Hello everyone, lately I've been having a problem in my local community.

We make tournaments in our store (4 or 5 swiss rounds, top 8 or top 4 cuts depending on the number of players).
But around round 3 or 4, players begin to arrange the results of their matches (ties mainly).

They normally do this because in our community there are “teams” so they share the cards and they don't really want to eliminate between them, so they normally tie.

When I read the rules I saw that agreement to tie will be reported as a 0-0, but the players are now just sitting there for 50 minutes “pretending to play” and forcing the tie, to get 1 point each (1-1-0), causing other players to get angry over this.

So I would like to know what do you do to prevent the forced ties? (There is no brivery involved in these).

Educate them.

The difference between a match result of 0-0 and 1-1 (or even 9-9) is minimal; it can affect the 2nd and 3rd tiebreakers. It might not be to their benefit to have those extra games on their record, if those tiebreakers actually matter (granted, that's a pretty unusual situation).

And explain that, by sitting there and only pretending to play, it might appear that they're trying to do something wrong. And that you can't guarantee that every judge will forgive them. Perhaps it will look like Slow Play? or even Stalling??!? If they just write “ID” on the slip and turn it in right away, they can avoid suspicion.

* * *

Now, if your question was “how do I prevent intentional draws?”, the answer is even simpler: you don't.

You might also want to tell them that 0-0 is the same as 1-1 point wise.
.. both results will give them one point each.

Greet
Jeremie

Could they each just concede a game, then ID the third?

Originally posted by Chris Nowak:

Could they each just concede a game, then ID the third?

Sure. They can fill out the slip as 0-0-99. (I don't think WER will let you enter that, and don't recall if DCIR did, either… but they can agree to draw any number of games.)

The first order of ranking is Match Points (1 for a draw, 3 for a win); the first tiebreaker is Opponent's Match Win percentage. Those are *usually* the only ones that matter. However, on occasion, the 2nd and even 3rd tiebreakers matter - and those are based on game win percentages - i.e., how many games did you win, out of the total you could have won?

And if you drew 99 games, you didn't win any of them. Guess you just punted your Game Win Percentage.

If you win a match 2-0, you've won 100% of those games. If you win 2-1, you've still won 66.6% - more than the 50% rate you get from a 1-1 draw.

Like I said, educate them on the reasons why they're just wasting time - and why it might be worse than that, in some circumstances.

It was my interpretation of

“either player may concede to or draw with the other, though if the conceding player won a game in the match, the match must be reported as 2-1. Intentional draws are always reported as 0-0-3.”

that we would enter any match result handed in prior to time (and thus clearly an ID) as 0-0-3 into WER. Am I mistaken?

People kept asking for an “official” answer to “how do we record IDs?” - so 0-0-3 was added to the MTR.

However, both DCIR and WER record a different result than that, if you use the hotkey for ID. (I believe DCIR was 0-0, and WER 0-0-1, but I'm not positive. Doesn't matter - it's NOT 0-0-3.)

It's not wrong to use that hotkey, and it's not wrong to manually enter 0-0-3.

I will correct one misunderstanding, however - if the players played any games before agreeing to an ID, the results slip needs to reflect those games. 1-1-0 is a more likely outcome; they play one game, then agree to ID, so the player who won concedes game two, then they draw. Or they agree to a draw as time expires, or is about to; that's probably 1-1-1.

You don't change that to 0-0-3 (or 0-0, etc), just because of their agreement.

This actually did come up at an event I was playing (though not judging): two players had split two games, then as they were shuffling up for the third, the TO informed them that there were about two minutes left in the round and that theirs was the last match. At that point they agreed to draw.

1. Were the TO's actions OK?

2. How would the match be reported? 1-1? 1-1-1?

(Also, I thought Game Win Percentage was calculated by taking 3*(game wins) + (games drawn) and dividing that by 3*(number of games played) for each match, then averaging that over the number of matches. Is this incorrect?)

Originally posted by Daniel Pareja:

Were the TO's actions OK?

Sure, that's fine. He didn't put any pressure on them, he just informed them of public information.

Originally posted by Daniel Pareja:

How would the match be reported?

They hadn't started the third game:

MTR 2.3
The game is considered to have begun once all players have completed their mulligans.

We'd record that as 1-1-0; if they had both said “I'll keep”, that would cross that threshold, the third game would have begun, and the correct match result is 1-1-1.

Just because I've tested this with another judge: WER goes to 0-0-7 as a maximum.