What are the most important skills for being a judge? Rules knowledge is the first thing I think of. You can’t adjudicate a game situation if you don’t understand what the cards do or how the rules work. If you’re going to judge competitive events you also need to have knowledge and understanding of the policy documents, how tournament rules and penalties work. Then there are the so-called soft skills like leadership, teamwork and customer service. The ability to be in charge without appearing to bossy or overbearing. These are the skills a judge needs if he wants to keep it fun and to keep it fair in today’s Magic tournament environment.

What about when you make a mistake as a judge? It’s a good idea to study the rules and policy documents regularly and to play and judge the game regularly to keep yourself sharp, but can you make yourself mistake proof? Logic indicates that it is not possible to be perfect. But you and I don’t need to rely on logic, we know this is true because we have judged Magic tournaments and made mistakes while judging. It’s obviously true that judges commit errors in adjudication, in application of penalties, in just every possible dimension of our jobs as judges. Hey you with the pretty face! Welcome to the human race.

As important as it is to strive to not mistakes, it is just as important to know how to deal with mistakes when they happen. A mistake is never the end of the world. This is the most important thing to know about mistakes any almost any walk of life. If you are afraid to make mistakes you will never allow yourself the freedom to be really good at judging or anything else.

In Magic tournaments, the “best” mistakes are the ones that are easily fixed and have no pronounced impact on the event. A match result is entered incorrectly by the scorekeeper but noticed immediately by one of the players affected before the next round actually begins. Maybe one of the players notices that his match points are incorrectly displayed on the printed pairings. In this case, the scorekeeper has made a mistake but because the problem has been noticed quickly enough, the scores for the match in question can be corrected and in most cases, the players affected can be manually repaired without requiring the entire tournament to grind to a halt for a complete repair. Another very small and easy to fix mistake happens when a player asks you a question before the match has begun. He calls you over and asks you about a card interaction in his deck that he’s not completely sure of. For whatever, maybe you just didn’t think it all out or weren’t very familiar with the deck or the interaction, you give him the wrong information about how a card works. Nothing bad has happened yet, but you’ve still made a small judge error that might cause a problem in this player’s match. You might suddenly realize that you gave bad information about the interaction, or maybe you asked another judge or even looked up one of the relevant cards on Gatherer on your phone. Suddenly, you have the correct information. You have the opportunity to go back and update that player with the correct information. If that player’s match has already started, it may be more problematic, but you could ask the player to step away from his match for just a moment so that you can revise the bad information you gave this player earlier. You are not coaching this player. He asked a specific question very recently and you know you gave him the wrong answer. You are giving excellent service as a judge by being willing to fix this mistake before it causes a player to make mistakes in his matches.

It would be great if all your judge mistakes could be fixed before they actually affect play, but that’s simply not going to always be the case. In many cases, a judge error is going to result in a player winning or losing a game when they may not have if given the correct information.

Here’s an example more recently relevant and specific. A player calls you over and explains the situation in their game. Player A has played Harnessed Lightning targeting a Smuggler’s Copter that is attacking him. With Harnessed Lightning on the stack, player B activates Pia Nalaar sacrificing Smuggler’s Copter. Player A wants to know if he still gets three energy counters from Harnessed Lightning and you tell him that he does. Player B disagrees but doesn’t appeal the ruling. A turn later, player A plays Aetherworks Marvel and has enough energy to activate it only due to the energy counters he got from Harnessed Lightning that he really shouldn’t have had. Player A wins the game.

You talk to another judge later, or you hear from other players, that the ruling was incorrect, that Harnessed Lightning was countered when it tried to resolve with no legal target, that player A should not have received any energy from the spell. Now what do you do? Your mistake has led to a situation that seriously affected the outcome of a competitive match. It’s great that you now understand correctly how Harnessed Lightning works, but what about the game that you helped mess up?

The answer is that if possible, you find the two players affected by this ruling and you explain what you did wrong. Even though your error may have helped him win the game, player A needs to know the correct way his cards work for future games. Player B needs to know that you know you got it wrong.

Confidence is everything in judging and we are meant to deliver rulings in a clear and confident manner. That doesn’t mean we aren’t going to be wrong sometimes. Jazz legend Miles Davis used to tell his band that if they were going to play something wrong, he wanted them to “be wrong strong.” That’s what happens when a judge delivers a confident ruling that is completely wrong. Sometimes our confident manner causes players to accept a ruling that is absolutely incorrect. When that happens, the right thing to do is to try and correct the situation if possible and, if it’s too late to correct the situation, to be honest and forthright enough to “fall on our sword” to a certain extent.

I have known judges who believe that if they go out of their way to explain how they were wrong on a particular ruling to a player that the player community will have less confidence in the judge’s ability. Well, that’s a thing that might happen. However, our individual reputations as judges aren’t the most important thing. The most important thing is to honestly adjudicate the tournament. We can’t do that if we aren’t willing to admit our mistakes to the players when we occasionally wrong them.

Quickly updating the affected players with the correct ruling, even after the damage has been done in a previous game or match, is a great opportunity to show the players that you take your job as judge seriously. Everyone likes to be right and nobody ever likes to be caught in a mistake, but mistakes happen nonetheless. Your honest character, on and off the tournament floor, is much more important than any one particular ruling. There’s a good chance that the players affected by your mistake will be happy to hear from you, not happy that a bad ruling hurt their game but glad that you are a conscientious judge that cares about fairness and isn’t afraid to own up to your mistakes.

Admitting your errors isn’t showing weakness, it’s just a matter of doing what’s right.