Good morning to everybody,
in two months, there will be Grand Prix Beijing, which will be the *first Team Sealed event* in Asia (outside Japan).
It will be the first of this type for most of the judges and also for a huge percentage of the players.
As this is a worldwide forum, I believe that many of you have participated to a team sealed event (a local event or a GP).
We are trying to assist the judges and the players far in advance, so that they can have the best experience possible, and I would like to ask for your help too; I would like to ask for it in a way that looks to me different from usual.
It would be great if you could just dedicate a minute and reply with a couple of pieces of advice (no need to “waste” time in reading the previous comments if you don’t want to, looking if anybody has already given the same piece of advice you want to give; just write it; if it’s a duplicate, it means it’s important); we will then sort them out and put them orderly in a document to distribute.

I’ll start:
For players: pools will be registered on a single team decklist; individual decks will be registered on three individual decklists; cards have to be assigned to individual sideboards (sideboards aren’t shared).
For judges and players: whoever finishes his match can move his chair to watch other matches, but should pay attention to avoid standing too high or going to the other side of the playing table, otherwise he becomes a spectator and cannot help his teammates any more.
For judges: players of a team are identified A, B and C; you can post signs “A”, “B” and “C” every two playing tables, to help players find their correct chair and opponent (this is when table numbers are per team).

Thank you for helping Grand Prix Beijing to be a better weekend for your friends who will judge and play there!

Riccardo

Match slips are by team (3 players), but pairings can be printed by either by player or by match. Know what you are posting where, when, and how so you can eliminate traffic and get players to their seats in as efficient a manner as possible.

1. Teams usually forget who player A, B and C are during the first round and can be solved by looking at the result slips. 

2. Once two players from the same team have won their matches, the result of the third match is irrelevant. 

3. Table rows for deck building and matches need to be in multiples of three so that we don't split team matches and also teams during deck building. 

4. Slow play seems to happen more when two matches are finished and the third match is the decider and all the teammates want to talk over every move that player makes. 

4. Each team member has individual sideboards which are not shared with the other team members. 

5. Once a team member who has finished a match leaves the play area, they should not be allowed back to confer with their teams. 





These are things I can remember off hand. 




Sashi C Loco (Emcee/Host/BroadcastDJ/HipHopArtiste)

On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 7:00 PM, Nicola DiPasquale
<forum-20735-fa92@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:

During deck build, players rearrange to sit in an “L” - one team uses the “A” seats, the other team uses the “C” seats (and one person on each team in a “B” seat).
Players in that B seat often want to pull their chair around the end; it can be a hazard to people walking by, if you don't have huge aisles.

Teams get to talk to each other and give “outside assistance” - but please do so quickly, so you still play the matches in time.

I will second what was said about pairings, they will confuse players. Look at the seatings, then at round one pairings, make sure the judges are ready to explain these BEFORE they are posted. (Hopefully round two, etc., will look the same as round one!)
I'd do the same thing with the first set of result slips - teach judges how they work, players will ask.

d:^D

Slow play: giving brief advice to a teammate is fine. Having a discussion
is not.

Pay attention to your team's A-B-C seat assignments when you sign up - once
the tournament starts, you can't change them.

Have the player with the card pool stand up during deck swap. It makes the
swap go much more smoothly.

When you're investigating what's happening, you've got four more players than usual paying attention to the game, so you've got more resources to discover what went wrong (or keep things from going wrong).

Make sure you note which match (of an UberMatch) is receiving a time extension on the slip - it doesn't apply to the whole table.

Player first names won't be on the slip, so get their name if you need to write up a penalty. Yes, if you forget, it'll be on the really contentious one like slow play or USC minor.

In Florence we offered product in two languages (Italian and English) and for the swap we made all the Italian-product teams move to another area of the hall so they wouldn't get mixed up. Is this going to be an issue in Bejing with Chinese/English product?

If you're going to offer a choice of language, it's better to seat the players separately. Otherwise you will have gaps in the tables which will make deck swapping tricky.

Make sure players know that if they see an error made by one of their team mates they still have to point it out and call a judge.
For judges: be especially vigilant at the beginning of the round or whenever a player in seat B or C shuffles an opponents deck. Sadly it often happens that seat A and B can see the bottom cards of the library and try to abuse that. (we had several investigations regarding this - a few of them with bad outcomes - in Florence)

Edited Christian Genz (Aug. 25, 2015 03:39:17 PM)

As the HJ, if you ever want to call all team leaders, use a different word for that. We once called “all judge team leaders come to the main stage” for a meeting and suddenly a third of the room stood up and started walking towards the stage. They thought “team leader” was something like “team captain”, which was something like “player A”…

We used “judge leaders” aftewards. :P

Hello to everybody,
last weekend, GP Beijing took place, we applied all your advice, and it has been a very smooth event, much smoother than any of us could expect.
I would like to thank you for all your advice, it has been useful for us :)

Riccardo