@Uncle Scott: This feels like something worth tracking with an infraction of some sort, because if there is a pattern of behaviour of Player A wherein they often reset their hand in this way, we should know about it. While I agree that this is a simple case of miscommunication and not worth issuing MPE on and forcing a mull to 5, I would not be opposed to issuing CPV for tracking purposes, to lessen the possibility that player A is “trying to get away with something”. And, as the saying goes, “If you think it's CPV, it isn't”, so it's highly unlikely that Player A will receive a harsher penalty due to an upgrade of CPV during this event, unless they are actually doing something shady.

This seems like a very simple cheat to execute, if someone wanted to do so maliciously (not saying it was done maliciously in this case, but treating this case without any infraction seems like it is abuseable):

1) I'm on the play, you're on the draw.
2) After I keep my 7 (very marginal but keepable) cards, I ask you if you want to concede while you are mulliganning.
3) You finish mulliganning and say “ok”.
4) I shuffle away my hand, without showing you or anyone else present what the hand was, so as to hide the fact that my hand was marginal.

Result: I get a free mulligan to 7, and I also know that you have mulliganned and also how far you've mulliganned, when making my decision of whether or not to keep my new 7 cards.

Edited Lyle Waldman (Sept. 22, 2017 05:13:18 PM)

Please don't issue penalties to players who didn't earn any penalty just for “tracking purposes”.

The closest you can reasonably get to a Warning here is instructing them not to do that again and issuing a warning for USC-Minor if they do, in fact, do it again.

This behavior honestly sounds like a very high-risk attempt at a free roll mulligan. After all, you have to keep a 7 you don't want and have your opponent mulligan several times and ambiguously declare their intent to keep their hand. I'm not worried about this.

Sent from my iPhone

Originally posted by Justin Miyashiro:

This behavior honestly sounds like a very high-risk attempt at a free roll mulligan. After all, you have to keep a 7 you don't want and have your opponent mulligan several times and ambiguously declare their intent to keep their hand. I'm not worried about this.

Exactly this. Sometimes, we as judges tend to overthink issues and see cheaters everywhere. Honestly, if this is the most shady thing that happened in your tournament, you've had a great event :) Marginal advantage that is very hard to pull off and with the odds of a judge letting you play with 5 or maybe even 0 cards… not the best cheat ever.

Originally posted by Justin Miyashiro:

The closest you can reasonably get to a Warning here…

As Isaac said:

Originally posted by Isaac King:

Please don't issue penalties to players who didn't earn any penalty just for “tracking purposes”.

Don't invent a Warning just because, don't reverse engineer a penalty so you can give a Warning. However, if you really think this behaviour is suspicious enough to warrant tracking (which I don't think applies here), you can always use a little trick: enter a Warning in WER with a thorough description of what exactly happened, but do not count this Warning at all for upgrade purposes! You still get your tracking, and the player is not disadvantaged.

I may not have been entirely clear. My point was, the only way I could see
to justify this player receiving a penalty was if you instructed him to be
careful and not do this again and then later on in the day he did this same
thing again, then you could give him USC-Minor for ignoring the instruction
of a tournament official and adding disruption to the event. That scenario
illustrates how far I felt the player would have to throw themselves down
the rabbit hole to justify getting a Warning for what's transpired here.

Thank you fine gentlemen for the numerous answers :D

Thank you Scott Marshall for clearing everything out and making me aware that not everything can be fixed with the IPG or other policy documents.

While I hope this will never occur again on an event I judge, I now have the answer on how to resolve this kind of problem.

Kind regards,

Bastiaan