Szene: Rules Are Rules 14.08.2017, 11:12

Introduction - "Rules Are Rules"

Interview with Graham Pitt, Head of Referee

In preparation for this interview series, several interviews, beginning in the middle of last year, were conducted over a longer period in order to avoid possible delays in the publication of the series. Correspondingly, the one or the other information may already be outdated. We ask for your understanding.

First of all please introduce yourself to our readers. Who are you and what do you do?

Hi my name's Graham, maybe some know me by my Twitter name @messioso. I work for ESL in Leagu Operations, mainly focusing on Counter-Strike right now and all the pro-competition that we have: Intel Extreme Masters, ESL One and ESL Pro League.

Can you elaborate a bit on your career? How did you end up at the ESL?

I ended up in ESL in late 2008. I'd already worked previously as a referee, as a tournament admin online for some other organizations and then ESL was running the local pro league in the UK and I wanted to work on that. And then from there it developed into more of a serious thing for me. When I finished my university they offered me a job and I moved out to Germany and here I am.

From my old days of LAN Parties and such I don't know the real distinction between an admin and a referee. Where's the line drawn today?

I would say that that's still very much the same. I think it's just different words for the same thing in my opinion. Admin is what was or known as online admins. You run you with the administration of the tournament and now we have a sort of distinction where we call them referees, they're the rule arbitrators. I think it's because they're more visible now, you see them at the events more. You put a face to a name and it's like football. I think that's the distinction that's sort of changed but I think the role is still the same.

„ We are the first line of defense… “

So your job is not just to enforce the rules and be there if there's a dispute between teams, you also have to take care of the technical side of things, correct?

Yeah. I mean we all are sort of the first response for any technical problems that may occur. Me especially and the guys I work with, we have like an IT background usually so we can fix basic technical problems with the computers, Counter-Strike and the programs we use such as Teamspeak. I would say we're not IT professionals but we do have an IT team behind us who obviously can fix more complex problems than that but we are the first line of defense in fixing the most basic issues.

What does your daily routine look like?

My daily routine depends a lot on whether I'm preparing for an event, be at an event or after an event. Preparing for an event involves a lot of planning the tournament structure and the schedule. A lot of it involves the flights for the players to get to the events that they're going to attend for us and making sure that they have all the information they need. Writing information packs and guides and anything that might help them. Obviously working internally with our other departments like the TV department, IT department and Event department to ensure we have enough computers where they're meant to be, the TV schedule and the tournament schedule are the same and no one's can confuse two things. From an I.T. perspective we have a lot of things to work with such as the anticheat restriction measures. We don't have internet at our computers, we don't allow USB access and things like that. That things have to be worked out individually for every event. So that's more of the pre-event. And then when we get to an event obviously it's running the physical tournament. Getting here in the morning, make sure the teams are here, they're warming up, they're ready to start the match when the match time starts. If we see anything that we don't like or is against the rules we have to enforce the rules and then punish the teams. A daily routine event is pretty much the same thing, it's just match match match match match. Just get the teams in and out, play the games and try and stick to the schedule.

Can you talk about what was the latest rule you had to enforce?

Well the big rule right now we're having is the technical timeout rule where teams are not allowed to communicate with each other via voice or typing during a technical pause. So that's a pause where you know someone's got a problem with their computer or the game and they have to restart. We don't allow them to talk during that time because there is a thought that some teams may be faking technical pauses to then have additional time to talk or break momentum of the other team. So we don't allow them to communicate which hopefully prevents the will to cause a problem like that so they don't gain much of an advantage.

And how do you enforce that? Do you mute teamspeak or just make sure that they don't talk at all?

Yeah we mute the teamspeak as soon as the technical pauses gets called. We do that from the admin PC where I'm usually sitting and then we have admins behind the players at all times during the matches and they they just remind them that they can't talk. We monitor all the players screens, if they're typing ingame to each other as well. So we make sure they can't do that as well and we can always check the server logs back to make sure they didn't type anything if we missed anything. But generally they've been very very good so far.

