Anna and Niels have been paired against eachother in the last round of a tournament before top8. Anna is at X-1, and is a guaranteed a spot in the top 8 if she wins this match. Niels is at X-2 and is out the competition for top8. The prices for X-2 are 3 boosters each, and X-3 is 1 booster each. Top 8 has 12 boosters for 4th to 8th, and double the payout for each tier upwards.

Is a price split + concession (Niels concedes to Anna) always bribery here? Niels would have no incentive to concede other than to be nice before the split is offered, and after the split has been offered and taken, he'll have a large incentive to concede. Concession means at least double the price pool to split.

In this situation Anna never mentions the price pool for top 8, or tries to give any signals that it would be in Niels' best interest to concede. It's a clear:
Anna: “Do you want to split prices”
Niels: “Yes”
Anna: “Do you want to concede to me?”
Niels: “Yes”

Edit: Cleared up the “clear” scenario.

Edited Espen Skarsbø Olsen (March 11, 2015 08:03:07 AM)

Asking for a consession after agreeing on a price split is not allowed.

The best thing for Anna to do (within the rules) would be to ask for a
50/50 prize split and hope that Niels understands that conceding would give
him the most prizes.

-R.

2015-03-11 13:41 GMT+01:00 Espen Skarsbø Olsen <

But, the annotated IPG says:

“However, a legal scenario is: you offer a prize split, then, once it's accepted, you ask your opponent to concede or you concede. In this scenario, the prize split was not dependent on a concession, despite the fact that once the prize split was agreed, one player no longer wanted to play.”

Source: http://wiki.magicjudges.org/en/w/Annotated_IPG/Bribery_and_Wagering

Is this wrong? Can't find a policy that says that asking for a concession after splits isn't allowed, only that “The decision to drop, concede, or agree to an intentional draw cannot be made in exchange for or influenced by
the offer of any reward or incentive.”

Sorry Richard, but I have to disagree with you in this case.

While it is true that Niels is incentivized to concede after the split has
been agreed to, what has been done is still legal. As Toby once told me,
human beings are driven by incentives. The simple existence of an incentive
to do something, does not make this bribery. What would make it Bribery
would be to connect the two together. The OP has clearly stated that the
two agreements were reached separately without mention of the other and
this is EXACTLY what we've been teaching players to do for years to stay
out of trouble.

-George FitzGerald
L2, Sarasota, FL

I've always told my players to not mention concessions after agreeing on
price splits.

To me it isn't clear who's asking the questions in the original scenario.

The first could've been asked by Niels, answered by Anna, who then
continues to ask Niels for a concession.
Would you consider that bribery?

-R

2015-03-11 13:56 GMT+01:00 George FitzGerald <

It's Anna asking Niels in both cases. Cleared up the scenario.

Richard - I'm still ok with that and I firmly believe policy is ok with
that too. What's the difference between a concession and a draw after
agreeing to a prize split?

I'm wondering how that ties into the MTR then.

From the MTR:





*Players are allowed to share prizes they have not yet received in the
current tournament as they wish and may agree as such before or during
their match, as long as any such sharing does not occur in exchange for any
game or match result or the dropping of a player from the tournament. As an
exception, players in the announced last round of the single-elimination
portion of a tournament may agree to divide tournament prizes as they wish.
In that case, one of the players at each table must agree to drop from the
tournament. Players are then awarded prizes according to their resulting
ranking. *

In my opinion this text says that a split followed by a concession isn't
allowed.
If this is meant to tell us that a prize split is fine as long as a
concession isn't part of the split, then I've misunderstood this part of
policy since it's last alteration.

-R.

2015-03-11 14:06 GMT+01:00 George FitzGerald <

I think that text from the MTR says that splits can not depend on match results, but it doesn't say anything about match results depending on splits.

Obviously if you mention them together, they start to depend on each other and you're in the DQ zone, but I'm fine with the scenario above where the agreement to split is not connected to a match result. The match result is then incentivised by the split, but the split was already agreed upon before the match result was mentioned.

Originally posted by Richard Drijvers:

*Players are allowed to share prizes they have not yet received in the
current tournament as they wish and may agree as such before or during
their match, as long as any such sharing does not occur in exchange for any
game or match result or the dropping of a player from the tournament.

