We describe our system to extract genia events that was developed for the BioNLP 2013 Shared Task. Our system uses a supervised information extraction platform based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) and separates the process of event classification into multiple stages. For each event type the SVM parameters are adjusted and feature selection carried out. We find that this optimisation improves the performance of our approach. Overall our system achieved the highest precision score of all systems and was ranked 6th of 10 participating systems on F-measure (strict matching). 