hello all,
Here is a mini-article about what worked in my area to increase attendance at PPTQs
I am both a fairly recent L2 and newly moved to New Brunswick. Both within the past year. Upon passing my L2 exam and interview I quickly got involved in the Local tournament scene which frankly was a disappointing. Of my first 7 pptqs only 2 had more than 10 in attendance. With the other 5 barely firing and usually only firing after players started calling any friends they could beg to come in and play. One event even had the players that were there pooling their trade binders to quickly build a deck for someone they convinced to come in at the last minute. Some of the things I noticed included stores were both poorly advertising their events as well well as scheduling pptqs on the same day as other large high draw events or event pptq with in an hour drive. As well players were growing unhappy with the prize support of the low turn out events some times only the rptq invite.

To address these problems I did three things. the first was setting up a Facebook group for all the Advanced store TO's and L2+ judges that might come into NB. (I am the only L2 in NB but several could come from PEI or Nova Scotia). Within this group we worked to make sure both every pptq had a judge confirmed before scheduling and that no events conflicted with any others. The next thing I did was get each store to make the Facebook event for their pptq at least a month ahead and then I made the extra effort to share these events within all the NB magic facebook groups as well as the Halifax(2-4 hours away) magic fb group. The third thing I did was create a prize support chart that all but 2 of the NB stores started using making prize support more transparent to the players.

The result of all this effort was this past season had double digit attendance at all the pptq which was a marked improvement over the previous two seasons some stores even had double their pptq attendance from the previous season.

I hope this helps,
submitted,
Rob Langmaid New Brunswick's L2

Hello Robert

I think that is a fantastic way to increase PPTQ attendance. For me I also either start a new whatsapp group or join an existing one to advertise events to hopefully increase attendance for store events.

Originally posted by Robert Langmaid:

The result of all this effort was this past season had double digit attendance at all the pptq which was a marked improvement over the previous two seasons some stores even had double their pptq attendance from the previous season.

Great to see that your efforts have paid off and I am sure that the NB MTG community has benefited from your efforts. Keep it up!

Originally posted by Robert Langmaid:

Within this group we worked to make sure both every pptq had a judge confirmed before scheduling and that no events conflicted with any others.

Please be really careful when doing something like this as it may violate competition/antitrust laws in your jurisdiction for tournament organizers to agree that they will not compete for players in this way.

IANAL but I have consulted one on the topic.

Just a quick update or local pptq attendance continues to grow with the most recent one being 32 players.