I have a question about handling an odd situation. 8 people sign up for a draft event, they are given their product and told they can start. They sit there for about 15 minutes and then walk up to the counter and say the draft is over.

Player 1 claims to have lost to Player 8, 2 to 7, 3 to 6, 4 to 5…and so on and finalizing that player 8 won the draft. Is there anything wrong with this if in each match, before it begins one of the players concedes to another player? For an 8 person event, would you enter the results in WER as 2-0 results for each conclusion? It is a bit odd.

I have heard of people doing team draft events at GPs where the prize support was worth more than the entry, and just conceding to one another. I guess I have only ever thought of the situation as a player and not as a judge and all it entails.

http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/30081/

There is some discussion going on in this post.

IMHO a draft consists of two sections, the draft and the matches.

While the players are able to chop up the prizes as they see fit (see the other post that Max linked for more info), I'd have a hard time being convinced that the players sat down and played matches before opening any packs in a draft.

My opinion is that awarding wins (and consequentially, planeswalker points) in this way is too close to tournament fraud.

I would allow the players to divvy up the prize pool as they deem fit, but I would not award match wins to players or allow them to concede before drafting. I would just drop all the participants from the event.

This really isn't a Judge Program issue, so I'll go ahead and close this thread.

I will state that it's not appropriate for players to receive prizes without actually playing, and this “ticket farming” activity is a symptom of an imbalance between prizes and entry fees - and that's something that Wizards will likely be discussing with the Premier TOs in the (very near?) future.

But, as I already said, this isn't something we should try to solve - most of all, please don't try to tell the TO how to run their GP. (That'd be bad, on several levels…)

d:^D