When I was a teenager, shortly after it first came out, a friend taught me to play Magic: The Gathering. I thought it was a lot of fun, got into it as a competi

When I was a teenager, shortly after it first came out, a friend taught me to play Magic: The Gathering. I thought it was a lot of fun, got into it as a competitive tournament player for a while, etc. Later on, I got certified as a tournament judge, and worked my way up the ranks, eventually becoming a level 3 (the current highest level; previously, levels 4 and 5 existed but were kind of special roles for level 3 anyway, so they got collapsed back into it a few years ago). Part of my role was to train and teach other people who wanted to do this. A Magic tournament judge, in the eyes of most players, is just someone you call over when there's a rules question or a dispute in your match. And that is the most visible part of what they do. And level 3 does require expert-level knowledge of the game's rules and tournament policies, and you get tested on that (a long written exam at promotion, and 3-4 refresher/update exams throughout each year). But being level 3 is about a whole lot more than that; L3s aren't more useful to a tournament because they can answer 10x as many rules questions in the same amount of time (they can't). L3s are useful because they act as multipliers for the other people around them. They've put in the time to learn how to coordinate a team of other officials, keep track of all the logistical things that need to be done to keep a tournament running, delegate as necessary and appropriate, etc. This is something that I saw over and over at large tournaments; L2s were permitted to lead teams on occasion as a kind of supervised training exercise (under the watchful eye of an L3), and watching them always brought home just how much stuff I'd had to learn to do in order to make that look easy, and to know how to keep a team running smoothly and getting things done throughout the tournament. But most Magic players don't get that; they still persist in thinking of the higher levels as just "the people who can answer really hard rules questions", when that's a tiny fraction of what's actually going on. Someone who could only answer hard rules questions quickly, without all the other multiplier skills, might be useful as an L2, but never as an L3 (I started out as one of those people, for what it's worth). And when I needed to explain the level structure in a short way, I'd always say it was about broadening your focus. At level 1, your focus is answering questions and being the go-to person in your local game store. At level 2, your focus broadens to include your entire local community, larger competitive events, and helping to train and give feedback on your colleagues. And at level 3, your focus broadens further: now you're concerned with tournaments of all types (including the professional level), you're at least a regional leader, you're working on helping turn existing L1s into L2s and L2s into L3s, etc. At a tournament, when things were going well, it sometimes looked like I was doing very little, unless you paid close attention. I'd wander around the floor of a tournament, having conversations with other judges, pausing every so often to pull out my notebook and write something down or cross something off a checklist, and occasionally consult on resolving some situation that had come up. But an air of nonchalance can cover for a lot of things actually going on; those conversations would be me checking in on members of my team, following up on things they'd asked about earlier, making sure they had things to keep them engaged if the tournament was running slow, redistributing people around the tournament floor if there were areas without good coverage, making sure they got their assigned breaks, delegating or re-scheduling things as needed, working down my various checklists. And by contrast, the times when I looked the busiest were the times when things were badly going wrong.