“I’ve Never Done an Investigation Before!”
“Why did they do that?”
“Why don’t life totals match?”
Have you ever found yourself asking a question similar to these while judging? Congratulations, you already have experience performing investigations.
Anytime that we look at a situation and the answer isn’t immediately obvious, or when we need to probe for more information in order to make a decision, we’re conducting an investigation. My goal in this article is to set you up with a few key pieces of advice that will help you in tackling any investigation regardless of the complexity or implications.
Walking it Back
Some of our most taxing moments in judging can come from trying to reconstruct a narrative for what happened in complex situations and board states, as in the following:
- A player calls you over to their table and isn’t sure if they’ve made their land drop this turn.
- Two players call you over because they just finished resolving a bunch of spell and aren’t sure whose turn it is.
- Life totals in a game have been different for several life total changes and the players don’t know why.
Once you know where to begin, step backwards piece by piece through what happened until we find the answer we are looking for. Be careful when rebuilding the narrative because you might lose your players. If we make logical jumps that are too big and we lose the thread, it’ll be very difficult to restart the process, causing delays and perhaps obstructing the players’ abilities to remember. There is also the possibility that the players will reach a point where they disagree on the facts, in which case we may need a different tack.
Whose Real is Real?
I want to quote the long outdated “Official DCI Penalty Guidelines” here to establish our basis for handling these disagreements:
“Players fail to agree on reality if they disagree on a central fact of the game–such as life totals, mana in the mana pool, what one player said, and so on…”
While this isn’t an infraction that we use anymore, it does help reinforce my first point in this section. Just because players disagree on the facts, that does not mean one of them is lying. Indeed, while lying is a possibility, it’s far from the first conclusion we should jump to. Both players are going to look at the game from a different angle, with different information available to them, which means that what they believe to be true may differ. They may both genuinely believe two different things are true and this where we, as a neutral party, can help to clear up confusion.
I say choose because we aren’t a court of law: we don’t have the time or resources to test every situation beyond a reasonable doubt. There are calls you won’t be 100% on and that leads me into the next topic…
Making a Decision
There are a few circumstances where your match will no longer continue once your judge call is completed–in fact there is a chance that at least one player won’t be continuing in the tournament at all. It’s important to be extremely diligent in these instances, though we should always be conscious of the clock and know when to ask for help. Cheating, bribery, improperly determining a winner, and stalling can all result in disqualifying one or more players involved. In Part 2 of this article, I’ll cover DQ investigations in detail, while also covering some strategies for handling uncooperative players.
In the meantime, check out the previous instalments in “The Road to L2 Series”:
- The Road to L2: Writing a Tournament Report
- The Road to L2: Regional Community Involvement
- The Road to L2: L2 Recommendations
For more on investigations check out the three-part series, “The Search for Collateral Truths” by Eric Shukan: