Chairman Kaga
Active Member
While this forum fills up with reports of players' travails through this year's massive tournament field, I thought I'd post something completely different. I have no deck. I didn't play in Nationals. Even if I did, I would suck and the report would be wholly uninteresting :smile: Instead, this year, I was honored to be selected as a Senior Division Judge. I thought I'd write about experiencing the tournament from the other side. I'm writing this all from memory, so I might have a few things in the wrong place time-wise, but it all happened at some point.
Tuesday night
The saga begins a bit early. I had just finished getting my car washed and cleaned out for the trip the following day, when it decides to break down on me (coolant system issue). Realizing it's not going to be drivable, I start getting prices for a rental car.
Wednesday
As staff, we're supposed to arrive late Wednesday afternoon. The rental car places all tell me I can't get anything until 6pm at best, which is way too late for me. So I'm forced to resort to begging my parents to let me take their Chrysler 300, and they reluctantly agree. I pick up my two travel partners (Nat Martin, who is on side events staff this year, and his wife, Cora) and we get on the road.
We arrive in St. Louis about 7:30 and check into the staff hotel (the Holiday Inn Select). The first person I see, of course, is Chris (DukeFireBird) and his fiancee, Erin. We're all hungry, so the party of five steps into the hotel restaurant. The first game to hit the table is Race For The Galaxy. Erin has never played it, and that's really not a game you want to be thrown into without a tutorial. It's rather amusing to watch her try to play, but we're all having fun and we help her along as much as we can. I play a pretty tight game, but couldn't get the right cards for victory. Nat ends up as the first winner of the trip.
We head up to Chris's room. Chris is also staffing for the second year in a row (Masters judge this year), and he hit the jackpot on the staff room draw, landing the corner suite that is literally twice as big as any other room in the hotel. Suffice it to say, most of our free time for the rest of the trip is spent there.
Thursday
On Thursday, the staff is supposed to head over to the hall early and assist with set up. I wake up way late, and I'm worried that someone from TPC is going to be mad, but I get a phone call from Chris saying they're all heading back to the hotel. Apparently the union guys at the convention center decided they were doing all the setup labor, and they weren't taking no for an answer. So the staff was released until the evening staff meeting. We fill it with some more games. Chris, Nat, Cora, and I sit down and break out Power Grid. It was at this point I met up with SteveP, and he caught us just as we were getting ready to start, so we included him in the game as well. Power Grid is a difficult game to pace yourself in to win, and I played a strategy that moved too slow early and left me too far behind at the tipping point to recover. SteveP ended up winning handily.
At around 5pm we migrated to the hotel conference room for the staff meeting. Here we got our staff shirts (both the teal Dragonite shirts, and the Captain Picard judge polos), and then we all sat down and talked about a lot of the rulings and procedures for the weekend. At this point we were also introduced to Tom Shea, who is an old-school Pokemon and Magic TO, who over the course of the weekend shared a lot of insight on some of the more subtle ways to cheat at Pokemon. Tom is a very cool and sharp guy that definitely knows his stuff. I was pleased to get several opportunities to learn from him over the course of the event.
After the staff meeting, more board games, of course.
Friday
Professor Cup time! I never do well in draft events, and I had no strategy going into this thing, so I expected to do horribly. I drew the always-awesome Clay Mitchell as my draft partner and first-round opponent. I knew things were bleak when he ended up with pretty much every trainer and supporter that was available. The special professor item for this year? Black Professor logo sleeves -- they look sweet, I just hope they're quality and hold up better than the pre-release sleeves do.
I actually don't do as bad as I thought I would during the actual game, but in the end Clay breaks out Turtwig GL and I simply don't have anything that can whack it hard enough to make up for the self-healing. I concede, realize I probably have more of that to look forward to, and drop from the cup after one game. Of course, I had another reason for dropping as well....
I head back across the street to the hotel to find that my package has arrived. I made arrangements with The Gorn to pick up two items for me at Origins and overnight them to me in St. Louis -- Race For The Galaxy: Rebel vs. Imperium and Dominion: Intrigue, expansion sets for two of my favorite games. They were making their US premiere at Origins, they won't be on store shelves for at least another month, and I didn't want to wait. I went back to my room for the base games, and dragged a tub of board games back across the street to the event hall.
