Hello, and welcome to the first installment of Feature Friday of the new year!

In my last article, I discussed the investigation of a player who may or may not have intentionally mislead his opponent about the rules of the game. The situation I discussed was the same one that Level 3 judge Matt Tabak had covered a few weeks previously; some concern was expressed in the forum thread for that article about how judges can be sure of themselves in ruling on issues like player intent. For that article, my goal was to show several directions that the investigation might go, and demonstrate that one can act in relative confidence.

Since Matt had already presented the scenario from a rules standpoint, I was rather surprised at the long and detailed discussion of the ruling that took place after my article went up. The discussion was great: passionate and civil, for the most part. It's good stuff and I'd encourage those of you who missed it to check it out. I'd like to request that we avoid a rehash, however, for a couple reasons. I feel like the ground has been well covered; I'm not going to be as available as normal over the weekend to respond to threads that develop; and perhaps most importantly, the whole issue is currently under review as part of the development of a major revision of the Penalty Guidelines. It's highly likely that the relevant sections will, at the very least, be reworded, and it's entirely possible that there will be more sweeping policy changes that will affect it. For the time being, it's probably not terribly productive to spend too much time thinking out all the nuances of rules representation.

When we see the new PG, we will revisit the issue, and I will do my best to make sure that everyone is as clear as possible on the current state of the matter.

The focus of today's article is about a subject that is closely tied to investigation, but it is somewhat distinct, perhaps a bit more abstract, and it definitely warrants its own discussion.

On several occasions, players and judges have asked me the question, "How certain do you have to be that a player has cheated before you disqualify that player?" They usually want an answer quantified in percentages. Seventy percent sure? Eighty percent sure? More.

... I'm about eighty-five percent sure that this way of looking at it doesn't make very much sense.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty hesitant to think that applying percentages to my certainty is not much of a careful science. The feedback loop on such a thing is terrible, too, since only rarely will you discover after the fact that you were wrong.

Fortunately, there's a useful bit of judging philosophy that obviates the need to talk percentages. It's broadly applicable to all penalty and game state situations and it's important to the big picture issue of what it is that the head judge does. This is what I tell people:

When you are the head judge, your job is to decide what happened.

There's some nuance to that, of course, but let's start with the big picture. From the point where a judge starts running tournaments that are too big to watch every match (which is to say: all of them), your ability to go into a ruling situation with full information about what has occurred diminishes with every additional player and judge at the tournament. It is patently obvious that the head judge cannot—must not—let this fact paralyze the decisionmaking process.

The DCI declares the head judge to be the final arbiter and interpreter of the rules and rulings at a sanctioned tournament. In the context of a tournament, the only opinion that matters, in the end, on matters of rules and rulings, is that of the head judge. (Outside a tournament, of course, the DCI can call on a judge to explain their actions; capricious or willfully ignorant judging is not acceptable. But only in the most extreme cases will the DCI retroactively alter the results of a tournament.)

The sum of these two ideas is this: the head judge writes the history of a tournament. A good judge does this confidently and (reasonably) accurately. At the end of any given ruling, when you have done your best to gather all the facts, you must assert what has transpired, and you must do this in a fashion that gives your players confidence in you.

So in the context of an investigation that may be leading to a DQ, I don't ask myself to quantify my confidence in the idea that the player cheated. I ask myself, "What do I believe happened here?" and "Does the evidence I have gathered support that belief over other likely situations?"

This is not a license to make arbitrary decisions. You have to be prepared to defend your actions as reasonable. But when you are making decisions about unknowns—and potentially, unmeasureables, like player intent—the only way you can move the tournament forward is with some level of filling in the gaps.

"Deciding what happened" also does not mean that you must insist that your version of events is accurate. While it is important to make a decision you can stand by, I will often qualify my statements to be factually accurate: "We can't seem to reach an agreement as to what exactly was said. I think the most likely situation was ... " or "It sounds to me like what you intended was to pass priority, so that's how we're going to handle this." I modulate my presentation of a ruling to try to best give my players a sense that I'm acting out of a consideration of as much data as possible.

In the end, deciding to disqualify a player is no different from deciding that their actions indicated a particular block. You take the information as best you can; you decide what the evidence points to; and you take the apppropriate actions. Make sure you're looking at the right evidence, though. Often in cheating investigations, the evidence that an infraction has occurred is unambiguous. A player may have drawn an extra card, or a couple extra cards. What you must look for is evidence that the infraction was intentional. Sometimes, you may suspect that a less-than-honest player has taken an illegal action intentionally, but if you cannot provide evidence for that view, you shouldn't just make up your mind that cheating actually happened. Details you might look for as evidence for cheating, in our card drawing example, would include: many extra cards drawn; a shifting story about the events leading up to the current game state; or even a flat-out confession (you'd be amazed).

As with smaller infractions, your obligation to determine what happened is not an obligation to pretend that you are omniscient (though if you are omniscient, go right ahead). There's a fair degree of latitude in how you present a DQ to a player. In general, I would probably use language that makes it clear that I'm applying my best judgement to a situation, but without calling attention to whatever gaps there are in your detailed knowledge of the situation.

I've presented this material differently than I would if I were working with a specific judge on how they can determine when to disqualify someone. Every judge has a different temperment and approach to issuing penalties. I believe it's common for a judge to do some degree of moving back and forth between to hesitant to issue penalties, particularly severe ones, and being to eager to throw the book at players. I tailor the presentation to my assessment of the particular judge's approach, encouraging some judges to look for more evidence, and reminding others that a tournament is not a court of law, and we do not require "proof" as such (I'd say our evidenciary standard is closer to the "preponderance of evidence" used in civil suits). I'm sure some of you will have questions to raise in the forums, which is fine, but I encourage you to bring these topics up with other senior judges, particularly if you are looking for useful recommendations to use in your own judging.

Until next time, keep shufflin'.