome all difficulties and that all judges/friends around us can help us and be a support to us.

 

Stop think, let’s start

Registration is closed and it’s time to start.

Who has never had problems with our beloved DCI reporter V3? :-)

Even at Worlds there may be problems and we started more than half an hour late.

When we were ready, we faced another problem: there were many more players than expected! We usually have many more tables than necessary and, guess what, we had to add tables for other 28 players, for a total of 388!

 

Penalties and DQs

Great news: there were ZERO illegal decklist! I always said that the perfect tournament is when we assign no penalties, because it means that players are very well educated!

I’ve never even had the pleasure to receive this good news, that I had to face the first DQ of the day: after the end of game 1, a player took a paper out from his pocket and read how to sideboard for that match-up; sad but necessary, that player had no chance to continue his adventure at the main event, because all players are expected to know rules and procedures and, even if it was clear that he thought it was legal (he really took a folded paper from his pocket and calmly unfolded it in front of his opponent), the DQ was the only choice. He immediately understood and felt very sad for not knowing it.

After some rounds, there was another DQ: a player was seen looking at the top card of his library while thinking about taking a mulligan or not (and, even if we see players doing this before taking a mulligan, this player decided to keep!).

Luckily, there were no other DQs for all the rest of the weekend.

 

L3 interviews and advancement

Friday and Saturday I spent a lot of time in L3 interviews; almost all the L3 who attended Worlds were involved in L3 interviews (the most expert as interviewers, and the new as observers), because getting to L3 is not the final stop of our judging activity; there are always new aspects of the Judge Program we can be involved in.

Congratulations to four new L3: Erik Mock, Eugene Bazhenov, Jared Sylva and Jeff Morrow.

 

What happened in the Top8?

Sunday, Top8, time to wear again the red and black shirt.

There were two interesting situations:

One is just about playing; if you didn’t see it or nobody told you about it, download the video of the semifinal between Chapin and Nassif, and look at the end of Game 4; the public went really crazy!

The other is about judging; after the first game of the final (Patrick Chapin, with a dragonstorm deck, against Uri Peleg, with a green-black aggro and with a lot of hand disruption), Chapin called me and asked something like “Can I make one of my cards fall on the table while I shuffle, so that my opponent sees it?”. Peleg had Stupor in his deck, and Chapin had Dodecapod in his sideboard; I imagined he wanted Peleg to know that he sideboarded the Dodecapods in, to make Peleg not to play cards like Stupor (do you agree with me that the worst enemy of a storm deck is hand disruption?). I told him that he shouldn’t commit an infraction intentionally; he could even reveal cards while sideboarding, but it wasn’t good to do it while shuffling in-game. At the end, I feel he decided not to do anything.

 

Special (short) notes:

There were 82 judges (4 L5, 3 L4, 22 L3, 35 L2, 15 L1, and 3 L0)

This year Japan won “only” the Pro Player of the Year and the Rookie of the Year race.

The current World champion, Uri Peleg, comes from Israel; Israel has around 500 players in total.

In Valencia it rained 24 hours, in New York it was so cold! I think we agree that it’s time to organize PT Bahamas or PT Seychelles… and this is my final ruling!

 

I hope you enjoyed this report and I hope this tales will help you in your future events.

To help me writing better reports or to discuss any interesting details, please send any comments on this list or to me privately (riccardotex@virgilio.it), as you wish.

 

Riccardo Tessitori