If the split is agreed with no reference to a concession, and is thus not “in exchange for” a concession, then it is a legal split. Nothing here stops players, once this has been agreed, from requesting a concession. If the split “stands alone”, then it is OK, and following it with a concession request is a separate, also legal, matter. If the split does not stand alone but is contingent on the following concession, then it wasn't a legal split in the first place.

Originally posted by Richard Drijvers:

As an exception, players in the announced last round of the single-elimination portion of a tournament may agree to divide tournament prizes as they wish. In that case, one of the players at each table must agree to drop from the tournament. Players are then awarded prizes according to their resulting ranking. *

This part of the rule is irrelevant to the topic; it's there to allow concession discussion to be part of split discussion in finals, since any split that involves Invites and the like must inherently and unavoidably involve discussion of a concession.

Edited James Winward-Stuart (March 11, 2015 08:34:40 AM)

The way that I read it is that you cannot connect the two. You cannot make
one dependent upon the other happening.

In the given scenario, a prize split has been agreed to. After that, a
match result has been asked for. If the player answers “No,” the prize
split is not rescinded and no such condition was made on the prize split.
Therefore, no exchange has occurred and no exchange is occurring if the
player says “Yes” either. It may be that the players both knew what was
going to happen after the prize split was agreed to, but as long as that
was not discussed before the prize split, I see no problem with that. The
player does have an incentive now to concede if he's figured out that he'll
get more prize that way. But as I said before, humans are incentive driven
beings. Anything we do, we generally do because we get something out of it,
weather it's financial gain, enjoyment, entertainment, or a sense of
responsibility. What the policy has told us though is that the incentive
cannot be directly offered as a prize split or as the result of a match.

Originally posted by George FitzGerald:

The way that I read it is that you cannot connect the two. You cannot make
one dependent upon the other happening.

Great summary George!

This is the view that judges I've talked to (and what I've read here in the past) has been - splits are OK, requesting concessions is OK, connecting them is very Not OK.


In the scenario given, they are two independent offers/agreements, and so are fine.

Also worth noting is that this is a common practice among players, and the very clear way it's put in the original question (no signals, 2 entirely separate questions) is exactly the way most judges I know would advise a player who asked for advice on how to propose such a split & concession request to do it.

We don't allow players to connect concession requests and prize splits, but we can't forbid concession requests when the other player might have some motive to concede. In every case where a player has agreed to scoop, they had some kind of motive to concede.

For those of you that thinks that asking for a concession after a split has been agreed upon, do you think any of these questions or actions are OK:

1. “If you concede, I'll be in the top8. Do you concede?”
2. “If you concede, we'll have more prices to split. Do you concede?”
3. “The top8 has a minimum of 12 boosters in price payout. Do you concede?”
4. "Do you concede? *wink, wink*

(my opinion is that none of these are OK, as all of them connect prices to the concession, or hint at the connection at least)

I think that the first three are definitely okay, and the last one is weird and very context dependent. Prizes are always going to be connected to the concession, by nature of what a concession is. All the first three examples are doing are providing facts about the event's prize structure. The prize structure will obviously influence the decision to concede/split - why would it be illegal to talk about the prize structure? The definition of Bribery in the MTR specifies that the reward/incentive has to be offered by one player for it to be Bribery, and nothing is being offered; the prize split has already been agreed on and is 50/50, and there are no other offers being made. The only thing is happening is that the opponent is trying to produce a win-win situation by maximizing both the opponent's prize payout and his own place in the event, and I don't see how that's illegal.

Originally posted by Bryan Li:

I think that the first three are definitely okay, and the last one is weird and very context dependent. Prizes are always going to be connected to the concession, by nature of what a concession is. All the first three examples are doing are providing facts about the event's prize structure. The prize structure will obviously influence the decision to concede/split - why would it be illegal to talk about the prize structure? The definition of Bribery in the MTR specifies that the reward/incentive has to be offered by one player for it to be Bribery, and nothing is being offered; the prize split has already been agreed on and is 50/50, and there are no other offers being made. The only thing is happening is that the opponent is trying to produce a win-win situation by maximizing both the opponent's prize payout and his own place in the event, and I don't see how that's illegal.

And that's exactly why I don't believe any of it should be/is okay.

We want people to play Magic, not buy games/matches.
-R.