First post here, so hopefully this is an appropriate topic, and placed in the appropriate forum!

I'd like to present a situation that happened to me last friday night. It is my hope that we can discuss the mistake I made and the potential fixes for it. I'm not here to present myself for judgement— I've already learned my lesson, and a careless error like this will not happen again. I more want to provide myself as an example to other judges (especially L0's and L1's like myself whomay face a situation like this), and give us an opportunity to learn how to handle the fallout of a situation like this.

Here we go:

It's Friday night, the last round of Draft night at the local shop, and you're the store judge. Since the regulars want to avoid byes, and there were an uneven number of players tonight, you are playing. As you're playing your match, you hear a snippet of conversation from the match next to you. They seem to be confused about a card.

You look over and see that Alex has cast Tromokratis, and is trying to explain the finer points of its blocking restriction to Nick. You know both players are smart, skilled players who should pick up on the subtleties of the card fairly easily, so you offer the line, “The words that are missing from that card are ‘if able’”. It's a line you've used a hundred times before to explain Tromokratis, though you are usually more careful to clarify what you mean.

The players say “thanks, judge”, and you turn back to your match. A few minutes later, you hear Nick say “well, I would have played my turn completely differently if I knew it worked like that!”. You pause your match, and to your horror, discover that your careless offering of advice resulted in Nick misinterpereting the card, tapping some of his creatures during his turn and losing the game (and the match).

Ooops. You messed this one up. You messed it up big-time. What do you say to the players? How do you fix the situation?


___________________

I'll explain how I handled the mistake, as well as what lessons I learned from it, but I'd like to see some discussion occur first. Think of this as a Knowledge Pool thread; the “Answer” will come later.


Edit: just noticed that Judgeapps has me as an L0. For clarity's sake, I'm L1. Now looking in to getting that corrected.

Edited Tara Wright (May 8, 2014 11:26:15 AM)

I don’t think there is much we could do to fix it other than apologize.

A line I have used in the past is “everyone makes mistakes, because of our role in the tournament our mistakes can affect players”. Usually players understand that and accept it.

Oh, apologize was the first thing I did. And the second. And third. And then again, as they were leaving at the end of the night.

I think the term “profusely” may be an understatement in regards to how much I apologized.

I guess I'm not clear on what went wrong here. Nick misunderstood the card's mechanics, and it cost him the game - this sounds like a pretty standard outcome of a player reaping the effects of their level of rules knowledge.

Nick did not understand. Instead of providing a full explanation of the card, I offered a quick line that was misinterpreted. He believed I was saying that it must be blocked by all creatures able to block it, and that the phase “if able” was assumed to be on the card.

This is of course incorrect— if any creature is unable to block for any reason, Tromokratis can't be blocked at all. However, the issue is not that he misinterpreted the card, but that a poorly-thought-out remark from the judge caused him to do so.

While we certainly allow players to make mistakes, do we also allow them to suffer for ours?

Originally posted by David Wright:

While we certainly allow players to make mistakes, do we also allow them to suffer for ours?

Yes. Judges punt rulings all the time. We work hard to minimize those occurrences, but they happen. Sometimes we catch them, sometimes we don't. If we do, we apologize and correct ourselves. A great majority of the time, the player will understand the first time, and seeing you take the effort to make the correction in the first place lets them know that you care about their positive experience.

But please don't fall over yourself apologizing to a player for making a mistake. You're there to help the players, and you want them to keep coming to you for help. In the rare cases where a player is upset by a ruling or a rules explanation (even an offhand one), repeated apologizing isn't likely to get you on their good side; when the player is satisfied with your first apology, repeated successive ones are more likely to get them annoyed. Customer service is important, but so is your perception as someone players can come to with problems. You won't ever stop making mistakes completely, but the more you work at it, the better you'll get - keep that confidence in your front pocket.

From the response of the injured party, it seems like they responded with “I would have done something different”, which is much better than “that stupid judge told me incorrectly.”

It doesn't seem like they took it personally, so an apology for not being clearer nor asking that they understand should be enough. If it were to cause a rift in your community's perception of how you help them, that should be addressed, but it doesn't sound like that occurred.

Lesson learned!

Lesson learned indeed.

Aaron, you bring up a good point. I may have exaggerated slightly for comedic effect earlier in the thread. I certainly apologized, and expressed embarrasment and regret, but I didn't grovel for forgiveness. I did fairly quickly take command of the situation, offering a fix that both parties felt okay with, and at the end of the day (as Evan guessed), my reputation is safe.

We can get into what that fix was if people are interested, but it seems like there just isn't all that much to talk about here. You guys are right— judges make mistakes, like any other human being. Most of the time, the other humans around you will understand this, and as long as you aren't a jerk or a simpering wimp about your error, there won't be any trouble.


Lesson learned: never casually do anything when you're on the clock. When you say something official, be official with it; don't just make offhand remarks.

Lesson learned: You will make mistakes. I've made them before, but this is one that stuck with me. When you do seriously punt a call, just take a deep breath, straighten up and deal with it. It's not the end of the world.

Hopefully someone else learned from reading about this experience.

Edited Tara Wright (May 8, 2014 05:45:03 PM)

Don't worry, these things happen :) Just apologize, and lesson learned :) And you should realize that playing-and-judging it's more difficult than judging, and that situations are more likely. You give short, or not technically accurate, or even incorrect answers, because you're deeply thinking in your own game. I've done this a few times, also with terrific results (one player losing the game because of my wrong ruling). As you can see, more or less, EVERY judge makes mistakes sometimes :)