The Pace of Play

When you win a game of Magic, how do you want to have won? When you lose, how do you want to have lost? Ignore for a moment that sometimes, winning is great no matter what the reason, and that losing is a bummer, regardless of why (and no, I'm not so idealistic as to suggest that this isn't often the case). Putting this aside, I think most people would agree that when the result boils down to raw skill, a win is much more satisfying and a loss is much more bearable.

One of the overarching goals of the DCI's tournament policies and the judging program is to ensure that this element takes center stage. While luck certainly plays a part in Magic, skill is a much bigger part, and it's one that we want to ensure plays a predominant role in the game, especially in a tournament where a lot is on the line.

So how in the world, given this, do we justify the existence of the slow play infraction, which seems to have nothing to do with play skill and everything to do with arbitrarily rushing you and altering your strategic decisions?*

There's no question that the idea of having to enforce a certain speed of play is arbitrary, nor that this might affect a player's ability to fully analyze a situation and make (what they consider to be) the optimal strategic decision. Blaming slow play for adding an arbitrary element to the game, however, is effectively like blaming the messenger. The actual arbitrary element is the match time limit.

In the ideal world, games would proceed without any mandated pace. Players would take whatever time they needed to make each action and time wouldn't be a factor in a game, removing one more non-skill element from the game. Generally, other than peer pressure and bored opponents, this is how things work when you play Magic casually.

In a tournament, however, things unfortunately cannot be this simple. Outside of the purity of a single game, there are other factors. Many other people with nothing to do, waiting for a slow match to finish. Players getting tired as the day grows long. Venues closing at the end of the day. Ultimately, in order to facilitate the logistics behind a tournament, and to account for the fact that there are many people involved (remember, serve the community, not the individual), time is necessarily a factor. Matches cannot last as long as they might "naturally".

Even though a time limit is required, though, it's there out of logistical necessity and not as an element of the game. In order to keep it that way, we need to make sure that as much as possible, it doesn't end up being the deciding factor of a game, and that both players have equal access to the time that is available. The existence and enforcement of the slow play infraction serves both of these purposes. Reading the philosophy of the infraction, both of these elements are clear. "... so that their opponents are not at a significant disadvantage (equal access) because of the time limit (prevent time from being the deciding factor in a game)."

So that's the idea behind slow play and why it exists; to ensure a fair environment for both players in a match to show their skill, within the confines of the necessary evil of a time limit. Though this seems relatively straightforward, if you've spent any time at all at DCI tournaments, you probably realize that it's nowhere near this simple. It turns out that slow play is incredibly difficult to define in objective terms, and so it is left as a subjective judgment on the part of the judges ("... take longer than is reasonably required ..."), and subjective things are much more difficult to gauge than objective ones. This means that though it's conceptually easy to understand, in practice it's really very difficult to get a handle on, both for players and for judges.

What I'm really trying to say here is this: if you're a player, I can pretty much guarantee that you've committed slow play, and that you've done so far more often than you've been penalized for it. And as a judge, you've seen slow play, and you've seen it far more often than you've actually acted upon it. That includes myself. There are some tips, tricks, and philosophies, however, that you can learn to make it much easier. Similarly, there are some misconceptions to clear up that can make the issue of slow play more difficult than it has to be.

(Fair warning: slow play, being difficult to judge, is also one of those things that isn't necessarily set in stone in the DCI and you will find disagreements across the judge program. This represents my summation of the current state-of-the-art in DCI thinking and I think you'll find that the majority of senior judges would agree with most, if not all of this, but don't be surprised if some of this is controversial or if some of it becomes obsolete as things change.)

But I'm not doing it on purpose ...
Let's get this one out of the way right off the bat. When a player is confronted with a charge of slow play, their usual first response will be that they didn't do it on purpose. Because it wasn't on purpose, players (especially new ones) tend not to understand why there's an issue at all. The mere fact that we're talking about slow play, however, dictates that we know that it's not happening on purpose. If we believed that we were talking about an intentional offense, we'd be talking about Cheating—Stalling, not Slow Play, and the potential ramifications would be much more dire.

This is actually one of the simplest and best demonstration of one of the core principles of the Magic penalty guidelines—in general, a violation of some rule is penalized in accordance with the possible advantage gained, assuming that the violation wasn't intentional. A violation that was committed willfully (generally to gain some advantage, though this isn't strictly necessary) by a player that knows that they're committing an infraction, however, is cheating and is usually grounds for disqualification. Simply put, rules violation + intent = cheating. In this case, playing slowly with the intent to gain advantage = stalling, which is a disqualifiable offense.