„ So we still pay out the full one million dollars, it just goes to different places… “

How do you penalize the teams if they don't respect the rules?

It depends on the rule they've broken. For example the rule that we just mentioned about the tactical pause, we're very harshly punishing that. It's a straight up 10 percent prize money gone every time they do it, every match. So that's a very harsh penalty. If you win this event it's $500.000 for the first place, so you lose 50.000 straight up and that money gets redistributed back to the other teams. So any team that loses money will then have their prize money redistributed back to all the other teams in the tournament. We still pay out the full one million dollars, it just goes to different places.

And do you publicize this punishments or does just the team and the managers know about this? Does the public get any information on this, because I can't remember any instance of any major rule that has been broken in the last event.

The rule books are generally online. They can be found just like our Intel Extreme Masters and ESL Pro League rules. The ESL One rules have been recently rewritten to include some of these new things and I think they should have gone live during this event already. But the teams have certainly been informed of them ahead of time. Usually we don't necessarily like to make a big deal about all the infractions you see. There may be times when we've we might punish the team with 1, 2, 3 percent of their prize money during an event and we don't necessarily write on Twitter or announce that we've punished the team for this. Obviously if it comes to disqualifying a team which we did do in Intel Extreme Masters Taipei because they had a VAC banned player, obviously that affects the entire tournament. It's quite obvious that team isn't playing. So we have to publicize things like that. But if it's generally just a small infraction we will just tell the team "hey if you had a warning then this is what's happening". And if they choose to take it to Twitter that's their own prerogative. But we generally - unless it needs to be out in the public sphere - then we won't necessarily do it.

So in case something happens that isn't clearly covered in rules, what happens then and how do you handle it?

Generally one of the first rules of every rule book is that in the interest of fair play, sportsmanship and the the interests of the league, there's a rule that basically says that we can kind of do what we want and we can make rules apply to how we need them or how we want them based on the situation. Obviously sometimes a situation arises that is just completely not covered in any way and you have to make a call eventually. That's basically what that rule is there for. Obviously we wouldn't start bending rules during the tournament just to suit ourselves, but if there is something that comes up that is just completely left out, then we would use that rule to find a solution of some kind that hopefully everyone agrees with.

Let's get back to to your job and your daily routine. Has anything changed a lot in the last years?

I would say it's maintained pretty much the same in terms of like responsibilities. But I would say that personally as I've got more into the products we have, in some events I get more involved in the natural product itself. For example in Intel Extreme Masters I might get more involved in certain aspects of the event or the season than other events. In ESL Pro League I actually don't do that much at all, I usually just come in just for the finals event and sort of just run those and I leave the actual online season alone. So it depends on what I'm working on at the time but most of basic things are exactly the same.

So after the tournament, is there any kind of evaluation how it was run and where there's room for improvement?

Yes and we're always looking to improve. We have internal meetings over at ESL where we go to each department and say "hey this was really good at this event, this wasn't so good at this event". We work out ways to improve and generally I think we do improve a lot behind the scenes, thats how we feel, but yeah we improve a lot of things. I directly talk with all the teams after the event and say "hey do you have any feedback on this or anything else" and sometimes they will tell me "everything was really great we had a good time" and sometimes "this could be improved, this wasn't so great". We will obviously take that feedback into our internal meetings and then try and improve on it. So I'd say yeah we all are constantly striving to improve everything.

In the match between mousesports and Virtus.pro they had serious sound issues. How are these things fixed? Is there a switch of hardware?

