Subject: Article for the cheating debate.
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 13:15:24 -0400
From: Chad Ellis <cellis@hbs.edu>
To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com

I just got back from a ten-day business trip with no Internet access.
After settling in, I went to the Dojo, hoping to see some new and
interesting decks out of Nationals and some fun stories.  Well, seeing
mono-green in the final eight just about made up for the Sligh and Cad
Bloom (not complaining, but those aren't the decks you're excited to see
winning after ten days of Magic withdrawal).  Far more prevalent, however,
were the postings on cheating...again.

I wasn't there, so I having nothing to say about whether Mike Long did or
did not cheat.  What I do want to address is the number of people who throw
up the tired line that everybody cheats and Long just gets accused and/or
caught more because he's famous or has a reputation or whatever.

Full stop.  Not everybody cheats.  I don't, and most of the people I play
with (which includes some PT players and a lot of others who are close to
that level) don't either.  Now let's get to the specifics of what the
cheater apologists are claiming:

1.  Everybody cheats.  Even you.  Yes, you, you know you cheat.

Bullshit.  It might interest you to know that a large bank was able to
reduce employee theft by adding a question to its employment application --
"Do you steal?"  People who steal (or cheat) are likely to rationalize
their behavior by believing that everyone else steals (or cheats) too.  A
great number of dishonest people assumed the question must be a trick, that
the Bank knew that everyone steals if they can and that they wouldn't hire
anyone dishonest enough to pretend that they wouldn't.  Thus, a lot of
people answered, "Yes."  It is this basic tendency of people to rationalize
their, shall we say, sub-optimal behavior that lies behind the rule that
people who distrust are more likely to be untrustworthy themselves.

Don't fall into this trap.  Most Magic players don't cheat -- most don't
even take advantage of mistakes, like tapping the wrong mana, let alone
draw extra cards, "fix" their life total or any of the other things we see
some doing.  If you cheat, face up to the fact that you're in the dishonest
minority -- if you don't cheat, don't get discouraged or think you're the
only honest player out there and you might as well lump outright cheating
in with the rest of a player's competitive weapons.

2.  Well, if you don't cheat, it's because you're just playing for fun.  If
you had thousands of dollars on the line you'd cheat too.

Bullshit.  I know money is tempting, and some people will cheat for it, but
I am sick of hearing that we'd all sell out our integrity if we had the
shot.  I know what I'm talking about -- I had the chance to "cheat" when I
was a securities analyst on Wall Street.  I won't go into the details here,
but there was nothing illegal involved, no career risk to me if I'd gone
along (quite probably it would have helped, since it was a Director of the
firm asking me to do it) and it could easily have been worth between twenty
and fifty thousand dollars to me in additional year-end bonus.  That's a
lot more than the average PT player is shooting for, and with better odds.
The only downside is it would have meant lying, so I said no.  The price
was simply too high.

I'm not a paragon of virtue, and I am not trying to say, "Look at me, I'm
the shining light, you could be like me."  I don't always live up to my own
standards and I can't guarantee that I wouldn't have yielded to temptation
if I really needed the money.  Nevertheless, the fact is that when offered
the chance to cheat, even when there is real money on the table, a lot of
people would rather keep their integrity.

The Hitmen are widely regarded as honest players, Hacker's (hopefully angry
but not true) post notwithstanding.  There are plenty of others.  I have
drafted with and played against a fair number of PT players, and while some
cheated, most did not, including the ones I beat.  All of them played hard,
not letting any mistakes go and taking advantage of any superior knowledge
they had about card rulings.  In other words, they played like serious
competitors who wanted to win -- within the rules of the game.  Hammer beat
me in a sealed deck match where in every game I got out both an Ivory Tower
and a Jayemdae Tome.  He didn't do it by cheating -- he did it by
out-sideboarding me after I beat him in the first duel, by making fewer
mistakes than I did, and with a bit of luck (didn't hurt to draw Builder's
Bane in game three).  He won like a Pro against an amateur, and I have
every confidence that if he could only have won by cheating it would have
been me in the semi-finals.

Having said that, it's way past time that Wizards and the DCI recognize
that cheating is a serious problem and that by failing to address it they
are making things worse.  For, while many players won't cheat, some will if
the expected reward outweighs the potential punishment.  This is made worse
for several reasons:

1.  Magic is complicated.  Life totals, cards in hand, counters, phase
effects, and in another year judges are going to have to start working out
so they can carry around their book of errata.  This makes the
opportunities for cheating (as well as honest mistakes) far greater.  As
regular a tournament player as I am, I still couldn't answer with 100%
confidence any number of basic rules questions, like "When is a player
committed to having tapped a land for mana?"

2.  Disputes are often hard to resolve.  In chess, both players are
required to take notation of the game.  Claims about whether a player has
made 40 moves before time control or if a player's King has moved so he
cannot castle can be verified by looking at the notation.  In Magic, we are
allowed to write down life totals as we go, but are specifically prohibited
from taking notes about how the current board situation arose.  I say I'm
at 13 life, you say I'm at 10 after a game where you've cast an X-spell and
I've cast Gerrard's Wisdom.  One or both of us may have miscounted or one
of us may be deliberately cheating, but a judge will be hard-pressed to
figure out who.

