Forums and Facebook posts have been completely up in arms about a recent occurrence in the Winter Regionals: the instance of players intentionally drawing, or IDing, during Swiss rounds. For those who haven’t seen it, what this basically comes down to is two players consenting to declare the match a tie rather than playing the match, with the judge’s approval, and moving on from there.
Let me begin with a simple request: if you’re only reading this to see my side, then either affirm your own beliefs or look for holes in my arguments to bash me in the comments, I strongly suggest you skip down to the last paragraph. If you actually want to have a coherent discussion on Nugget Bridge forums, or just read about a few misconceptions, continue.
I have two goals with this article: the first is to address misconceptions about intentional draws that players should be aware of before bashing others, and the second is to offer my two cents regarding a solution.
Misconceptions About the Intentional Draw
The reason that this is wrong is that the rules state otherwise, and players should know better
I want to state up front that I’m conceptually against legalizing intentional draws. I think they don’t serve the purpose they are intended to do well enough to keep around, and I have read from others that, despite enforcement being inconsistent, the Tournament Organizer Chris Brown (AlphaZealot) intended them to be against the rules.
From a moral standpoint, the question of whether or not to ID is obvious. The problem with IDing is not that it is expressly forbidden in the rules; some judges, independent of how the written rules are interpreted by the players, are inconsistent in deciding whether or not this is okay. The reason IDing is an issue, from a moral standpoint at least, is that the only scenario in which a player can gain an advantage by IDing is one in which most other players don’t follow suit. By its very nature, it is a tactic that depends on other players playing a certain way, and manipulating that. If everyone IDed, then we’d have draw tie breakers the same way we do win/loss tie breakers, and the tournament would function as per usual, and no unfair advantage would be had. So for right now, with most players believing IDs are illegal and not doing it, there is no doubt that there is a possibility of an unfair advantage (more on the specific term “possibility” later).
But from a legality standpoint, things get debatable. The rules forbid playing that goes against the spirit of the game in ways such as bribery, and also clearly states that a player who selects run will have that match marked as a loss. But the interpretations of these statements have been argued back and forth; for example, one forum post commented that the IDs in question received full consent and did not involve bribery, and did not actually play the match and use the double-forfeit option, but instead directly went to the judge. Furthermore, the aforementioned comment directly from Chris Brown is not in a public and widely accessible manner, and at this point is merely heresay from the grapevine.
Most players assume their IDing comrades should know better. But in some cases, they don’t. I think that most, if not all, of the people who IDed during this last weekend strive to be in good standing with the community, and logically would not have done this had they seen the act from the perspectives voiced through social media in the time after the event. Granted, I don’t believe ignorance is an excuse in many scenarios, but I also don’t believe the players strictly speaking believed they were cheating, and should not be treated to the same harshness. From the ones that I’ve talked to, players not only had direct consent of each other, but also direct consent of the head judge at the time. They did everything they could to double check that the idea they had was, in fact, legal. And a judge’s rule is final, whether we like it or not – the judge could have (and, depending on your viewpoint, should have) said no at any time.
For this to be treated with the severity that it has been given so far, the first step is a firm and explicit ban on IDs, with no room for misinterpretation. In any other situation, while the player’s actions are of course in a gray area, the fact remains that it is the tournament organizer and judges’ responsibility to ensure that all players are informed of the rules and acting in accordance with them, and the fact that this even happened begs for change in the written clarifications we have.
Players who do this inherently gain an unfair advantage
If you have a smart phone, I strongly recommend a paid app called Debate Mobile, which can show you the possible win/loss ratios of a tournament, given a certain number of swiss rounds and number of players. For those that don’t have it, I’ll skip to what you’ll find by looking at it: the Oregon Regional Championships that just passed were a perfect example of why it is not a hundred percent accurate to assume IDs give an advantage to the players that use them.
In a tournament of 128 players with seven rounds of swiss, the overwhelming odds are in favor of a single 7-0 score, and seven 6-1 scores, with no chance for a 5-2 score or below to make top cut. Players who go for an ID after one loss will be 5-1-1, making them automatically below the top 8 top cut that is standard for this size of a tournament. The only way for someone with an ID on their record to guarantee top cut in these circumstances is to never lose, at which point there was little point in IDing in the first place. The match that person avoided with an ID almost would have been better off as a loss. I think, on some level, some players who ID know this, and do this not to gain an advantage but rather to avoid having to play (and affect the outcome of) a friend, which is a whole other discussion.
A tie is its own separate category of the ranking system, meaning that a 5-1-1 will always go above a 5-2, but will also always go below a 6-1, the same way a Bullet Punch is always faster than a Dynamic Punch regardless of individual speed, but will always be slower than an Extremespeed. In this way, a tie in many instances is a safe middleground that will never be the best thing a player can do. A player at 5-1 going into the final round of a Swiss will be better off risking the match and trying to win if the goal is to guarantee top cut; playing it safe means being higher than certain people, but never high enough to matter. That is, of course, assuming conditions are similar enough to the example above.
The Missouri Regional, on the other hand, definitely saw some influence with IDing, due to the nature of the top 16 top cut. Most players will still make it, but people on the bubble who relied on resistances will be forced just below where they need to be if a potential loss of another player was recorded as a tie instead. This is a possibility that I cannot deny, and the part that builds my argument that, for the sake of the most fair tournament possible, every tournament should know in advance whether or not this okay, and it should not be left up to the head judge presiding over a specific regional.
Why This Matters, and What You Can Do
I stand by what I said before about being conceptually against the use of this; from what more informed players know, the absence of the intentional draw should be the originally intended format. But the way the Pokemon community as a whole has addressed the issue as a whole is far more unsportsmanlike than the instance itself; shaming people over Facebook statuses and posts doesn’t make the issue better, but merely makes some players feel worse. Whether they should feel guilty is up to you, and I won’t contest that.
But if you really want to do something about this, don’t waste your time ranting on the internet where no one in power will see it. I strongly encourage you to write to TPCi, and let your voice be heard in a constructive and assertive but still polite manner. Explain to them why having rules consistently enforced the same way, and more clearly spelled out in an accessible way for that matter, are important ideals. Share your side of what happened, and ask them to change things for the next set of tournaments (it’s not like we’ve never seen TPCi change the format mid season before).
This all comes down to one of the most fundamentals of being a Pokemon master: if something isn’t working, complaining doesn’t do any good – you have to do something to change it. Complaining doesn’t fix teambuilding issues, it doesn’t fix prediction issues, and it won’t fix this. For all of us to be better trainers, we have to face our problems head on rather than complain and shame someone for our own satisfaction.
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