Technical issues obviously vary, depending on what the technical issues are. In this case it was a players own sound card. I can't necessarily be responsible for every piece of hardware that a player brings into the event. If it doesn't work then we will put them back onto the basic what we provide, what will obviously then be the onboard sound from the motherboard. If the players are not happy with that, which in this case he wasn't, then we actually found a backup sound card from one of his teammates and we used that and that's how we resolved the problem in the end. If it was for example a problem with a monitor or a PC, like you have the monitors flickering or dead pixels, then we'd obviously just replace the monitor straight away. Same thing with cables and anything that we provide, we can just switch out. When it comes to player hardware it's a lot harder because they're very specific, maybe they have a very specific keyboard, mousepad or mouse and then it becomes very complicated. It actually amazes me that a lot of players don't have backup hardware because I think every player playing for one million dollars, if you're mouse stops working they should have backup hardware.

„ We do test the hardware and we have different ways of doing it… “

I think last year players had to notify the ESL beforehand which hardware would be brought in and then it would be sealed off to make sure there is no foul play as a reaction to the Steam Cloud cheating scandal. Are they allowed to bring soundcards and other internal hardware that they plug into the computer?

Anything they plugin to the computers is USB related and they have to drop off all of their gear to us on the first day. We keep it for the duration of the tournament, in time they're not actually physically playing with it. During the event it's locked away in boxes. We do test the hardware and we have different ways of doing it. I don't want to go into how we test it because obviously that would enable some teams to try and maybe bypass or work out what we're doing, but we do test the hardware and we don't get the fresh hardware, they bring in what they're comfortable with. It's very hard logistically to get fresh hardware everytime and at a extreme cost. So we're not at that level yet but we would potentially like to go to there. Right now what we do is we test the hardware randomly or we'll test X player from team Y and we'll see what happens. So far everyone has been completely fine, we haven't had any problems.

Lets talk about something different. What are some great challenges that your job brings along that most of the viewers or readers don't recognize?

Biggest challenges of the job usually revolve around just managing the needs and the wants of the players against the live show. Obviously the players want as much time to warm up and prepare and be happy. On the other hand the TV show needs to flow and we can't have massive breaks. It's managing the fine line between keeping the players happy enough and keeping the TV production happy enough because essentially, in my control, I say when the game starts. TV say we're ready, players say we're ready and sometimes they are not on the same time. So I have to try and bridge the gap and make it as close as possible whilst also keeping people as happy as possible.

So have you ever been forced to make an unpopular decision? And if so can you tell us what it is?

There are one or two disqualifications, not necessarily in Counter-Strike but also in Starcraft. There's been a few disqualifications we've had to make. Obviously the most recent one would be the the TyLoo disqualification at IEM Taipei because they had a VAC banned player. It went down sort of 50/50, a lot of people sometimes try to get the benefit of the doubt to the player, like "you know it was three, four years ago". But at the end of the day Valve state that no player who's ever had a VAC ban on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive can play in the Valve major or any qualification to it. So it was a easy decision to make. I think maybe if I went on the Chinese community websites then I probably see a lot more hate but I think maybe because looking primarily on HLTV, anything I read most people are like "oh that's the background". That's just what it is. So I didn't think it was necessary too unpopular, but it certainly wasn't popular.

What are some of the most important things to make sure the event runs smoothly and it's a great experience for players and viewers, that they might not be aware of?

It's a really tough question that one. From the spectators point of view they want to see great games all the time, no breaks, things like that. And then from the players point of view they want comfortable playing conditions, lots of time to prepare and practice and a comfortable hotel because some of them travel for long periods of time. They need to feel like it's as close to their home experience as possible and sometimes that isn't easy to replicate. Especially for us, we fly all around the world. We don't necessarily have the same suppliers for each event we have. So sometimes the tables are slightly different height or width and managing expectations like that can really make the difference between the players being happy and the players being not very happy. And if sometimes you start off on the wrong foot with the players from the beginning, things can snowball from there and you can get quite tense situations where just the smallest things will annoy people. The thing before was already annoying them and then it just builds up. I think preparation and planning are the two biggest things. And I think that's one thing we're starting to improve a lot on right now.

How far in advance are tournaments or league finals being planned? What kind of requirements have to be met to get special venues?