Immediately, Race comes out onto the table, and Chris and I play a two player game. I wind up with a sick board with the new expansion cards and win by a rather large margin.
At some point during the afternoon, I am introduced to Dylan, who is the new rules guy at TPCi (the job that Jimmer used to hold). We talk a bit about my rulebook project (the one in my sig). I'm sworn to secrecy on the rest of the conversation, but it's going to get cool.
4pm rolls around, and it's time to open registration for what is bound to be the largest Pokemon tournament ever. We can all see the massive line forming from the front table all the way to the back of the hall and outside. The entire staff quickly gets together and deploys to get things underway. I end up on crowd control, trying to keep the shirt claim area flowing in one direction. I also end up fielding a lot of questions, and grabbing a big stack of decklist sheets to hand out to people that missed them at the front tables. All in all, registration went smoothly, and we tore through that entire line in a little over an hour. When registration closes, we hear the final tally -- almost 1,200 players. It's going to be a crazy weekend....
Once the registration line thinned out, about 15 of us moved into the corner where they were putting on a judge seminar. This was a good opportunity to hear from the best judges and TOs out there -- BDS, bulbasnore, PokePop, Chrisbo, and also Tom Shea was there offering a lot of advice on building a good judging team. Besides the actual experience of working Nationals, this was one of the most important things I took away from the weekend.
Back at the hotel, my friend Nat gets a special surprise -- he's being promoted from side event staff to Masters division judge! I know he was quite surprised and honored at that.
Saturday
For most of the staff, the day starts at 7am. A few crazier ones show up at 6:15 to help with some final setup tasks, but I'm a guy that needs his beauty rest :lol: I get dressed, grab some of the breakfast buffet at the hotel, and head across the street. We get all the table numbers set out (there's a lot of those things!), and then all the staff is summoned to the front for a quick little rally. Dave Schwimmer tells us we've got the largest Pokemon tournament in history, and we're going to "kick its [you know what]" :lol: Dave is always a very serious person while the tournaments are running, but at any other time he's one of the most fun and cool guys you'll ever meet. I hope everyone (players, judges, parents, whoever you are) get to meet the real Dave at some point. He's by far the most fun TO :smile:
We move on to our division judge meetings. PokePop is my head judge, and he relays the last-minute decisions on how things are going to go. And then...it's time to open the doors.
After the final registration window closes, we hear the final total: over 1,200 players, 282 of them in the senior division I'll be judging shortly. Everyone sits down for the player meeting, the decklists are collected, and before long, Nationals 2009 is underway!
The first round, as PokePop would say afterward, was "the roughest first round he's ever been a part of". Most of that is due to deck issues -- they are checking the decklists while the first round is underway, and then sending the problems out for us to handle in the middle of the first round. In every case I was part of, it was simply a card being omitted from the decklist -- I would count the deck at the table, ensure the player has 60 cards, and then hand them a warning and an instruction to see the head judge to fix the decklist after their game is complete. In total we had about 20 or 30 of those and it sucked a lot of time away from really judging the matches, and of course time extensions had to be given when we stopped games for deck counts. However, in a tournament as massive as this, what we did with the decklist checks is really the only way you can do it, so I guess we couldn't have asked for much better.
The rest of the day was a lot smoother, at least for me. My biggest flaw, I've found, is dealing with the old "he-said/she-said" situation, where neither player can agree on how things are supposed to be. It takes me a while to unravel things and get down to reality, and it's hard to do with the pressure of keeping such a major tournament running on time. Too often I pulled in PokePop too early (before I really had a clear view to present to him), and a couple times I went to him on things that didn't really require his attention -- in events as hectic as this one, it's important not to bog down the head judge any more than necessary. But it all worked out in the end.
