Hello to everybody,
here you have an article about On Demand Events: Floor Management.
I hope it will be a useful read for your tournaments and for you in general.

Comments, feedback, requests (about the specific article or about the blog in general) are very welcome :)

Riccardo

Thanks for the blog post Riccardo.

The method with the lands seems really well structured, but I can imagine that you end up using a ton of man-power just to update it and move players such that you collapse two tournaments going into their semis, or 4 going into finals etc. How much work goes into that process? How much do you feel it is worth to have that clear overview of all ODEs in one location vs the man hours it takes to keep it updated?

You absolutely need some kind of map, Jonas.

The big deal is that on Saturday morning of a GP, you may get 95%+
utilization of your floor space. GP Indy this year had 98% utilization
give or take. GP OKC last year had 102%, which was, uh, not good until we
dropped some extra tables. The only way to manage that kind of tight space
is with good map management.

If you don't manage the space correctly, you end up either dropping events
on top of each other, waiting for events to clear when you could have
combined them, or waiting on ODEs to finish that you don't know have
finished, causing your events to back up in the firing area.

The judge-hours used for this fundamentally don't matter - player time is
costly to spend, judge time is not costly, from a customer service
perspective. So I'd rather actually burn 1-2 judges doing stuff like this,
all day, if it means that events fire even only slightly faster or better
handled.

Also, there is a digital management map tool that Joe Hughto and some
others have been working on which we have been using at some US GPs that
makes this kind of management faster - come stop by at a Pastimes event and
I can show it to you.


—
Rob McKenzie
Magic Judge Level III
Judge Regional Coordinator USA-North
Minnesota

I have to disagree there Rob (and I'm sure Anniek could share her opinion on this too).

While a map can certainly be useful, it by no means is the only way to do space management, and it is space management you need, not map management. I myself have never really liked using maps (even though I have seen others using them to good effect), and much prefer appointed floor managers that show runners where to bring the players, and who can be on the floor to move players around and to clear space where needed. I find them to be even more efficiënt at wizarding up space that you didn't know was there, because they are at the place where the magic happens, instead of at the stage.

Where I do like maps is in halls where the layout for ODE's is spread out (some tournaments in this row, some in the one at the back and some in the other hall), because you can't have someone (or two) overlooking the area, but in the cases where the tournaments are clustered together, my preference goes to a floor manager.

Cheers,

Jona

Space managers have a map - it's in their heads. I've done it both ways,
including at GenCon, which is all smaller events. The way to know what is
going on is to sample data, and deal with that data in some fashion. You
either need a model of the space in the real world, or in your internal
world. For smaller events, relying on the brain of one person is fine.

The advantage an external map has is that more than one person can see it
at once, and handoffs are smoother, so you can have someone else take over
when you take a break. Multiple people being able to both see and work on
that floor model is fantastic, and makes larger events functional as we
scale up.

This is not about “wizarding up space” - proper proactive space management
is about the opposite of wizarding up space, it is about anticipating where
you will have space in the future and making the process for handling that
space smooth.

A map massively decreases the amount of experience and skill you need to
manage a tight space. It is a tool that allows you to drop the skill floor
for this kind of thing much lower, which means you don't need to rely on
specific people as much. It also means you can break up the workload among
multiple people easily.

It's not “necessary”, but neither is WER - a truly skilled scorekeeper can
run the majority of events on notecards and be fine. The floor for
scorekeepers is much lower with a dedicated tool for managing event
scorekeeping. This is similar.

And note that I'm the kind of person that argues against change or tools
for the sake of change or tools - having floor maps is a powerful tool that
brings direct value to larger events.


—
Rob McKenzie
Magic Judge Level III
Judge Regional Coordinator USA-North
Minnesota

As Jona predicted, I have an opinion about the map.

In my experience, the overhead it takes to keep it up to date is not worth it. As you say, Rob, a floor manager has a map in their head. I wouldn't say it takes more skill to manage space that way, (almost) all judges are equipped with a pair of eyes that can spot empty spaces. The handoff, similarly, is not complex. I'd even dare say that telling someone ‘we’ve got space here, here, and here' is easier than pointing at a map and saying ‘so this is the judge station, we’ve numbered the tables like this, then we have some space in this row, which is over there, etc'.

And I think you might be mistaken about scaling up, as the scale increases, the difficulty of keeping the map accurate increases exponentially. I was in charge of ODE at last year's humongous GP Utrecht (the modern masters one). There were 3 scorekeeper stations firing events at once, and a constant line of people handing in finished events. If they all had to go through a central mapkeeping point, it would have taken at least 3 judges off the floor. That, and sending runners to a specific table in a very large area would be very prone to error. We ran it without a map, it went smoothly.

For further deliberation on why I think mapless is the way to go, here's a thing I wrote a year ago: http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/22897/

Edited Anniek Van der Peijl (Oct. 3, 2016 07:36:38 PM)

If you believe the skill floor is low, would you assign an unknown-to-you
L2 to be floor space manager at a GP with minimial training (15 minutes or
less at the start of the day), or would you expect them to need significant
experience to be able to know how things work in order to do the job?

I believe that with a map, I can have someone I did not know at the start
of the day managing floor space in less than 15 minutes, and be reasonably
comfortable with them doing so without them being likely to blow things
up. Without a map, this gives me the creeping heebie-jeebies, because
there is a lot of room for failure in really impressive ways, especially if
ODEs and scheduled events are operating in a tight and shared space. (This
happens at some US events in smaller halls here, it may not happen that
much in Europe. I genuinely don't know.)

