I’ve had situations where I didn’t put in enough entries to use up my credit, and bought the event t-shirt in a prereg packet, so I cashed out my unused credit at the end.
A lot of people work for $10 an hour or less. My day job isn’t THAT much higher, and that’s after several years of raises.
I think having an extra hour for vols is good because they are sacrificing qualifying time so, that extra hour can help make up for it.
One thing score keepers should be informed of is not to stand between games to capture scores. There is usually no reason for them to get closer than the normal spectating position.
I just kept score at a tourney and would approach the player and game when a player was finished and raised their hand. Seemed to work fine.
We had chairs set up behind each game for players “on deck” and kept spectators behind those chairs. It was a good way to keep the playing area clear and to get scorekeepers and TDs quick access when needed. We had 50 players over a 5 hrs with over 600 games played on 10 games during qualifying.
I felt this question is best asked in this thread from last year:
When using the DTM tourney software for your tourneys, how many pins do you expect a scorekeeper to monitor? (pins per scorekeeper metric… for example, if you’ve got 12 pins, and 3 scorekeepers, you’re at 4 pins per scorekeeper)
I want to make sure I don’t have too few (or too many) scorekeepers per time slot to have people volunteer.
That’s the metric I’ve been using, 4 pins per scorekeeper.
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I was gonna say what @kdeangelo said - 4-5 max per person is probably best. I pride myself on trying to keep tournies running efficiently doing things like when taking a score, i pull the player away from the machine and if I know who’s next, give them a nod so they can come up and start playing while the guy who just finished figures out what to queue on next etc. This might only save 5-10 seconds but over a couple days in total that’s probably a few more qualification entries per scorekeeper per shift = bigger pot and more attempts 
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We targeted 4 at INDISC. The main problem we had was machines that do not hold the score in their display and have long attract cycle times. Other than taking a phone photo, which not everyone can do or does, we haven’t yet found a good fix for that. Now if we just had some bright programmer who could come up with a one-software-patch-per-system fix to handle this … I know, but it would save time at tournaments worldwide.
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One solution is to start two player games instead of one player, during qualifying. The player only plays on game one and plunges all but the last ball on the second game. Then let it sit on player two ball 3 (or 5) until score is taken, to avoid attract mode.
I doubt this would be worth the confusion for the player, and might not even be a net time savings, but it’s one alternative for addressing the issue.
Another possibility is rebooting the game to see the score faster. This did not work on Hoops though, fwiw.
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It might not feel like it while waiting through attract mode, but I’m fairly certain waiting for P2’s plunged ball to drain would add to, rather than subtract from, the total time from pressing start to recording score.
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For SS games what I found was useful was just to watch when a player was on ball three and/or listen and learn the drain sound (or the players yelps of anguish) and then get over there quick with my phone out to take a pic of the score as bonus is counted up. This is a lot to do for some ADD scorekeepers though
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Ah, good point.
I can think of some ways to take average of the score cameras that are already there for the streaming, though none of them are that easy. Such as having one scorekeeper for the early SS games like this watching them all on a monitor, taking a screenshot at the end and recording scores. Who verifies that the score was taken before the next game begins? Who calls out for the next player in the queue? I don’t know.
No offense, but I only see chaos coming from this idea… way too many players would forget, and play a “P2” ball… some would err the other way, only starting a 1P game but then plunging their ball 2, thinking it was the voided “P2”… either way, you’re left with unhappy players.
Thankfully, only a few games are truly awful about showing scores at end of game. (But the ones that are bad are REALLY REALLY BAD… I’m looking at you, --Sonic B-- Dr. Who.)
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Oh, I agree that none of the ideas I’ve posted here are worth implementing I’m brainstorming out loud in case it leads anyone to more practical solutions.
In my experience, tournaments with >5 machines per scorekeeper often have folks waiting a long time for scorekeepers to take tickets and give clearance to start. I’ve seen long lines while having 40%+ idle machines which is frustrating for players and scorekeepers alike. This is made much worse when the scorekeeper is also TD, making rulings, clearing stuck balls, etc. 4 per scorekeeper also permits an occasional moment of human interaction between player and scorekeeper which is kind of nice when you’re doing hours of scorekeeping.
Often on this type of game, I’ll leave the match on, then you can listen for the match animation and get ready or the player can use that time to grab the scorekeeper’s attention.
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Saw it posted on another forum of @alwysmooth’s ScoreKeeping Guide he used for Magfest. Very nice! Only thing I might change/add is make #4 into 2.5 (or make it 3 and make 3, #4, but basically insert it after #2). This is for when it’s busy and you want to keep lines going (like the final hours of qualifying 
One thing I do is once I have the score entered - and the player is reviewing to make sure it’s OK and then considering their next game (which can take a bit of time as they peruse the queues, etc.) - I draw them away from the game while they contemplate and look at who’s queued up (often they are lurking nearby) and have them address the machine to get started to keep things moving… then once they figure out what they wanna get into queue for next, I enter that, and having already put the next player on the game, you can click on their name to make it official that they are up on the game (step 4d in the current documentation)
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I totally forgot I had even put this together, lol. I’ll find the original and make the updates you mentioned. Then I need to put it back out here so TDs can use it more effectively.
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