So you've made it! You're at the venue, your tables are all set up and you've been meeting and greeting everyone. Everyone's army lists are completed, their models are on trays. What do you do now?
Setting up round one:
Shortly before the round is set to start, gather everyone's army lists and put them into a pool. Randomly draw two lists from the pool and place these two on table one. Rinse and repeat until all the player sheets are on tables. In bigger events it's customary for you to avoid making players face their club mates in round one, which can be achieved by separating the different clubs into piles and taking each member of a pair from different piles. Pick a scenario and communicate loudly to each player which it is for this round, they'll still ask you which they need anyway.
We want to make sure we finish on time, so tell the players their clocks need to have started by whatever time round one starts. Once you reach the round one start time go round to each table and ensure their clocks have started (and if they haven't start the clock). Usually the players have decided who is going first by now, so start the clock on them. If someone has no opponent start the clock on the absent player, and tell the lone player that if their opponent hasn't turned up by a certain time, then they have won their game, I usually say 30 minutes.
Once all your players are off and running you can relax a little (not too much though!). That's the hardest part of a round done. Now that you're running, you have a little free time to wander round watching some of the games or you can bring something light to do with you (I usually bring models to paint).
Judge Calls:
Usually, as a Tournament Organiser you'll probably have the added responsibility of answering judge calls. These can be nerve wracking when you first start running tournaments. My advice is to keep up playing games of Warmachine whenever you can, as this will help you keep a good grasp of the rules. In addition to this I find bringing a small rulebook along with you helps greatly too.
Some times players will call you over to a complex situation on the board. These can be quite involved, so once you've been called, tell your players to pause their clock while you head over to work it out. Once I'm at the table, my first question is usually "Who's doing what?". The players' explanation usually helps greatly in clarifying what they want to know, and helps you make sense of the table. My usual follow-up to this is "Can you show me the card with the rule on it?". Most of the time, this combination of questions and reading the text of the rules involved will solve your query. Consulting the timing chart (found at the back of the rulebook) can also help.
If you're still unsure at this point, it's going to be pretty complex, so make the ruling that makes the most sense in your personal judgement and say to the players something along the lines of "It's not 100% clear how this interacts, but this is how I'm ruling it today, I'll check for an official ruling later". Your players will hopefully understand you're not infallible but that also you've made a decision that you're going to stick to for the rest of the event, and you'll be looking for the appropriate solution afterwards. It's important to go and actually check on the rules forums (found here) and ask for a proper Infernal ruling to solve the rules hole for other players as well as your own sake. A small aside here, regularly checking the rules forum will really help out when you're making judge calls.
Round 2:
So you've made it through round one with a few judge calls. Now all your games will have finished and the players have filled in their army sheets and returned them to you (if they haven't then bug them about it, there're always a few stragglers). You're now looking at a pile of sheets with winners and losers. Separate the sheets out into a pile of winner and a pile of losers, and repeat the steps for round one to get your pairings (randomly pair the sheets in each pile and distribute them to tables). If you have an odd number of winners and losers you'll be looking at what's called a pair down. This is where we find the "worst" winner and pit them against the "best" loser. In practice this means finding the person with the lowest scenario points in the winners pile, and facing them against the highest scenario points in the losers pile (SOS isn't really a factor yet).
Once you're solved any pair downs, with a new set of pairings, round two is ready to go.
Round 3 and beyond:
At the end of round two, you'll end up with three piles now; two-wins, one-win, no-wins. These get lined up into three piles. Any pair up/downs are resolved - important to note here, that someone who has already been paired down/up should not be paired down/up again, and then 2-wins face 2-wins, 1-wins vs 1-wins, 0-wins vs 0-wins. Round three ends with four piles and round four ends with five piles (for the more mathematically minded folks minded folks out there: Round n ends with n+1 piles).
Once you've finished and ended up with one undefeated player you've found your tournament winner! But how do we decide on second and third place? The dreaded Strength of Schedule (SoS)!
Rankings:
Strength of Schedule is my least favourite parts of tournaments! It involves taking your players and working out the number of wins their opponents have. The total of wins that all of a players opponents is that players Strength of Schedule score. This takes a bit of time and the more players you have, the more time it takes. One "shortcut" I use, when working out SoS, is to mark a vertical line for each win on the top corner of a player's army list. This lets me, when scanning through to see how many wins a player has, identify the number of wins quickly.
Tally up each players strength of schedule and order them accordingly. If two players have the same SoS the next tie breaker is number of scenario points, then if these are also equal, it's army points killed. I've never had it be tied past these tiebreakers, so it's difficult to say what to do beyond there, when it happens I'll let you know how I solved it!
End of the Day:
Now it's time to reward your players! Once your last round is done, it's nice to have a little awards ceremony. Gather all your players together after the games are all done, and thank them for coming (after all, the event wouldn't have happened if they weren't there). Then present your prizes if you have any and congratulate the players who ranked in the top 3 (it's customary to go from bottom to top). Handshakes, prize awarding and photos usually happen here, especially at the bigger events. You'll either learn to love it or to fake smiles.
Once you're done it's time to pack away and get home, some players will head home, especially those with long journeys ahead (if you're a player, this is absolutely fine by the way). Some might stay to help you pack up, make sure you thank these guys, they're absolute gems after a long day running a tournament.
A small note before I end about pairing software: this is very handy and takes a lot of the hard work out of sorting our pair downs/ups and calculating Strength of Schedule. Some examples of software that does this is PG Swiss available here, and Tiebreak (web based) available here.
That's it for this one, thanks as always to Rob "all for Puns, and Puns for all" McCormick for proof reading - He talks a lot of sense about Khador here : https://avatarofslaughter.wordpress.com/
Next time I'll do a quick post-mortem on the Powerfist 13th May Steamroller
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