Managed to put 15 hours into a tournament last night. 4 of which was playing in the tournament. Still managed to win. I call that a fluke. Most of the time end up in doing well in early rounds and then hitting the exhaustion wall.
What about competitions where there is no prior practice? In mind were the competitions at Arcade Expo: The machines are off-limits until a competition begins, and they ran on a three-strikes format, meaning the only people who couldāve played on it prior were people who helped set up the events. I donāt know if they did or not though.
I can say the same goes for the PokĆ©mon Trading Card Game too. Iāve read the list of rulings for unclear circumstances (it was about 150,000 characters back in 2008; itās probably much bigger now) and Iāve taken the test to be a judge, which I barely didnāt pass, though I didnāt really care to be a judge.
There was a lot of crooked activity back during those years when I competed in the competitions too. Players got their friends inducted as judges, and said judges would wander up and down the aisles and report to the competitors between rounds as to what decks everyone was using and sometimes sneaking information about playersā hands mid-match. And, of course, they could always rule in favor of the people they knew.
I think Iāve mentioned this on some other topics, but itās part of why I canāt really trust people who work for an event to play in it. Not necessarily the tournament directors, but more the lower-level volunteers who donāt necessarily spend the previous night setting everything up.
This is why I like PAPA. If you volunteer, you cannot be put in the same bank as you are playing (and maybe one higher). I did all of my volunteer hours in A last year, and while I could say āthat IJ is a malicious beast straight from the bowels of Hell,ā I still need an official TD to make any decisions on my behalf. They have multiple failsafes in mind to try to prevent this from occurring.
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