I had an idea for a way to assist judges in detecting cheaters who might attempt to stack their opponents decks.

What if, our match slips included a place for each player to write down how many mulligans they took during each match, and that information was entered into WER, and tracked in a central database.

And then, what if at the beginning of a tournament, a report could be printed for the head judge to browse that listed how many standard deviations away from the mean any particular players opponents had mulliganed. If a player is habitually stacking their opponents deck, tracking the number of mulligans that their opponents have taken could help guide the eyes of us judges to something that might be problematic.

If a players opponents had been mulliganing in a manner that was statistically questionable, the judges on staff could be made aware to watch that player more closely as they shuffle the cards during a tournament.

Having a statistic like this might help judges know where to focus their energy when watching for cheats.

Issues I've come up with:
* I see no evidence and believe it is unlikely that this method of cheating
is common.
* That an opponent can stack your deck in a meaningful way that would cause
you to mulligan more often without being able to give you hands that are
keepable but can't win.
* That the above effect would be greater than other variations: format,
skill of players, preference for muligans, player and TO compliance with
the filling out the requested information
* Inexperienced staff would then victimise players flagged as cheat (you
can be sure that is how some stores would treat the data)
* That the immense amount of effort (spread across millions of people)
would be worthwhile to catch how many cheats

There are more common issues your tournaments have than this that you can
get better at policing with less disruption than this.

On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Michael White <
forum-13463-0ce8@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:

> I had an idea for a way to assist judges in detecting cheaters who might
> attempt to stack their opponents decks.
>
> What if, our match slips included a place for each player to write down
> how many mulligans they took during each match, and that information was
> entered into WER, and tracked in a central database.
>
> And then, what if at the beginning of a tournament, a report could be
> printed for the head judge to browse that listed how many standard
> deviations away from the mean any particular players opponents had
> mulliganed. If a player is habitually stacking their opponents deck,
> tracking the number of mulligans that their opponents have taken could help
> guide the eyes of us judges to something that might be problematic.
>
> If a players opponents had been mulliganing in a manner that was
> statistically questionable, the judges on staff could be made aware to
> watch that player more closely as they shuffle the cards during a
> tournament.
>
> Having a statistic like this might help judges know where to focus their
> energy when watching for cheats.
>
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–
Gareth Pye
Level 2 Judge, Melbourne, Australia
Australian MTG Forum: mtgau.com
gareth@cerberos.id.au - www.rockpaperdynamite.wordpress.com
“Dear God, I would like to file a bug report”

While the idea seems like it may be beneficial in theory, I think there would be a couple of issues that I find readily apparent. First is that this would make a boatload of additional work for the scorekeeper, as you'd go from clicking on a single button per match (assuming zero infractions to enter) to having to enter additional numbers and then click that button. This would certainly slow down the process, and make it quite problematic at larger events.

The second issue I see is that now we are asking players to keep track of mulligans that may have happened prior to them even getting their match slips. When we have issues with players not being able to remember who went first, I can't imagine this going as smoothly as we'd like.

Mostly I think our best bet is to stress vigilance in observing your opponent while they shuffle your deck. If anything could be changed to help stop this behavior, perhaps it would be best to limit the time you have to shuffle your opponent's deck. In order to stack it you'd need how many mash shuffles on average? How many do you need to sufficiently randomize a deck that has, in theory, already been sufficiently randomized?

I don't like the idea of teaching players that we correlate mulligans to cheating. I know that's not what anyone's saying here, but that's the message that will be heard, by way too many.

d:^D

I'd like to note that this issue is likely to sort itself out with players watching their opponents like a hawk in the next few months. I'd assume that judges only catch small fraction of illegal plays that take place at a large event. We rely on players calling a judge to point out an error or game rule violation. While cheating is a high profile problem, it is by far not the most common rule violation at an event. While it is the judge's job to enforce the rules, they can only do so successfully if players point out violations.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't watch for cheaters, I'm just noting that there is someone who is highly invested in the match who has the duty of making sure their opponent only performs legal actions. Players are really the first line of defense against any form of rules violation, and at this point they're pretty aware of this gimmick.

Marc raises a great point - with a recent debacle so well-publicised and fairly easy to watch out for, players will be more watchful of their opponents, to make sure that this isn't happening to them.

Not to mention that with your solution, we pile another tonne of work onto the scorekeepers, while only catching a marginal portion of event cheats. It's just not worth it, for anyone involved. Watching a game of Magic, being versed in the kind of shuffles, sleights of hand, and cheats that players do, will catch far more than trying to perform statistics on mulligans over a tournament.

Originally posted by Jack Doyle:

while only catching a marginal portion of event cheats

I'm more concerned that we'd end up “catching” the wrong people - i.e., those who just had a weird streak of luck re: opponents' mulligans.

Note that I have DQ'd someone for manipulating their opponents' decks while shuffling. The coincidence of mulligans was a big part of what brought this to our attention, but it was careful observation that provided me with sufficient evidence to pull the trigger.

d:^D

This also would disproportionately affect decks that aggressively mulligan (certain archetypes in Legacy for example).

I think this proposed solution would be dealing with the symptoms and not the root cause.

not really sure there is much point in continuing this discussion so I'm going to close the topic.