Like slow play itself, stalling is not as rare as it should be. In fact, many of the cases you'll hear about and many of the cases that judges get called for under the guise of slow play are actually about stalling. The usual case—somebody is up by a game in a match and the round is almost over and suddenly their play slows down (not to be confused with playing at a reasonable pace, but in a way that makes it difficult for their opponent to win). In general, lacking extenuating circumstances, we're talking about stalling —playing excessively slowly (the rules violation) in a willful fashion (the intent) to force the round to end in order for this game not to be finished (the advantage).

Suffice it to say, this is a big deal and as a player, something that is strictly forbidden. The time limit is there out of tournament necessity and not as a strategic element and attempting to exploit it as a strategic element is cheating. Just don't do it. As a judge, stalling is actually much more clear-cut and easy to spot than slow play, since it generally amounts to a noticeable change in a situation that where advantage can be gained. The hardest part of dealing with stalling is the natural hesitation to disqualify players, a mental hurdle that takes some time to clear. That, however, is a subject deserving of its own article and one that I'll get back to in a future month.

For the rest of this discussion, though, I'm going to put stalling aside, as it's generally more clear and less confusing. Just remember that anytime you're thinking about slow play (for the rest of this article or in a tournament), you need to keep the issue of intent in the back of your mind. If it ever enters the situation, the possibility of stalling needs to be seriously considered.

An Assessment Framework
Determining what is and isn't a "reasonable" pace of play turns out the be an incredibly difficult task. There are some core principles that can be applied, though, which make this somewhat easier, and the inspiration for these comes from Magic Online. While generally speaking, you shouldn't assume that the way that things are done on Magic Online match the way that that things are or should be done in real life tournaments, in some cases it can be very instructive to see how they relate.

If you've played a match on Magic Online before, you're probably pretty familiar with the way that the time limit clock works. The time limit for each round is split exactly in half, with half being granted to each player. This serves as an overall, global time limit for the player, and guarantees that the sum of all of their turns put together doesn't exceed a certain amount. Additionally, there is a time limit that is "invisibly" imposed upon each action. This doesn't show up explicitly in the UI, but if you don't act for a long enough period of time, you will time out and lose the current game. This serves as an immediate, local time limit for the player, guaranteeing that they don't take too long on any single action.

Before anyone jumps on me about how my analogies break down because of various specifics with the way the timers work and how they can be exploited in some cases, I realize that those things are true. The goal here isn't to directly correlate the two, just to derive some lessons from the ideal of the Magic Online clock. That said, what can this teach us about slow play in real life tournaments?

• Note that your clock doesn't change depending on your opponent or on their actions. Whether they play quickly or they play slowly, your time limit remains constant. Slow play is, roughly speaking, an individual thing, and does not depend on your opponent. Just because they play quickly doesn't mean that you can suck up the extra time by playing slowly. This is really a protection for players; the flip side of this is that nobody can take advantage of you playing rapidly by going more slowly. This is vitally important psychologically—if one player is fast and the other plays slowly, there is a tendency for this to be self-reinforcing. The fast player is often very conscious of the clock and of the fact that things are going slowly and can feel forced to play faster than they're comfortable with, and it's not fair to put a player into this position. A good rule of thumb to use here is to ask whether a player, if playing against a mirror image of themselves, would still be able to complete the match reasonably. This trick helps to take the opponent out of the equation and assess each individual fairly.
• It can be useful to consider both the current action and the match as a whole when assessing slow play. There will be ebbs and flows in how long each turn or action takes, but averaged as a whole, you can get a picture of how quickly a player is playing and compare that against the bounds of how long a match can take to figure out whether they're playing too slowly. At the same time, within these ebbs and flows, any single action shouldn't take too long. If it does, this should set off warning bells that there might be danger ahead—there's a natural tendency for players to slow down over time, not to speed up, as a match gets more complicated, and if there's a sudden noticeable dip in play speed, you need to be very careful that it isn't going to persist and grow into a longer-term trend.
• Subtly, Magic Online's timers also have something to say about the increasing complexity of a match—in short, it doesn't actually care. You aren't granted more time for an action later in a match than you are earlier in a match. Why does this make sense? Simply put, board situations develop over time; they aren't suddenly thrust upon you. This means that the amount of new information that a player is taking in during each turn comes in controlled bursts and just needs to be integrated to what's happened so far, and this delta tends to remain relatively constant over time. Judges in particular can have a hard time remembering this, as they often enter a match already in progress, and have to assimilate a lot of information at once. Remember that the players are not having to do this.
• It doesn't matter what deck you're playing. There's a pretty common argument from players that they shouldn't be assessed a penalty for playing slowly, because the deck that they're playing is complicated. Just as the Magic Online timer doesn't care what deck you're playing, the penalty guidelines make no provisions for this. Ultimately, the only metric is whether or not you're playing fast enough to make sure that your opponent gets their fair time and isn't put at a disadvantage because you chose to play a slow deck. Regardless of what deck you choose, you're still responsible for playing fast enough, and if your deck has a tendency to be slower, it's your responsibility to learn to play it sufficiently quickly.

