I have witnessed the following situation:

There is a FNM tournament with 8 players, currently at the beginning round 3.
There are only two players, who have 6 match points (2-0).
These two players know, that if they agree to intentional draw, they will place 1st and 2nd in the tournament and so they do agree and report ID to TO.
However, they are not very satisfied with the fact, that they final standing will be determined by the OMW%, which is absolutely out of their control, so they decide to play the match (off the tournament) and let the winner of this match get the 1st prize and the loser 2nd prize, without taking official results into account.

What is your oninion?
Can this behaviour be considered a bribery?

The way I see this is that the players have already reported the ID to the
TO so the match is over. However they choose to split the prize after the
result has been entered would be up to them. There are those who split at
FNMs and then play for the PWP. I think the key is that no-one is offering
anything in exchange for anything. They are playing magic to determine how
they want to split the prizes after already reporting an ID. I don't see
an issue here. Someone may have a different interpretation than I.

My take:

Nothing was offered in exchange for a concession (or ID in this case), so there is no bribery involved. After the results are official, how they decide to split the prizing is no longer our concern.

It is certainly not Bribery. Actually, it's rather like Wagering. They are playing a game of magic outside the tourney and the winner will get packs from the loser - well he MAY get packs, because the winner of this game may win the event anyway.

But, calling it Wagering is waaay too technical, because they aren't actually betting on any aspect of the tourney (like who comes in first or how many players there will be or whether the world champ over there will win 2-0 or 2-1). As long as they don't go crazy advertising their behavior to the room, I wouldn't worry about it. Think of it as money drafting at big tourneys… Happens all the time and we know it. We even SEE it, and sometimes the players even TELL us that they have a great deck in the money draft. But, as long as they do it sort of privately and don't go advertising it and don't have cash out, we're certainly not going to scour the room for the money drafters.

So, in this case, as long as they are discreet about it, I would just hand the correct tourney prizes to the official 1st and 2nd place finishers based on breakers, and they can go about their business. This isn't the kind of wagering I'd be too concerned about because it doesn't involve any tournament aspect. You can even be proactive by reminding them that they should never bet on an active match in an active torunament :)

Eric Shukan
L3
Woburn, MA USA
—– Original Message —–
From: David Zalesky
To: eshukan@verizon.net
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 4:08 PM
Subject: Intentional draw (potentional bribery) at Regular REL (Tournament Operations)


I have witnessed the following situation:

There is a FNM tournament with 8 players, currently at the beginning round 3.
There are only two players, who have 6 match points (2-0).
These two players know, that if they agree to intentional draw, they will place 1st and 2nd in the tournament and so they do agree and report ID to TO.
However, they are not very satisfied with the fact, that they final standing will be determined by the OMW%, which is absolutely out of their control, so they decide to play the match (off the tournament) and let the winner of this match get the 1st prize and the loser 2nd prize, without taking official results into account.

What is your oninion?
Can this behaviour be considered a bribery?

—————————
If you want to respond to thi s thread, simply reply to this e-email. Or view and respond to this message on the web at http://apps.magicjudges.org/notifications/118989/

Disable all notifications for this topic: http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/noemail/2030/
Receive on-site notifications only for this topic: http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/noemail/2030/

You can change your email notification settings at http://apps.magicjudges.org/profiles/edit

I believe that there was no bribery involved.
Both players agreed on the way the prize should be split and neither player seems to have offered the other anything in exchange for anything else.
Also, I do believe that the key point here is whether their actions will affect the integrity of the event/tournament.
In this case, results have been reported, and the results were obtained through means that are not random (eg. rolling a dice to determine a winner etc.), thus there is no issue here.
It would be different if one player went “Hey, I'll take second and you'll take the prize for first if you'll concede to me as I need the points for byes at GPs”.

If you're very concerned about this sort of behavior, you could alter the prize payout for 8-man drafts to reflect the trend. At one of our local stores, 8-man draft prizes are now a standard 5-5-1-1 instead of 6-4-1-1 as they were before, since the third round included an ID and “split” about 90% of the time. Since all the tournaments ended up paying 5-5-1-1 because of the ID/split anyway, the store owner chose to codify that prize to prevent the appearance of any shenanigans.

Making prizes encourage the playing of magic is the best way to do it. So
make the “2nd place” prize always go to the loser of the final. People are
less likely to want to split when they are garanteed second place anyway.

(My comment assumes 8 man drafts are swiss, which they all are around these
parts)


On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 3:46 PM, William Stephenson <
forum-2030@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:

> If you're very concerned about this sort of behavior, you could alter the
> prize payout for 8-man drafts to reflect the trend. At one of our local
> stores, 8-man draft prizes are now a standard 5-5-1-1 instead of 6-4-1-1 as
> they were before, since the third round included an ID and “split” about
> 90% of the time. Since all the tournaments ended up paying 5-5-1-1 because
> of the ID/split anyway, the store owner chose to codify that prize to
> prevent the appearance of any shenanigans.
>
> ——————————————————————————–
> If you want to respond to this thread, simply reply to this e-email. Or
> view and respond to this message on the web at
> http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/post/9592/
>
>
> Disable all notifications for this topic:
> http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/noemail/2030/<http://%20apps.magicjudges.org/forum/noemail/2030/>
> Receive on-site notifications only for this topic:
> http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/noemail/2030/
>
> You can change your email notification settings at
> http://apps.magicjudges.org/profiles/edit
>



–
Gareth Pye
Level 2 Judge, Melbourne, Australia
Australian MTG Forum: mtgau.com
gareth@cerberos.id.au - www.rockpaperdynamite.wordpress.com
“Dear God, I would like to file a bug report”