I had a case in Round 3 or 4 where a player had forgotten his prizes and searched for a Level X, which was now in play. In any of my own events, this would be a pretty clear Multi-Prize or Game Loss (depending on division and when in occurred in the tournament), but the guidance we were given from above was that one search without prizes would be a single Prize Loss, regardless of what card was searched for, two searches would be Multi-Prize, and three would be Game Loss. Everyone on the team (PokePop included) felt that the one-search case was a bit too lenient given the circumstance, but that's what we were told to do, so that's how we rolled.
I think it was Round 5 where we got an unexpected break -- a match tied on prizes went into overtime, and took a good 20-30 minutes to close out. I took the opportunity to wander the hall a bit. I got hit up by the owner of Collector's Cache for an interview for their Facebook site. I usually look like an idiot on camera, but I was happy to oblige -- after all, he does host one of my leagues :smile:
When things got back underway it was very apparent how tense it was becoming at the top tables, and even at the mid tables where players were sitting on the bubble with 3- and 4-win records and hoping to make the tail end of the cut at 5-3. This is not something I'm personally used to -- my area tends to be more casual players that aren't so big on winning -- so it upped the pressure on myself to make sure that I was getting things right.
While I was doing my judge patrol in Round 6, I glanced over at the Juniors and happened to notice one of my league kids playing at table 1! I caught up with him between rounds -- turns out he had gone 5-0 with the Kingdra deck he'd been playing most of the year. He would eventually make it to Sunday, losing in Top 32 to a horrible draw -- 3 Kingdras prized in game 3! Another junior of mine also made the cut, losing in Top 64. But I'm very proud of both of them for getting that far!
During the final round of Swiss, I had my worst moment of the day. A game that went to time involving two players needing a win for any chance at making the cut. One player had already won the game (it was his turn and he was already up on prizes), I told them both that it was basically over, and the other player chose this point to voice the fact that he felt he had been stalled out for most of the game. Now, it really is his fault for not calling one of us over the minute he felt he was getting stalled -- we can't do anything after the fact if we don't observe the stalling -- but I communicated very poorly (even to the point some may consider rude) and I'm sure left a very bad taste in his mouth. He left the table obviously disgusted, mostly with his elimination, I think, but also with me as well. If that player happens to be reading this, I apologize for handling that situation as indelicately as I did.
We transitioned to top cut, and once the round of 64 was complete, we moved on to deck checks. Now this is an area I've always felt deficient, but I got some good education from several of the best judges -- Chrisbo came over from Juniors (who were completely wrapped up for the night at this point) and I got to sit right across from him and watch him work. Deck checking requires a lot of attention to detail -- you need to be able to spot even the most subtle variations that could possibly be a mark. Definitely one of the hardest skills to master as a judge.
Once the deck checks were complete, we sealed them all up and locked them away for the night, and then we all headed off to bed. At this point my legs were pure pain, having been standing for the better portion of 15 hours.
Sunday
Back in the hall at 8am to finish setting up for Top 32. We got all the players seated with their decks and kicked off the first round of the finals. Judging this round was the highlight of my weekend. You know, if you read too many reports on here from the "elite" players, you start to think that everyone at this level is a massive egotistical jerk who is concerned solely with "pwning everyone". I witnessed nothing of the sort in Seniors. Every kid here was genuinely happy to be here, and win or lose, they were all very congratulatory and complimentary to each other. Stuff like the winner of the match saying to his eliminated opponent, "Man, that deck of yours is killer -- I just had that awesome draw first game, or you'd definitely be moving on and have a great shot to win." Very little ego to be found, and a lot of true Spirit of the Game being shown by all.
After Top 32, I was relieved of duty. Aww, and just when we were getting to the table judging, too -- the one thing I'm actually good at! I went over to side events to help out there, ran a couple 8-man pods, then about lunchtime I decided to run back to the hotel room to change clothes into my regular staff shirt and shorts. Unfortunately, I was so completely shot from the long Saturday and short sleep, I laid down on the bed for just a minute and went straight to sleep. I woke back up at about 3pm, went "oops", and ran back over to the hall in time to see the event winding down and the winners crowned.