An Alternative Definition
The global time limit lends itself to another way of thinking of slow play that can be very useful. This concept was first introduced to me by Jay Schneider, a judge in the Seattle area. Put simply, there's a pretty reasonable way of reading the slow play policy that leads to the conclusion that any match that isn't finished by the end of the match time limit has somehow involved slow play, on the part of at least one and possibly by both of the players involved. After all, as soon as a match reaches the extra turns that prematurely conclude a match, things have definitely left the realm of natural and significant possibility of disadvantage exists.

Of course, this is again just a tool that you can use in judging slow play; without having watched the match, it's difficult to tell whether one player or the other (or both) is responsible, and it's certainly late in the game to actually do anything about the situation. It's also not anything more than thinking of slow play with respect to the "global" time limit, just taken to more of an extreme. It does, however, provide a more concrete backdrop for making evaluations. When having to decide whether you think slow play might be an issue, just ask yourself whether or not you think this match will have to go to time or not. If you think that it might, then it's worth following up on.

The Experiment—Predictable and Unintentional
When Jay and I discussed this issue originally, there was more than just the definition. It came along with a hypothesis, born from the idea that it's hard to tell which player might be guilty of slow play simply based on a match that has gone to extra turns. Short of watching every match, we decided that we might be able to determine the same information, with reasonable certainly, using statistics over the course of several rounds.

The premise was this: though we can't tell from a single match that went to time which player might be committing slow play, we can make statistically sound guesses if we chart matches over many rounds and find out which players are consistently in matches that run the duration. It's true that somebody who plays at a reasonable pace might inadvertently be caught in a single match or two with a slow player that forces a slow match. Over many matches, though, the ones that are actually causing the slowness should show up far more often than those who are caught incidentally.

We actually ended up putting this into practice for a PTQ of around one hundred people, and the results were actually quite enlightening. It turns out that this theory actually does bear out in practice. We charted this data over the course of the first five rounds and found that only four players showed up in matches that went to time in at least four out of the five matches. Everybody else with few exceptions showed up in no more than one or two.

More interesting, though, is what happened when we spoke to these four players. None of them was actually aware that there was any issue; they were all under the impression that matches going to time was a standard thing, and they didn't realize that they were playing slower than the norm. After pointing this out, we continued charting for the rest of the tournament and not one of them was involved in a match that went to time again.

Ultimately, I'm not saying that this should become a standard practice, nor should it be a hard-and-fast rule. It is, however, a useful possible tool that can help identify players who might need a little nudge. The goal, after all, is to help prevent slow play from happening in the first place, not just to penalize players for it, and it's likely that just identifying the problem for many players will stop it from happening at all. Awareness is oftentimes the first step to improvement.

Take Five Extra Turns ...
So far, I've spent a lot of time talking about how slow play works within the confines of the match time limit. This leads to another natural, common, and mistaken assumption—that slow play no longer is relevant when the time limit expires and a match has entered the extra turns procedure. This is not actually true.

Sheldon Menery put this as well as any judge I've ever spoken to. To paraphrase, "During the regular match time, you're spending your own time. Now that your time is over, you're playing in my time." So far, I've focused on the fairness aspects of slow play, but the other purpose for the infraction comes into play here. Slow play also exists to ensure the timely logistical operation of a tournament, and once a match enters extra turns, it now is slowing down the entire tournament and is quite possibly causing many people to have to wait.

