Rhavas
7/6/2010 6:50:00 PM
On Jul 6, 1:26 pm, "Matthew T. Morgan" <farq...@io.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Jul 2010, Xaddam wrote:
> > I gotta say..
>
> > I was hoping to go play at one of the major events in the USA some
> > time. Though now I don't know if I want to if collusion is "legal and
> > common" in the US. At least not without lots of friends to outnumber
> > the american players.
>
> > Hope this misinformation about the rules have been cleared up until I
> > want to tour the western isles. :)
>
> I wouldn't say it's common. Most of the time finalists in the US are
> there to win and don't really care that much who wins if they don't win
> (barring the appearance of a hated deck like Una or something, which is
> another matter entirely).
>
> As for the US Championship going to Hugh vs. going to an American. I
> think it should go to an American if an American earns it (such as
> happened this year - whether or not collusion was intended, it didn't
> alter the outcome of the game from what I saw; James was out too fast).
> Let us not forget that the NAC 2009 featured a German, a Hungarian, a
> Swiss, myself and that Hugh character. I was the only American to earn
> even a single game win that day. Clearly we didn't deserve to win.
> Playing to keep Europeans out of finals/keep them from winning American
> events is a pretty foolish notion when good ol' USA can only score one
> game win all day (out of 16 possible).
>
> So I'm not sure how serious Jay was about denying Hugh the win on the
> basis of his pedigree, but hopefully in the future we'll all keep in mind
> that the best way to deny him the win is to beat him, as evidenced by the
> USA Championship final this year.
The problem is, simply making the agreement is a violation of the
rules, whether or not a party is sucessful in carrying it out is
inconsequential. It is like a charge of conspiracy in US criminal
law, the agreement itself is the violation. The fact that the two
parties had no chance to utilize their agreement or make an effort to
prevent Hugh from winning doesn't matter, they went in with the intent
to do so if the opportunity arose. If I colluded with a friend of mine
that he would throw me the final, but we both got ousted prior to
being able to doing anything meaningful, we would both still be
violating the rules due to our intent.
It is easy to overlook a violation when it has had no impact, but to
do so greatly reduces the weight of the enforcement when it does have
an impact. Selectively enforcing rules can be very problematic. This
kind of violation is probably very rare to be exposed, but this is a
case where one party of the agreement has laid it out, apparently with
the misbelief that this kind of agreement was not a violation.
At the very least, this opportunity should be used to promote the fact
that agreements such as this are rules violations. As to what to do
in this case, I haven't the foggiest idea.