And then the announcement came: "Staff, let the teardown begin." In less than an hour, the only clue that Nationals had even occurred was the stage at front (which would be torn down later) and the stuff still hanging from the ceiling -- the banners, and a Pikachu in desperate need of medication.
Once the hall was clear, Pete De Shaw had a little surprise for us. He started calling out staff members in random order and directing them to the hall next door. Inside, they had laid out a slew of banners and display backdrops from their show booths that they were in the process of retiring. Rather than simply throw them out, they used them as gifts for the staff instead. We each got to choose one. Sadly I was way down the list, so a lot of the cooler ones were taken, but I did score a 6'x8' DP1 banner with Electivire. Not exactly sure what to do with it, but I'll figure something out. After that, Dave lined us all up to give us our last few pieces of swag and his thanks for an event well done....and our invitations to the staff dinner.
Oh, the staff dinner...now that is quite an experience. We all REDACTED REDACTED, played plenty of REDACTED, and consumed about 50 gallons of REDACTED. Oh, and Mike Liesik did this REDACTED REDACTED bacon REDACTED hamster REDACTED REDACTED Episcopalian REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED.
While the dinner was a lot of fun, it was also a sad reminder that Nationals was officially over. I hate the fact that I only get to see all these great people once or twice a year. The Pokemon community really is a family, and I'm glad to be a part of it.
I close out Nationals back at the Holiday Inn in Chris's room -- we finally crack open Dominion: Intrigue and play a game. I won. A good note to end on :smile:
Props:
Slops:
Tuesday night
The saga begins a bit early. I had just finished getting my car washed and cleaned out for the trip the following day, when it decides to break down on me (coolant system issue). Realizing it's not going to be drivable, I start getting prices for a rental car.
Wednesday
As staff, we're supposed to arrive late Wednesday afternoon. The rental car places all tell me I can't get anything until 6pm at best, which is way too late for me. So I'm forced to resort to begging my parents to let me take their Chrysler 300, and they reluctantly agree. I pick up my two travel partners (Nat Martin, who is on side events staff this year, and his wife, Cora) and we get on the road.
We arrive in St. Louis about 7:30 and check into the staff hotel (the Holiday Inn Select). The first person I see, of course, is Chris (DukeFireBird) and his fiancee, Erin. We're all hungry, so the party of five steps into the hotel restaurant. The first game to hit the table is Race For The Galaxy. Erin has never played it, and that's really not a game you want to be thrown into without a tutorial. It's rather amusing to watch her try to play, but we're all having fun and we help her along as much as we can. I play a pretty tight game, but couldn't get the right cards for victory. Nat ends up as the first winner of the trip.
We head up to Chris's room. Chris is also staffing for the second year in a row (Masters judge this year), and he hit the jackpot on the staff room draw, landing the corner suite that is literally twice as big as any other room in the hotel. Suffice it to say, most of our free time for the rest of the trip is spent there.
Thursday
On Thursday, the staff is supposed to head over to the hall early and assist with set up. I wake up way late, and I'm worried that someone from TPC is going to be mad, but I get a phone call from Chris saying they're all heading back to the hotel. Apparently the union guys at the convention center decided they were doing all the setup labor, and they weren't taking no for an answer. So the staff was released until the evening staff meeting. We fill it with some more games. Chris, Nat, Cora, and I sit down and break out Power Grid. It was at this point I met up with SteveP, and he caught us just as we were getting ready to start, so we included him in the game as well. Power Grid is a difficult game to pace yourself in to win, and I played a strategy that moved too slow early and left me too far behind at the tipping point to recover. SteveP ended up winning handily.
At around 5pm we migrated to the hotel conference room for the staff meeting. Here we got our staff shirts (both the teal Dragonite shirts, and the Captain Picard judge polos), and then we all sat down and talked about a lot of the rulings and procedures for the weekend. At this point we were also introduced to Tom Shea, who is an old-school Pokemon and Magic TO, who over the course of the weekend shared a lot of insight on some of the more subtle ways to cheat at Pokemon. Tom is a very cool and sharp guy that definitely knows his stuff. I was pleased to get several opportunities to learn from him over the course of the event.