I can't speak on the preparation and planning for a specific event too much but it varies a lot between events. Sometimes we can announce an event a month before and just go straight into it, we did that for example with the the Pro League Finals recently in London. They were announced kind of mid-season whereas we've announced the Pro League Finals for the second season in Sao Paolo in Brazil for October. We've announced this before the season even started. We haven't actually announced the start of the season yet but we have announced the end of the season. So it depends a lot on the specific event in question and what stage in the planning we're able to confirm enough things that we can say "hey this event is going to happen, here it is". I'm not involved in some of the high level planning of the events, finding venues, etc. So I can't really speak on how it happens but when I find out about it, it's usually not too much ahead of the public. But yeah I'd say it just ranges a lot depending on the event and who is managing the event. Also we work with a lot of local partners. We have Brazilian partners, obviously we have the Polish partners to help us with Katowice, we have the UK partners who helped us with the London event and a big North American office who helped us with the IEM Oakland, which will be happening in November. Things like that have been put into place for nearly a year even.

From a professional standpoint: Is there an event or league, even outside of the CS:GO scene, that has particularly impressed you and may be acting as some kind of role model to you?

It's tough. I have to think about that for a second.. I think we can draw upon from a lot of different events. I really enjoyed watching the LCS grow into what it's become in League of Legends. The way they have the weekly shows and they build the storylines for the whole season, they have all the teams live at the event every week. I've really enjoyed watching that. The same can be said about ELEAGUE recently in CS:GO. Their shows are very slick and you can see there's a TV element to it which I quite like the idea. I think a lot of different production companies have their own strengths and weaknesses. For example PGL, we have them in for this week for the events game production. People say that you can't match that and to some degree I'd say I agree. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses I think. And I think a lot of the skill is to make sure you don't have too much into the show and it flows nicely.

How safe do you think tournaments are in regard of cheating? I saw these boxes you talked about, where all the players have to leave their mobile phones, correct?

I mean I obviously can't talk for ESLs Anticheat at this point because I don't have any experience in that field. Some players have told me what happened at other events and I'd say it's similar to same levels that we do in some cases. Obviously we test all the hardware, we keep all that hardware, they can't change it during the event. In regard to phones, they have no communication devices on them at all. We ensure they have nothing on their person and that includes the coaches as well. We make sure that no one can get into their teamspeak and talk to them. Beyond that we obviously lock down the Internet restrictions on their computers. Anything that's unlocked is Steam so they can login and then they play at a local server that's located in the venue, which is completely locked down by us as well. They have no USB access to the computers apart from mouse and keyboards, they can't plug any removable storage in, they can't install anything because every time you run an *.exe file you have to have administrator permissions to run it and the admin password. So an admin or referee has to install every *.exe file on the computer and the same goes for many other files, like batch files and other things. So anything that may possibly have something in it we generally have to install it ourselves, which hopefully reduces the risk alot of anyone installing anything. All the players drivers that they get are provided on a local file system by us and we check through all the drivers, make sure we download them from the manufacturer's website so they are legit. Beyond that I don't really want to go too much into what else we do because that would potentially allow teams to work around it.

„ So far every person that we've tested has come through as completely clean… “

In your personal opinion, do you think doping checks are really necessary?

I think we're getting to a point where enough money is available that there's a potential for it. I think that getting in early and telling the teams that it isn't OK to be taking performance enhancing drugs that may aid them is important. We want everyone to be playing on essentially the same playing field and I think that doing doping checks is a pretty vital part of going towards that. I'm not saying that I think that anyone has been taking any performance enhancing drugs. So far every person that we've tested has come through as completely clean. And I think personally that will continue for a long long time. I don't think there are many people taking drugs. But again we don't want to be in a position where players think they can take them. So I think that is a very good preventative measure to stop that happening.

What's your view on the evolution of sports? Where do you think it's heading, what do you wish to see in future?

