Originally posted by Mart Leuvering:

If the event were Sealed Deck, how would you handle someone who ripped open his boosters prematurely?

Ask him to put his cards face down until the time started.

If the event is Sealed Deck with a deck swap, I don't mind at all players opening and sorting the cards early.

Emilien - surely not at Competitive REL? Chances are you're announcing some things while product and lists are being handed out - players opening boosters prematurely means that they're not listening to you, and gaining more time than others to perform the registration step.

Originally posted by Jack Doyle:

Emilien - surely not at Competitive REL? Chances are you're announcing some things while product and lists are being handed out - players opening boosters prematurely means that they're not listening to you, and gaining more time than others to perform the registration step.

When there is a deck swap, what advantage to players get by opening their boosters and starting registration early?

The players who are opening their boosters early were probably already not listening to you, which is how this situation arose in the first place ;)

Fair. The only thing I'd be worried about is the cascade effect of one guy opening his boosters causes the rest of the table to start doing it - but you're not exactly wrong that those players are more than likely not listening anyway.

Neither player meeting nor pool registration and deck swap are fun, so I try to keep them as short as possible so we can move quickly to the exciting parts of the event. That also means that I try to break my player meeting into small parts, each of them contening only the informations needed to proceed to the next part of the event.

For example, people don't need to know the number of players, or rounds, or how I expect ingame communication to be held or latests IPG upgraded before cracking open their packs: they just need to know venue rules, plus how to sort, register and check, which should take 30s, so I usualy instruct my team to don't distribute packs before I finish. Then, as soon as a player get the product, I'm fine with him opening and sorting: he's actualy saving us time.

The rest of the annoucements could take place partialy before deck building, and the remaining part before the start of round one.