Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

Welcome to the Judges' Chambers

PokePop

Administrator
Staff member
Welcome.
The PokeGym has long been a resource for playing in and running tournaments.
One of our main features is the Ask the Rules Team forum where players and judges can ask questions about card interactions and the correct way to do things during a tournament and get an answer that carries official weight, backed up by Pokemon Organized Play.

However, we have avoided answering questions about judge calls and penalties that have a range of correct answers because we could not usually give one answer that is THE correct way to handle those situations. Judges are given a fair amount of leeway in fixing game states and issuing penalties and we did not want to give an answer that by inference would mean that any other way of handling was wrong.

But that is not to say that there are best practices and that some ways of handling things are not better than others.
Toward that end, we introduce "The Judges' Chambers", where tournament rulings can be discussed, fine tuned, and best practices discussed and spread to the wider community. It is worth noting that while this forum does NOT carry the same "official" weight that the Ask the Rules Team forum does, we expect that those giving rulings and advice have a minimum level of experience to back up their advice.

Topics can be either question and answer or involved discussion. Whatever fits your need. These will be the types of questions that we can't handle in ATRT, but ones that you want honest feedback and guidance on, not just a forum to complain about a specific judge. Gossip can handle that.

Posters answering questions should tag their post at the end with the highest level tournament that they judged at, and if they were Judge, Division Judge, or Head Judge at that event. For example, I would tag my post at the end with...

World Championships Masters Head Judge
 
To anyone posting here, when you do ask your questions or share a scenario, please include as many details as possible. By providing many details most judges can take the penalty guidelines and other ruling documents and figure out why something was ruled the way it was. Please help us help you by giving us all important details regarding your questions/scenarios.

The following is a list of details that may matter when making a tournament ruling or issuing a penalty. Not everything on this list is important to every tournament ruling or penalty, but by providing the details, you save us from going back and forth asking for more details. This is not an all inclusive list, if you think a detail may be important but not listed, go ahead and mention it.

Important Details for most Penalties-
  • Type of tournament attended? League Challenge, Cities, States, etc...
  • Age division of the players?
  • Current Round and Current Record of the players?
  • Penalty History of Players at current tournaments?
  • Penalty History of Players at other local tournaments?


For Match Resolution Questions-
  • Is the Match a Best of 1 or Best of 3 Match?
  • If Best of 3, what is the current Game Count?
  • Is your question referring to Swiss Play or Single Elimination Play?
  • Whose turn was it when Time was called, or was it in between turns?

For Game Play Errors-
  • When was the error discovered?
  • How long ago did the error occur? What actions took place between the error and the discovery of the error?
  • Who discovered the error?


For Deck Errors-
  • When was the error discovered? Between rounds? During a round? During Mid-Tournament random deck check? During top cut deck check?
  • Who discovered the error?
  • Was the problem with the deck list or the deck itself or both?
  • Was the deck list format legal? Was the deck itself format legal?
  • If there was something wrong with the deck list and/or deck, what was the error? Too many cards? Too few cards? Illegal cards?
  • Was the deck list AND the deck legal, but the issue was that they did not match?


PokePop or any other admin, if you want to edit this to add anything I missed, feel free to do so.



United States National Championship Judge / State Championship Head Judge
 
A couple of questions,

Is the intent of this forum to only answer questions? Or is it a case where general discourse on threads is encouraged, where appropriate of course?

Secondly, I am only relatively new to being a Pokémon Professor, but have been involved with Judging for other games systems and been the rules guru for my local Pokémon groups for a long time. As such my highest level of judging has been at Prereleases and a couple of 40-50 player non-official events. Is the forum the place for me to chime in with an answer if I personally believe I have the correct answer? Or should I sit back and let someone with more experience answer?

Regards,

Pope
 
Pope: The forum is going to develop over time, but on the outset, I see it as both hosting question and answer topics as well as discourses and debates on specific ruling scenarios. It's pretty open at this point.

Regarding judges without credentials from higher level events:
We certainly welcome participation in discussion and honing best practices. Good ideas are good ideas and it doesn't matter where they come from!

However, for giving an answer along the lines of "this is the right way to do this", that would probably be best coming from someone who has participated on a team at a Regionals or higher event for a couple of reasons. The answer carries the weight of the credentials (since we don't have an "official" sanction for this forum) and there are best practices discussed and reviewed at those level of events that we would desire to promote to the wider audience.
 
If you are still answering rulings questions I have a question about weakness in regards to cards like the new unknown vstar. If a Pokemon has no weaknesses does an ability that gives weakness give it x2 weakness or is a Pokemon with no weaknesses printed considered x0 to everything?
 
If you are still answering rulings questions I have a question about weakness in regards to cards like the new unknown vstar. If a Pokemon has no weaknesses does an ability that gives weakness give it x2 weakness or is a Pokemon with no weaknesses printed considered x0 to everything?
We actually have a different forum for rulings questions, Ask the Rules Team.
But we wouldn't give a ruling on a card that hasn't been released yet as we will want to see the actual English text.
But we'll make sure to get that ruling into the FAQ that will be published on our Front Page before Prereleases start for that set.
 
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