After the staff meeting, more board games, of course.
Friday
Professor Cup time! I never do well in draft events, and I had no strategy going into this thing, so I expected to do horribly. I drew the always-awesome Clay Mitchell as my draft partner and first-round opponent. I knew things were bleak when he ended up with pretty much every trainer and supporter that was available. The special professor item for this year? Black Professor logo sleeves -- they look sweet, I just hope they're quality and hold up better than the pre-release sleeves do.
I actually don't do as bad as I thought I would during the actual game, but in the end Clay breaks out Turtwig GL and I simply don't have anything that can whack it hard enough to make up for the self-healing. I concede, realize I probably have more of that to look forward to, and drop from the cup after one game. Of course, I had another reason for dropping as well....
I head back across the street to the hotel to find that my package has arrived. I made arrangements with The Gorn to pick up two items for me at Origins and overnight them to me in St. Louis -- Race For The Galaxy: Rebel vs. Imperium and Dominion: Intrigue, expansion sets for two of my favorite games. They were making their US premiere at Origins, they won't be on store shelves for at least another month, and I didn't want to wait. I went back to my room for the base games, and dragged a tub of board games back across the street to the event hall.
Immediately, Race comes out onto the table, and Chris and I play a two player game. I wind up with a sick board with the new expansion cards and win by a rather large margin.
At some point during the afternoon, I am introduced to Dylan, who is the new rules guy at TPCi (the job that Jimmer used to hold). We talk a bit about my rulebook project (the one in my sig). I'm sworn to secrecy on the rest of the conversation, but it's going to get cool.
4pm rolls around, and it's time to open registration for what is bound to be the largest Pokemon tournament ever. We can all see the massive line forming from the front table all the way to the back of the hall and outside. The entire staff quickly gets together and deploys to get things underway. I end up on crowd control, trying to keep the shirt claim area flowing in one direction. I also end up fielding a lot of questions, and grabbing a big stack of decklist sheets to hand out to people that missed them at the front tables. All in all, registration went smoothly, and we tore through that entire line in a little over an hour. When registration closes, we hear the final tally -- almost 1,200 players. It's going to be a crazy weekend....
Once the registration line thinned out, about 15 of us moved into the corner where they were putting on a judge seminar. This was a good opportunity to hear from the best judges and TOs out there -- BDS, bulbasnore, PokePop, Chrisbo, and also Tom Shea was there offering a lot of advice on building a good judging team. Besides the actual experience of working Nationals, this was one of the most important things I took away from the weekend.
Back at the hotel, my friend Nat gets a special surprise -- he's being promoted from side event staff to Masters division judge! I know he was quite surprised and honored at that.
Saturday
For most of the staff, the day starts at 7am. A few crazier ones show up at 6:15 to help with some final setup tasks, but I'm a guy that needs his beauty rest :lol: I get dressed, grab some of the breakfast buffet at the hotel, and head across the street. We get all the table numbers set out (there's a lot of those things!), and then all the staff is summoned to the front for a quick little rally. Dave Schwimmer tells us we've got the largest Pokemon tournament in history, and we're going to "kick its [you know what]" :lol: Dave is always a very serious person while the tournaments are running, but at any other time he's one of the most fun and cool guys you'll ever meet. I hope everyone (players, judges, parents, whoever you are) get to meet the real Dave at some point. He's by far the most fun TO :smile:
We move on to our division judge meetings. PokePop is my head judge, and he relays the last-minute decisions on how things are going to go. And then...it's time to open the doors.
After the final registration window closes, we hear the final total: over 1,200 players, 282 of them in the senior division I'll be judging shortly. Everyone sits down for the player meeting, the decklists are collected, and before long, Nationals 2009 is underway!
