I wish people would stop throwing around figures like 50/50 and 51/49. There is no “DQ meter” that fills up as you do your investigation.

Riki is 100% right here.

Just saw this thread. Seems interesting. Initially, I think if we don't know the penalty to assess, it might be better to just assess the least possible penalty and give the players “the benefit of the doubt”, as it were. For Adam, this would be a DQ, as the options are UC - Lying to a Tournament Official or UC - Cheating. For Nick, the options are UC - Improperly Determining a Winner or no penalty, in which case we should assess no penalty. My idea is that, if we simply say “well, I'm not sure, let's DQ to be safe”, then any player can just easily get a match win (and ruin another player's day/tournament/opinion of OP and the DCI) simply by alleging Improperly Determining a Winner, as long as there are no witnesses. We don't want that, so if the investigation absolutely and completely fails (i.e. this should be a last resort judgment, not the default, if all else fails) giving Nick the benefit of the doubt here is my opinion.

I feel that enough discussion has been had on this so I'm closing it before it gets too much into repeated discussions, I would strongly encourage reading of Eric Shukan's posts if nothing else in this thread.