Managing Competition Officials

Overview

Every competition needs a staff beyond the primary admin: adjudicators to judge, a scrutineer to confirm recalls and placements, a deck captain to check competitors in, an emcee to run the floor, and sometimes a co-organizer to help manage the event. This page explains how to add people to those roles, who is allowed to do it, and how removal works.

Who Can Manage Officials

Only the primary admin — the account that originally created the competition — can add or remove officials. Co-organizers cannot, even though they can help manage most other parts of the competition. This is not a setting you can change; it's a fixed limit on the Officials page itself.

If you're a co-organizer and need an official added or removed, ask the primary admin to do it.

Key Concepts

Officials must already have an account

You can only add someone as an official if they already have an account in the system. There is no invitation email and no "pending" state — adding an official is a direct lookup by email address, and it fails immediately if no matching account exists.

If the person you want to add doesn't have an account yet, ask them to sign up first, then add them using the email address they registered with.

Note: Studio accounts can't be added as officials. Use the individual's personal account instead.

One role per competition, per person

A person can hold exactly one official role on a given competition at a time. The roles are:

Owner (primary admin)
Organizer (co-organizer)
Adjudicator
Scrutineer
Deck Captain
Emcee

These are mutually exclusive — for example, someone who is already your competition's scrutineer can't also be added as an adjudicator for the same competition. If you try, the system will reject it. To change someone's role, remove them from their current role first, then add them again in the new one.

The same person can hold different roles at different competitions without any conflict.

Adding is immediate, not an invitation

There's no accept/decline step. As soon as you add someone, they have that role on the competition right away, and it will show up on their dashboard the next time they log in. Double-check the email address and role before saving.

Adding an Official

Steps

Open the competition and go to the Officials page.
Click New Official.
Enter the official's User Email — the email address associated with their existing account.
Select their Role: Adjudicator, Deck Captain, Emcee, Organizer, or Scrutineer.
Click Save.

The new official appears on the Officials page immediately, and you can filter the list by role using the filter menu at the top of the page.

Note: The Owner role isn't available from this form — it reflects the account that created the competition and isn't assigned through this flow.

Removing an Official

Steps

Open the competition's Officials page.
Find the official's card and select Remove.
Confirm the removal in the dialog that appears.

Officials who can't be removed

Once an adjudicator has been assigned to judge a round on the competition's schedule, they can no longer be removed — even if the round hasn't started or they haven't submitted any marks yet. This protects the scoring records tied to that assignment.

If you try to remove an official in this state, the removal will fail and you'll see an error. To free them up, you'd need to reassign the round to someone else first; if the round has already been judged, the assignment — and the official — generally can't be removed at all. Contact support if you run into this and aren't sure how to proceed.

Officials who haven't been assigned to any round yet (including adjudicators newly added but not yet scheduled) can be removed with no restriction.

Where to Find This

Organizers manage officials from the competition's Officials page (in the Competition section of the management sidebar). Assigning an already-added adjudicator to specific events or rounds is a separate step, done from the Event Assignments and Round Assignments pages under Adjudicator Assignments.