3.  Magic is interactive.  This might not seem to be a problem, but it is
very relevant to stalling and deliberate efforts to distract an opponent
(trash talking or unsportsmanlike conduct, depending on how you look at
it).  In chess, you simply cannot stall -- you have a fixed amount of time,
either for all your moves or to make a certain number of them, and if you
take too long, you lose.  In Magic, this isn't possible because each player
acts during the other's turn.

4.  The Magic culture doesn't punish cheaters.  In chess (gee, do you think
I've played in chess tournaments, too?) someone who behaved rudely to their
opponents would be a pariah -- someone who cheated would simply be barred
from tournaments.  This is a culture that complains about agreed draws
between Grandmasters for whom chess is a career.  In all the chess
tournaments I've been to, I can't think of a single instance where someone
has cheated against me, or where I've heard someone say, "Well, he may have
cheated, but it was in the finals and there were thousands of dollars on
the line."

If we want to stop cheating, we have to make sure that the punishment,
AFTER adjusting for the likelihood of getting caught, is too much to make
the risk worthwhile.  That's not going to be easy -- even automatic match
losses for relatively moderate (and possibly accidental) cheating won't do
it, because in too many cases players know they will lose the match if they
don't cheat, or at least that their odds of winning go up if they cheat,
given the modest chance of getting caught.  We all know Magic has an
element of rocks-paper-scissors to it, and quite often when a chance to
cheat comes up it's in a situation where you can SEE that honest play will
lose.  [In the semi-finals of a local sealed deck tournament, I miscounted
my opponent's life.  He knew that he could probably win with the extra life
he would have if he accepted my count and that even if I had nothing but
land in my hand he would lose if he corrected me.  He corrected me.]

To make cheating not pay, I suggest the following steps should be taken by
the DCI, at least for serious tournaments:

1.  Assume everything is intentional.  Moses is entirely right -- the DCI
should state clearly that judges are to assume that all actions a player
takes are taken deliberately.  This is a pain, and will cause some honest
players to be penalized for making mistakes, but it's necessary --
otherwise, there is no way to ensure that infractions are penalized
uniformly or that judges are willing to penalize famous players.  Players
that pore over recent rulings and do all the other mental work it takes to
be competitive at top-level Magic can make sure their deck is shuffled and
that they draw the right number of cards.  [Remember the Muscle Sliver
incident?  Going to a dealer to replace a damaged card is something a
novice might do -- at the PT it's reasonable to require players to know
that only a judge can hand out proxies.]

2.  Institute some form of escalating penalties.  Infractions should follow
a player from tournament to tournament, not as some nebulous "reputation"
that causes a judge to issue a more serious penalty, but as part of a clear
and formal process that causes further infractions to receive a stiffer
penalty.  This will serve both to reduce the damage to honest players who
make an occasional mistake (since early penalties could be modest) as well
as increasing the risk to a PT regular who is making a straightforward
risk/reward assessment of cheating.  It's one thing to say, "Well, if I
don't cheat I'm going to lose this match and not make final 8 anyway, so
mise well," and quite another if you know that getting caught cheating here
could affect you in future tournaments as well.

3.  Be willing to dish out real penalties.  Long may or may not have been
cheating.  As Moses pointed out, at 11-0 he was already in the final 8, so
if he WAS cheating it suggests something pathological rather than just
pushing the ethical envelope.  Personally, I don't think it matters.  In
this serious a tournament, and under rule 1 assuming he intentionally snuck
a Cad Bloom under his leg, he should have been ejected from the tournament.
 That's certainly a harsh outcome if it was a mistake, but if Wizards isn't
willing to do that they will never shift the risk/reward in favor of honest
play.

4.  Rethink the rules about notes and play aids.  It may just lead to new
problems, especially in terms of stalling, but if players were allowed to
take notes of what has happened during the game, it might make "failure to
agree on reality" disputes, which can simply mean one player is making a
false claim.  Every time my opponent or I take damage during a game, I
confirm that he or she agrees with the life totals I am recording -- that
way, any disputes relate only to the most recent damage-dealing and can
usually be resolved simply.  Similarly, if each turn were annotated, it
would be a lot easier to resolve other disputes.  Yes, it would reward
players with poor memories, giving them a tool with which to remember
exactly which cards were in their opponent's deck, but so what?  We don't
demand that players memorize what's in the graveyards or what has been
removed from the game.  This should at least come up for consideration,
although it may well prove unworkable.

Magic is a great game, but it is also a game in which fair play is
difficult to enforce.  The DCI (and we, as players) need to face up to
this.  In the chess community, people are shocked to hear that someone had
touched a piece and then claimed not to and tried to move another one.
We're shocked because it is incredibly rare.  If we want Magic to evolve to
a game where at the end of a major tournament the Dojo is dominated by
reports about new decks and how players did, rather than the latest
cheating debate, we are going to have to work for it.

Love and Rockets,
Chad

cellis@hbs.edu