Because of this, slow play rules are not relaxed in extra turns, they simply take a slightly different tenor. The game still needs to proceed at a reasonable pace, with the goal of ending the match. Because of the effect on the tournament as a whole, players and judges both should be at least as vigilant about slow play during these extra turns as they are during a match, if not more. Play should not slow down during this period, and you should use the same metrics for pace here as you would during the standard match time.

Some Practical Advice
So far, this has been a lot of philosophical advice which, while valuable in guiding your decisions, can be difficult to actually put into practice. I'll leave you with a few practical tips on how to deal with slow play in practice.

• As I've mentioned, awareness is oftentimes all that is necessary to prevent slow play or to stop it in progress. A quick word or a quick look can be all that is required, and is something that you can do easily without causing undue disruption. Even if you're unsure as to whether there's anything to worry about, telling both players at a match, "please remember that we need both of you to ensure that this match progresses at a reasonable pace," doesn't hurt, and often can help things a lot. It doesn't single out either player, but reminds them both that the issue might exist and reminds them that it's something that they need to watch for. Because slow play isn't an intentional offense, players don't actually want to be committing it, but there's something natural about not realizing that one is playing too slowly. The old adage that time flies is true when it comes to perception of play speed. In the thick of a match, it's easy to lose track of how long you're taking to make an action, and sometimes just having this pointed out is enough to bring this into your conscious control.
• A slow turn isn't nearly as slow as you might think. Though, again, there's no concrete rule on how much time can be taken for a turn, think about your typical three game match. Subtracting out sideboarding and shuffling time, there are approximately forty-five minutes available. If an average match lasts for about eight turns for each player, that leaves less than a minute available per turn; you'll find, if you watch an intense match that is going long, that a minute is really not much time at all. This doesn't mean that you should automatically warn after a minute has gone by. Again, this is just another guideline that can help to inform your decisions and flag a potential slow play situation worth addressing.
• Judges have a strong tendency only to worry about slow play late in a round, when it looks like matches are in jeopardy of going to time. Similarly, players tend to only call over judges about slow play later in the round. This is, however, an unnatural bias. Playing slow in the beginning of a round is no different from playing slow at the end; though it feels like it has more of an impact because of its immediacy, both equally affect the ability of a match to finish during time. Plus, addressing slow play earlier in a round gives more time for the problem to work itself out without impacting the match. It's important to stay vigilant, whether early or late in a round.
• Finally, this really is one of those things that requires practice. Practice, practice, practice. Watch your friends play casually. Take the time (when it doesn't interfere with other duties) to watch matches play out and see how the play speed ebbs and flows naturally and how it affects the ending time of a match. Over time, you'll start to get a good feel for how a match is likely to go and whether intervention is needed.

I hope that all of this has proven useful in clearing up how to prevent slow play as a player and how to enforce the infraction as a judge. This is, however, one of those things that is difficult to learn by reading, and there's little substitute for practice. Even with all of this in mind, it's likely that you'll miss cases and that you may be confused from time to time; nothing will change the fact that it is one of the most difficult concepts in tournaments and in judging. But, by keeping in mind the overall goal of the infraction—to keep things fair and to keep things operating on time—it can become a lot easier to understand when and how to apply it.

That wraps it up for me this time around. Got any thoughts on this subject? Disagree with anything? Have any questions? Any and all feedback is welcome—please feel free to engage in the forums or send me mail with the link below or directly at mtgjudge@gmail.com. Or, for a more lively and interactive discussion, find me as Agbaar or Ag|Work on EFnet's # mtgjudge channel. You'll always find a lively debate there and many judges with great experience and ideas, including most of the judges you'll read here at StarCityGames. I can't recommend it enough for people interested in learning more (and helping others to learn more) about judging.

Next month: Everybody is special, and every event has its own nuance that makes it different from every other. That said, your circumstance is probably neither as significant nor as exceptional as you think. In depth on deviation deviance. See you then!

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Nicholas J. Fang
DCI Certified Level 3 Judge—Redmond, WA
mtgjudge@gmail.com
Agbaar and Ag|Work on EFnet's # mtgjudge

*: Some of the denizens of # mtgjudge were quick to point out after last month's teaser that slow play is an infraction that can be committed, not a penalty that can be assessed. Apologies for the impreciseness. Though I won't get to the details of the difference this month, stay tuned...