A Few Housekeeping Matters for Worlds

This post will cover a few issues regarding tournament policy going into the World Championship this weekend. In keeping with a proud tradition in YGO judging, we will not be changing any longstanding policies prior to Worlds, but we will be clarifying a few things that have always been true, but that have been inconsistently enforced up to this point.

It has always been the policy of GoatFormat.com to enforce the traditional doctrine of shortcuts in tournament play. This is explained at length in this post, but the basic gist is that players are expected and even encouraged to use shortcuts in tournament play in order to be able to proceed at a reasonable pace. For example, most players do not explicitly announce every pass of priority in the course of a turn. The general rule here is that once a shortcut has been "established" as part of the players' routines in a game, the player that wishes to deviate from them is responsible for announcing when they wish to do so. So if you have spent the entire game silently passing priority after drawing a card during your Draw Phase, you need to announce clearly when you intend to retain priority after doing so. On DuelingBook, this will often require you to say so before or immediately after beginning your turn, as the simulator will automatically draw the card for you upon doing so. However, if you have been using your phase buttons responsibly on DuelingBook, you have not actually been using this shortcut at all, since clicking over to your Standby Phase suffices to announce your intention to pass priority during the Draw Phase.

When using DuelingBook, players may occasionally run into "glitches" wherein, for example, they become unable to move cards to and from the field. Our policy is to replay a game from the beginning when it is rendered unplayable by such a glitch, as long as the affected player can prove it to a judge. Towards the end of a game, this may not be necessary, as the players can simply announce what cards they are using as needed until the game is over. But eventually it can become impossible for the "glitched" player to proceed, at which point a replay will be necessary.

A few more points regarding DuelingBook:

• When a card effect such as Trap Dustshoot requires the player to reveal their hand, they should do so by banishing it with the command "/banishhand." You may remember that we required this in the past when the "show hand" function was liable to create the sort of glitch described above, but this is actually no longer the case: the only reason we're requiring it here is for the sake of video coverage.

That's all for now. Be sure to stay tuned as coverage for Worlds begins at the end of this week!