We've hit a point now where obviously lots of professional sports notice eSports. We've seen Manchester City just pick up a FIFA player recently, Schalke have a League of Legends Team and then there's many other teams. NRG have Shaquille O'Neal as one of the Investors. Obviously Echo Fox has Rick Fox. The NBA getting into it now aswell. I think we're hitting a point now where we're going to see potentially quite a big shift in my opinion, of a lot of what we call mainstream. We're seeing Turner are doing the ELEAGUE on TV now every week. So I think the mainstream thing is going to happen and it's going to be quite big soon. I don't really know where it's going if I'm honest. Personally I don't want to see all the organizations that have got us this far, I don't want to see them phased out. I don't want to see Manchester United necessarily, I'm quite happy seeing fnatic and Dignitas. Their teams have been here for over a decade now and they've got us where we are now, they deserve to be here as we keep growing. I don't want to see all these legendary organizations talked about as if they were history. I want to talk about them as the present and that's for me one thing I think we need to maintain as we go forth into this in the next few years especially.

If you had unlimited resources and possibilities, what would your dream tournament or league look like?

I honestly don't know. It would have everything! I mean from my personal point of view I would love every team to have their own practice room where they can access it 24/7, as maybe in the hotel where they're staying. They can just wake up like "oh I can't sleep, screw it I'm going to go DM for two hours downstairs". I want every team to be as comfortable as possible, as if they were home. I would love that to be the case for every event they come to. That's one of the basic things. I think it isn't necessarily a requirement right now but it's something that would be so nice to have, that teams would appreciate a lot. I think it would increase the level that teams can play at and show the best Counter-Strike they can. I mean an unlimited amount of money that's just that.. this is a dream right. Ah.. I don't know what I'd do with it.

One last question: which advice can you give fans that might be interested in pursuing a career in your field of expertise?

In my field of expertise I think the best way to get into it is actually to just do it. In this day and age nothing's for free right? I mean that's how I started. I did six years of free volunteer work online. Maybe I went to an event and they might have paid me a bit, but I did six years completely for free online. We have a lot of guys here, they're doing the same thing. They work for ESL Play, our online tournament platform, and they run tournaments online. I was like "hey I've been impressed with you and you doing your work for the last few months online, do you want to come work at an event?" and then they'll come and do it. Some of them are very good at what they do and they stick with me. I've got a very experienced team now. Then I've got like a group a level below them. Gradually I'll take one or two to an event each time and they'll get more experience. And then eventually that's how you'll get hired by someone who will say like "look I've got this experience, I can do this job for you". You are not going to get into my job without doing it for free first I don't think. Because no one's necessarily going to pay you to do something you've never done, it's a very weird niche point. There's no way you can get a degree in League Operations. You either can or can't do it and the way people will find out if you can do it, is by doing it for free I think. So honestly you have to accept that you might have to work for free for once.

Like internships in a completely new industry.

Yeah, I would liken it to doing an internship. It's just: get some experience and then if people see you and you're good at it, then you will get somewhere if you want to. But you will have to put yourself out there and you make it known that this is what you want to do.

*Editors Note: Graham Pitt left ESL at the end of October 2016 and is now working for RFRSH

Missed a part?

In the previous interview we discussed the role of Head Admin, whose duties overlap in many respects with the referee. Nevertheless, it is interesting to take a closer going into the work of officials. With the professionalization of eSports and the ever-increasing events, a job is needed that is a major player in other sports.Without them, some games, digitally as well as traditional, would sink into chaos. It needs a guardian who takes care of the compliance with the rules and in an emergency also pronounce disqualifications. Especially in football, the referees are often unpopular with many fans, many feel disadvantaged when he pronounces his judgment. In the eSport luckily it looks different.Direct intervention into the game are rare and effective public discussions on a rule interpretation are rare. For Graham Pitt, however, the job often does not end with the rule book, he also provides technical support and helps prepare the event and more. As a former Head of Referee and Specialist League Operations at ESL, he offers insights into his work for Turtle Entertainment.