The first round, as PokePop would say afterward, was "the roughest first round he's ever been a part of". Most of that is due to deck issues -- they are checking the decklists while the first round is underway, and then sending the problems out for us to handle in the middle of the first round. In every case I was part of, it was simply a card being omitted from the decklist -- I would count the deck at the table, ensure the player has 60 cards, and then hand them a warning and an instruction to see the head judge to fix the decklist after their game is complete. In total we had about 20 or 30 of those and it sucked a lot of time away from really judging the matches, and of course time extensions had to be given when we stopped games for deck counts. However, in a tournament as massive as this, what we did with the decklist checks is really the only way you can do it, so I guess we couldn't have asked for much better.
The rest of the day was a lot smoother, at least for me. My biggest flaw, I've found, is dealing with the old "he-said/she-said" situation, where neither player can agree on how things are supposed to be. It takes me a while to unravel things and get down to reality, and it's hard to do with the pressure of keeping such a major tournament running on time. Too often I pulled in PokePop too early (before I really had a clear view to present to him), and a couple times I went to him on things that didn't really require his attention -- in events as hectic as this one, it's important not to bog down the head judge any more than necessary. But it all worked out in the end.
I had a case in Round 3 or 4 where a player had forgotten his prizes and searched for a Level X, which was now in play. In any of my own events, this would be a pretty clear Multi-Prize or Game Loss (depending on division and when in occurred in the tournament), but the guidance we were given from above was that one search without prizes would be a single Prize Loss, regardless of what card was searched for, two searches would be Multi-Prize, and three would be Game Loss. Everyone on the team (PokePop included) felt that the one-search case was a bit too lenient given the circumstance, but that's what we were told to do, so that's how we rolled.
I think it was Round 5 where we got an unexpected break -- a match tied on prizes went into overtime, and took a good 20-30 minutes to close out. I took the opportunity to wander the hall a bit. I got hit up by the owner of Collector's Cache for an interview for their Facebook site. I usually look like an idiot on camera, but I was happy to oblige -- after all, he does host one of my leagues :smile:
When things got back underway it was very apparent how tense it was becoming at the top tables, and even at the mid tables where players were sitting on the bubble with 3- and 4-win records and hoping to make the tail end of the cut at 5-3. This is not something I'm personally used to -- my area tends to be more casual players that aren't so big on winning -- so it upped the pressure on myself to make sure that I was getting things right.
While I was doing my judge patrol in Round 6, I glanced over at the Juniors and happened to notice one of my league kids playing at table 1! I caught up with him between rounds -- turns out he had gone 5-0 with the Kingdra deck he'd been playing most of the year. He would eventually make it to Sunday, losing in Top 32 to a horrible draw -- 3 Kingdras prized in game 3! Another junior of mine also made the cut, losing in Top 64. But I'm very proud of both of them for getting that far!
During the final round of Swiss, I had my worst moment of the day. A game that went to time involving two players needing a win for any chance at making the cut. One player had already won the game (it was his turn and he was already up on prizes), I told them both that it was basically over, and the other player chose this point to voice the fact that he felt he had been stalled out for most of the game. Now, it really is his fault for not calling one of us over the minute he felt he was getting stalled -- we can't do anything after the fact if we don't observe the stalling -- but I communicated very poorly (even to the point some may consider rude) and I'm sure left a very bad taste in his mouth. He left the table obviously disgusted, mostly with his elimination, I think, but also with me as well. If that player happens to be reading this, I apologize for handling that situation as indelicately as I did.
We transitioned to top cut, and once the round of 64 was complete, we moved on to deck checks. Now this is an area I've always felt deficient, but I got some good education from several of the best judges -- Chrisbo came over from Juniors (who were completely wrapped up for the night at this point) and I got to sit right across from him and watch him work. Deck checking requires a lot of attention to detail -- you need to be able to spot even the most subtle variations that could possibly be a mark. Definitely one of the hardest skills to master as a judge.
Once the deck checks were complete, we sealed them all up and locked them away for the night, and then we all headed off to bed. At this point my legs were pure pain, having been standing for the better portion of 15 hours.