With proper management of workflow, you don't need things to be backed up
on event management, especially for ODEs. You just assign each event a
space from a queue of available space as it comes out. Using a digital map
that multiple people can edit, this is even easier. (See above comment
about the work Joe has been doing.)

Note that I am coming at this from the perspective of more than just ODEs -
I care a lot about maximizing space for scheduled events and avoiding
delays in their start times. I want to know when to stop firing events
because space will very shortly be full, and I want to know when I can
start those back up again.

ODEs and scheduled events should optimally both be looking at the same kind
of map, so that someone who wants to know what is going on where can find
out in order to make these decisions.

And this mostly is irrelevant on Fridays and Sundays, note. The reason to
keep with a map on Friday and Sunday is more about consistency than about
needing the system all three days of a GP. On Fridays and Sundays, you can
assign space largely randomly and not have issues with collisions at many
events. You need either good planning or a high-skill individual to
maximize space on Saturdays, especially early in the day. (This is from my
US experience, other events in different areas may have wildly different
things going on.)

—
Rob McKenzie
Magic Judge Level III
Judge Regional Coordinator USA-North
Minnesota

On Oct 3, 2016 12:17 PM, “Anniek Van der Peijl” <

Originally posted by Rob McKenzie:

If you believe the skill floor is low, would you assign an unknown-to-you
L2 to be floor space manager at a GP with minimial training (15 minutes or
less at the start of the day), or would you expect them to need significant
experience to be able to know how things work in order to do the job?

I would. What they need to know is:
- What tables are our area
- When you see a runner coming in, guide them to an empty spot
- Let me know if you think we will run out of space in the next 15 minutes.
- If space is potentially an issue (i.e. it's saturday): keep the events squeezed as much as possible towards this end* of our area and be proactive about squeezing events together if you need to.

You talk about knowing when to stop firing, that's something we try to avoid at all costs (it's a very bad experience for the players, and it creates a backlog of waiting events as registration continues). If space is about to run out, I get in touch with the sides manager to ask for more.

I think a map is valuable for overall side event management, where you have a number of scheduled events where you can make some predictions about their size and allocate space accordingly. But for ODE, it's more driven by the printer (spitting out brackets) and claiming or releasing space depending on how the day goes. So I think for the sides lead, they just want to know which area is ODE and which is for other events. We can do business about relinquishing some of that space if they need it and we have it.

*this end being the opposite of the end that other side events will want in the case that they need an emergency space expansion.

Edited Anniek Van der Peijl (Oct. 3, 2016 08:05:14 PM)

I'm happy to see that the article generated some conversations, and I hope that they will be useful to many.

I have just one request to the most active writers: please pay attention not to end up in a debate to determine if it's better to use a map or not.
I work better with a map, Anniek works better without; each of us has a different brain and therefore different favorite methods of working.

I would discuss the different aspects of the different methods, so to understand the strenghts of both (or more, if there are more than two), but I would do my best to refrain from saying or strongly implying that, taking just me and Anniek as the two people talking, “my system is better than Anniek's”, because
- first, it would be wrong; my system is better for me, and her system is better for her, so both are actually “better”
- second, it would be very unkind and pretentious to say that the other person's system is “wrong”

Quoting the article:
“Like for all tournament operations, *each person may have a different preference*; today, I am going to describe the “Floor Map”, which is a system…”

Thank you :)

Riccardo

Hi all,

I've seen both the map with Nicolette and without with Anniek and I think the map system Nicolette used in Sydney was better, to be honest.

She might chime in with more details but the differences were mostly:

- The basic lands were put into 9-pocket pages: it was a lot safer because a judge couldn't just pass by and remove a few table with a bad gesture or with the wind and it allowed for a more ordered and space optimized system

- Empty spaces were…. Empty (duh!). I don't really see the point of having Forest were you could have just void to show that space is available but it is just my view of things

- Each basic land was a different type of event (Limited, standard, modern, legacy, 2HG) and we would write the number of the event on it while putting it in a pocket. We would therefore know exactly what tournament was going on and where (it did happen that we were asked a few times “where is legacy 5?” and it really help to just point him to the correct table.

Now about map or mapless:
I've thought a lot about it and I think the main reason why we couldn't really use it currently in Europe is because judges are handling the prices payout of ODEs. As Anniek pointed out in her article, we already have a grid with all the prices of all events in it. Thus we already know the state of all event just by looking at the prices still left in the grid. having the floor manager so far removed from the floor (because of the price handling) makes it suboptimal.

The map has the advantage that it is very portable and could be placed in the middle of the ODE area to ensure quick reaction. I could actually see a possibility of having the floor manager use it in the middle of his tables to have a better way of handing the whole floor management to someone else when he goes on break. Having the whole plan in his head is difficult to hand over (well, it's more messy than difficult and the result are not always in line with expectations).

Greets
Jeremie

Thanks for all the responses. I can feel like I have stepped into a discussion that has been ongoing for some time.

I guess the core of my question is how the continous updates of the map affects the functionality of the map. I'm not trying to argue if a map is necessary but what the consequences of a map might be.

One thing is knowing at what table range a draft will be, but when space is needed if makes it a necessity to squeeze tournaments together as they get smaller, especially from 8->4 players. All of these moves must be updated at the map. If all these moves are requested by the ODE Manager then he/she needs a very accurate map which means always update when rounds end and then update when we make a move which could be 50+ times every hour.

Is there not a risk that the map won't be accurate and that the map could be a bottleneck for judges trying to update it/find space for new events?