Not sure how much of the community this will actually pertain to, but I wanted to share a neat experience that I had last weekend.

For those who don’t know, Shonen Jump Championship is a big Yu-Gi-Oh tournament held about a dozen times a year throughout North America. Some people might be familiar with local card shop tournaments with 20-40 participants and regional type tournaments with 200-300 participants, but these big Shonen Jump style tournaments usually attract 500-800 participants. Many of the popular players and teams from all over the country attend, so it’s neat to meet these people that you’ve read about and talked to online.

Over the past weekend, a Shonen Jump Championship (2 day event) was held here in Baltimore (it was actually College Park lol). Aside from being a competitive player, I’m also a UDE judge and I was lucky enough to be invited to Judge this 2 day event.

Even though I knew I wasn’t going to play, I still did massive playtesting and prepping with my friends and teammates prior to this event. We’ve tried to run through as many decks and strategies as we possibly could, just so everyone was ready. Getting these guys ready was a lot of fun, plus it helped me brush up on the latest rulings and play mechanics.

Registration for the tournament started at 8:30 am on Saturday and the actual tournament started at about 10:30. These tournaments are all swiss style – so everyone plays a number of rounds (Best 2 out of 3, 40 min. rounds) based on attendance. We had a little less than 600 participants, so that set us at 10 rounds of Yu-Gi-Oh. Man that’s a long day lol!

There wasn’t as much confusion or chaos as you would have expected from a tournament this size, so that was definitely a plus. But of course, everything couldn’t have ran smoothly lol. One of the biggest “complications” that our judge/tournament staff ran into was that at round 9, the tournament software seemed to screw up the pairings. So people who were 8-0 were playing people who were 7-1 or 6-2. Unfortunately they didn’t catch the mistake till it was too late, so near the end of round 9, we had to make an announcement of the error and we needed to repair round 9! So even though the current round didn’t count, we ended up going through 11 rounds in reality lol. How much did that suck. We didn’t get outta there till about 11:30 pm.

So aside from being dead tired, there’s no way you can go back to the hotel and fall asleep right away, especially when you’re cramming 6 or 7 people in a hotel room lol! So after dinner and a bit more playtesting we didn’t head to bed till about 2:30ish in the morning. The Hotel was mediocre, didn’t offer any suits, and offered a free continental breakfast where the line was too freakin’ ridiculous and the food area was as small as a closet, but I guess it got the job done.

Sunday was a pretty decent day, but I think we were all feeling the fatigue settle in. The main Shonen Jump Tournament was over, but the Top 8 players from Saturday had their tournament, plus there was a regionals tournament, side events tournament, and a Marvel PCQ tournament all going on…so that was a busy day as well. I was on the Judge staff for the Yu-Gi-Oh Regionals tournament, and by this time I was just itching to play…but it was cool watching your friends and teammates play and hoping they’d do their best.

Overall it was a fun but long and tiring weekend. I’ve done Regional Events before, but this was my first 2 day Shonen Jump Championship event. A lot of the judge staff for this event were from out of state or out of area, so it was neat to work with them and see their different experience levels.

I’d love to play in a Shonen Jump Championship sometime this year, I think my only opportunity will be in Philly in June…so maybe we’ll take a trip over there  One last thing I wanted to point out was the prize structure:

1st place: laptop, trophy, Des Volstgaph Championship card, trophy, framed uncut sheet of ultra rare cards
2nd place: 60GB iPod Photo and Nintendo DS
3-4th place: Sony PSP
5-8th place: Nintendo DS
1st – 64 place: boxes/boster packs

Not bad if you can place high enough lol. One thing I did notice was that fatigue definitely played an important role. By the 7th or 8th round I started seeing more and more mistakes and sloppy play…a lot of the things that normally wouldn’t happen in the earlier rounds.

Anyways it was definitely a hell of an experience, so hopefully I’ll get the chance to play in a Shonen Jump Tournament and if I do, I’ll be sure to write up a blurb