Normally, having you and a friend make the Top 8 at a Pro Tour is a time for celebration - but Yann Hamon and Nicolas Labarre were worried, and not because they thought they might lose.
Why? Like so many other Pro Tour players, they had bought their airline ticket on the assumption that they weren't making Sunday. They were both scheduled to leave early on Sunday morning.
Changing an airline tickets would cost roughly $1,400 between them - a significant deduction from the lush $13,500 paycheck the two of them would get for just showing up for their Top 8 match. There were also job concerns; with a later flight, they would miss two days of work, and it would be hard to explain that they were missing it because of a game. They could be fired.
And since they had established that they were splitting whatever they had won between them, why take the risk? Even though their quarterfinals match wasn't supposed to start until 8:00 a.m., they asked that they be allowed to play it out immediately, on Saturday evening.
This presented a problem for Wizards: At that very moment, the Feature Match area was being rebuilt for the next day in order to accommodate the crowds who would want to see the Top 8 matches. Cameras were being brought in. And yet Hamon and Labarre were requesting that they play it out in a dusty corner, fourteen hours before their start time, where nobody but the staff would see it.
There was an immediate and worried conference.
This had come up before, where Kai had made the quarterfinals and wanted to concede to Patrick Mello so that he could make the Masters... But the judges had told Kai that he could not concede. In the Top at of a Pro Tour, there would be no intentional draws, if only for the expense Wizards had gone to provide publicity for the whole thing.
Mike Guptil and Mark Rosewater told them the same thing: No. You must wait for tomorrow.
But unlike Kai, the French players were more obstinate. What if, they asked, we went off somewhere private and played it out ourselves to determine the winner, and the loser simply didn't show up tomorrow?
I was there, trying to help Yann rebook his flight, when the judge came over to talk with him. It was clearly explained that whoever did not show up after a set amount of time would receive a match loss, just as in every other tournament. If neither player showed, it would invoke the rarely-seen occasion what was called a double loss, which would be treated as a draw for purposes of rating points, but as two losses for purposes of determining who finished where in the Top 8.
If they were to go somewhere and play it out privately, the DCI could not stop them. Technically speaking, they were not using random methods to determine the winner, and there was no rule that specifically mandated that someone attend their match. However, there would almost certainly be an immediate investigation into the matter to see whether this was something the DCI approved of.
And remember: The DCI is not an American court. They do not need absolute proof, nor do they require specific laws in order to take action against anyone. The DCI is part of a private corporation, and they can take whatever actions they need to in order to keep Magic fair and enjoyable.
In other words the implication may have been, We don't like this. There is nothing technically wrong with it. But it's very shady, and outside the letter of the law, and you may well be punished for it.
Yann said he understood.
This morning, only Yann showed up. Off the record, according to credible eyewitnesses who were there, Yann won it in a squeaker match 3-2.
It's possibly the strangest situation we've ever covered, and our take is this: Even though there is no rule that forbids this situation, both players are getting paid a lot of money for their Top 8 finish. Yes, they worked to get there, but the reason Wizards holds these events is to publicize Magic. In other words, that $13,500 - and more, considering that Hamon has made the semifinals - is part of their paycheck for working for the betterment of Magic everywhere.
They should have bitten the bullet and both showed up.
| 
