Subject: Fixing the Pro Tour Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 08:39:04 -0400 From: "Len Blado" To: Side Note to Frank: This is really an outgrowth of two separate threads (cheating and Mad Hatter's loss of casual players in Magic), so I simply created a new subject line. Currently, in Magic, the Pro Tour has come under fire, both for alienating casual players and for the presumption of rampant cheating. It's in my mind that the current setup of the Pro Tour simply cannot continue in the same vein while retaining credibility. So, for discussion, I have listed a few points below that I believe would make the Pro Tour a much more 'professional' venue, as well as returning the lower levels of play to the casual player, so they can take part in organized Magic play without being preyed upon by unscrupulous professionals. 1. As has been mentioned elsewhere, there should be a distinction between professional and amateur Magic players. My recommendation would be that qualification for Professional status confers the following (if accepted): a) Invitation to all Pro Tour Events, Worlds, and possibly inclusion in other events such as the Duellist Invitational. b) Prohibition of play in any sanctioned event which the players are not invited to per (a), with the possible exception of Prereleases. c) Issuance of a new DCI card and number with 'Professional' clearly marked on it to ease the bookkeeping of (a) and (b) above. d) A minimum 'appearance fee' of $1,000 for any tournament at which a registered Professional appears and is invited to. e) A separate ranking total, based on how much money was won in Professional tournaments by the player in the past year. 2. Pro Tours themselves should be changed somewhat: a) Size should be reduced. While side events would remain the same, the main event would consistent of a much smaller body of people. Given that the current setup is a small group of hardcore professionals and a large group of 'fodder' for them to beat, we should simply reduce this to the hardcore group. b) One Judge per Match. Cheating has shown itself to be so endemic that this is a necessary step. If the size of Pro Tours can be reduced to 64 participants (or so), then you'd need around 40 judges per Pro Tour. Fundamentally, an additional rule for Pro events only would exist: game play outside the direct supervision of a judge is invalid. c) Pure Swiss format. Prizes should be awarded strictly on the basis of match points. While this eliminates the certainty of a sole winner, it is a far more honest and equitable way to distribute prizes, rather than relying on a fairly random set of tiebreaks to determine the difference between making a pile of cash and watching the final rounds from the cheap seats. d) Seeding of initial seats. Every professional player should be seeded according to either previous Pro experience or previous amateur ranking (if no Pro experience is available) to ensure that the best players play towards the end of the day. While something akin to this is in force, it is severely warped by the inclusion of unrelated performance against amateurs by pros. 3. Elimination of the PTQ system. In shrinking the available slots on the Pro Tour, PTQs become unreasonable- they simply award too many slots, and along strange biases. For example, Alaskan PTQs (although infrequent) draw from a pool considerably smaller than LA PTQs. Ergo, quite a few people qualify who, if they had competed in a larger market, most likely would not have. This is not a comment on the relative strengths of specific players in any given areas, but rather on the simple demographics of low population areas. 4. Qualification through Grand Prix and Worlds. a) National competitions would be exclusively for amateur players. The 'prize' awarded would be a stipend geared towards covering the expense of going to Worlds. b) The top non-Professional players at Worlds would be qualified for the next season's Pro Tour, to replace the lowest ranked players currently on the Pro Tour. c) Worlds would include both amateurs (the National teams) and professionals. d) Grand Prix would include only amateurs, giving (aside from prizes) a slot on the next season's Pro Tour. What would this accomplish? First of all, it would allow the development of a truly professional class of player. By allowing players to qualify and then stay for an entire season on the Pro Tour, without losing money in travel, players could reasonably play the game without having to visit every tournament they could find just to ameliorate the expense of being a professional player. Second of all, it would segregate the truly competitive players from the casual players, allowing a broader spectrum of competition in the lower level tournaments. Lastly, it would attempt to eliminate the spectre of cheating from the highest profile tournaments by directly supervising professional level games. -Len Blado