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The GP was over on the way back to my room I ran into someone in the lobby I’d known for the long-long-ago.  I pulled up a chair to talk and we started talking with the people waiting for elevators and picked up a few stories:

  1. The guy who got 2nd at the 300+ person PTQ had gotten second at a PTQ less than a week ago.
  2. A fellow got DQed from the GP after making a poor comment.  He was a prolific better willing to throw 10 bucks on about anything (he put 10 dollars on Obama being gay and another 10 on man getting to Mars by 2015).  In this case he bet 10 bucks he’d make it to the top 8 and after getting into the quarter finals a friend said “I guess you won the bet”, his opponent reported this as wagering and the player was DQed.
  3. Someone came by saying that his friend’s car tires were slashed after his friend got someone DQed from the GP.
  4. A judge who was stone-faced about something he’d said that prevented him from getting L2.
  5. Someone was drunk and trying to push the elevator button.  He missed a few times and yelled “judge!”, I replied and he said “YOU PEOPLE ARE EVERYWHERE”.

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The current judge shirts aren’t available in my size and when I asked why the response was “they were made in Europe”.  So, on the way to Columbus I stopped by my mother’s house who’d volunteered to sew the appropriate patches in place.  I received my patched shirt and drove to Delaware to pick up my co-pilot.  The ride started out dull enough until we got to Lancaster whereby the driving became “old timey” and we were passed by horse-drawn wagons.  I’m still not sure why, but there was a section where everyone seemed to be driving on the shoulder with the center two lanes being entirely clear of traffic.  We again hit traffic in New Stanton and made it to Columbus two hours after my target time.

I went to the event venue to meet my room mate, gave him a key, and went to bed happy in the fact that my last-minute arrangement would cut the price of my stay in half.  These feeling ended when I discovered my room mate snored liked a buzz saw.  Normally this is just hyperbole but I’ve never encountered someone who was able to have a single snore extend for such time.  As an experiment, I synced my breathing with my room mate and his snore nearly outdid my breath.  The sound had that timbre that pops up when something is slowed down; maybe this was the snoring equivalent of whalesong.  I only got about 4 hours of sleep but added a new To Do item: get earplugs.

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This weekend will hold GP: Columbus at the Greater Columbus Convention Center.  GPs (short for Grand Prix) are large Magic: The Gathering tournaments open to the public which often have days of play in excess of 10 hours.  These events span two days and require dozens of judges to run, additionally, these are days largely consisting of walking and standing.  I’ve done six or seven such things before and while I’d call them neither awesome nor horrible I wouldn’t consider them “fun” in the traditional sense as I could achieve more joy through most other endeavors.   GPs help me keep contact with other judges, sharpen my skills, interact with players at a different scale, and let me see how other organizers run events and this learning easily justifies the time.

A few weeks ago, introductory notes started going out about who the judges were and in reading them I found two patterns.  New judges said things like “I look forward to having fun” and experienced judges focused on things like “I like knitting”.  Another common thread was new judges seemed to hope the event would break a size record, some of the more experienced ones simply hoped it broke the 1400 person barrier for the judge compensation to increase.