Sunday
Back in the hall at 8am to finish setting up for Top 32. We got all the players seated with their decks and kicked off the first round of the finals. Judging this round was the highlight of my weekend. You know, if you read too many reports on here from the "elite" players, you start to think that everyone at this level is a massive egotistical jerk who is concerned solely with "pwning everyone". I witnessed nothing of the sort in Seniors. Every kid here was genuinely happy to be here, and win or lose, they were all very congratulatory and complimentary to each other. Stuff like the winner of the match saying to his eliminated opponent, "Man, that deck of yours is killer -- I just had that awesome draw first game, or you'd definitely be moving on and have a great shot to win." Very little ego to be found, and a lot of true Spirit of the Game being shown by all.
After Top 32, I was relieved of duty. Aww, and just when we were getting to the table judging, too -- the one thing I'm actually good at! I went over to side events to help out there, ran a couple 8-man pods, then about lunchtime I decided to run back to the hotel room to change clothes into my regular staff shirt and shorts. Unfortunately, I was so completely shot from the long Saturday and short sleep, I laid down on the bed for just a minute and went straight to sleep. I woke back up at about 3pm, went "oops", and ran back over to the hall in time to see the event winding down and the winners crowned.
And then the announcement came: "Staff, let the teardown begin." In less than an hour, the only clue that Nationals had even occurred was the stage at front (which would be torn down later) and the stuff still hanging from the ceiling -- the banners, and a Pikachu in desperate need of medication.
Once the hall was clear, Pete De Shaw had a little surprise for us. He started calling out staff members in random order and directing them to the hall next door. Inside, they had laid out a slew of banners and display backdrops from their show booths that they were in the process of retiring. Rather than simply throw them out, they used them as gifts for the staff instead. We each got to choose one. Sadly I was way down the list, so a lot of the cooler ones were taken, but I did score a 6'x8' DP1 banner with Electivire. Not exactly sure what to do with it, but I'll figure something out. After that, Dave lined us all up to give us our last few pieces of swag and his thanks for an event well done....and our invitations to the staff dinner.
Oh, the staff dinner...now that is quite an experience. We all REDACTED REDACTED, played plenty of REDACTED, and consumed about 50 gallons of REDACTED. Oh, and Mike Liesik did this REDACTED REDACTED bacon REDACTED hamster REDACTED REDACTED Episcopalian REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED.
While the dinner was a lot of fun, it was also a sad reminder that Nationals was officially over. I hate the fact that I only get to see all these great people once or twice a year. The Pokemon community really is a family, and I'm glad to be a part of it.
I close out Nationals back at the Holiday Inn in Chris's room -- we finally crack open Dominion: Intrigue and play a game. I won. A good note to end on :smile:
Props:
- TPCi, for providing fully-comped staff positions. Without it, I would not have been able to attend Nats this year. I can't possibly express enough thanks here.
- Biggest. Tournament. EVAR.
- PokePop for being an awesome head judge. I learned a lot from you.
- The rest of the Seniors judge team: Doreen (SD PokéMom), Heather (secretsof2113), Tom (Simba), Andrea, and whoever else I'm forgetting. You guys were so much fun to work with!
- Everyone at TPCi: Dave, Pete, Mike, Brad, Dylan, and all you marketing and design guys I got to meet this weekend. You're the best at what you do.
- DukeFireBird. You're one of my best friends. It was fun destroying you in board games all weekend :lol: Oh, and I finally introduced you to Doctor Who. My work is complete.
- Ultra-classy top cut players in Seniors
- Noah and Jared -- my two league Juniors that made the cut. Awesome job, guys!
- The Gorn for being my personal shopper at Origins
- Fedex for guaranteed 10:30am next day delivery
Slops:
- $12 for a breakfast buffet. Are you serious, Holiday Inn? You do realize most Hampton Inns offer better breakfasts for free, right?
- $3.75 for a 20-ounce drink at the cafe? Seriously, did we accidentally hold Nationals at a ballpark?
- Not buying and consuming an entire bottle of Advil to get me through Saturday and Sunday
- Clay Mitchell for stealing every damn supporter in the Professor Cup draft :lol:
- The A/C on my parent's car failing on the drive back. Hooray for deodorant.
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Enjoyed reading this, it is interesting to hear about the judge life. 
