I found them amusing. What I find tacky and offensive is the people who condone what he did as merely 'pushing the envelope' because he's 'very competitive'. Tiger Woods is very competitive, but he manages to play his game without cheating to win.Originally Posted by dschalter
I sell a little bit of meth to high schoolers on the weekends, but it's ok, because it's just a little bit and meth isn't as serious as crack or heroin. I'm very competitive, you see, and need the money to keep up with all the new things my neighbor is buying.
I cheated on a test. I copied answers off the guy sitting next to me. But only a few dozen, and it's not as bad as if I had stolen an answer key to study off of. I'm very competitive, and sometimes I push the envelope.
I got a blowjob from my wife's best friend today. It wasn't like I actually nailed her. It's just a little pushing of the enevelope, it's not full on cheating. Besides, the guys at work were talking about their exploits and I had to have something to one up them with.
Also, if you let me get you hooked on ice or cheat on your test, it's your own fault for not doing more to stop me. And it's my wife's fault for having slutty friends. It's really on your shoulders if you let me get away with this kind of behavior.
TL,DR: if you think Saito is ok, check your moral compass. It may be broken.
Ummm, I think comparing selling crystal meth to children to stalling in mtg is more than a bit ridiculous.
And yeah, I do think that if someone was blatantly playing the clock and you didn't call a judge, it's your own fault. Just because it's not as directly obvious as stacking the deck or drawing extra cards doesn't mean that you shouldn't use the judge as a resource. People just need to be more aware of what is allowable under tournament rules.
Saito is probably an ok dude. OTOH, if the Pro Tour by its nature turns ok people into dicks, maybe it's not in Hasbro's best interest to maintain it, especially when their trained dickwolves start to interact with the general public. (GPs, 5Ks, MTGO, etc.)
Wizards, of course, supports their behavior because it makes things "more storied" (Maro's apologetics for Long, et al.). OTOH, some suit somewhere up the food chain is eventually going to hear from a friend how his or her kid was treated by a pro and the PT will go the way of player rewards.
When Gerry T (also an ok guy by me! no sarcasm at all) seriously goes on about how playing with a die as a prop to deliberately misrepresent the game state and how that's ok because outside of variance pro players pretty much all play perfectly so creating storylines is the only thing that keeps playing fresh and interesting for those in the lifestyle, only to have just about everyone on the SCG forum fall in line as sycophants, I can't see a reason to refuse Saito a spot on the hall of fame.
OTOH, I have to wonder how long things are going to go on like this. Wizards clearly thinks things are fine. Hasbro could change its mind though at any moment. I wonder if Saito and co. should be treading carefully to preserve the bubble or fiddling like there's no tomorrow. :shrug:
I don't think the things Saito has done in tournaments are 'ok'. But news outlets that want to be taken seriously have a responsibility to report the facts, not their opinions. There's a reason you'll never see Fox News run a story about Obama and caption the photo 'N***** Immigrant Communist In Chief', even if that's what half their audience secretly believes.
There are eyewitness accounts of him doing the same thing at Columbus. That means he cheated someone out of several thousand dollars. It's reasonable to believe, as there has been a pattern of behavior here, that it's not the only time that he's done so. How does that strike you as a minor thing. If he robbed a bank and took off with 3 or 4 grand, it'd be a felony, but if he defrauds a couple people out of the money, good on him. That's their fault for letting it happen. And the people that miss T8 because Saito cheated his way in aren't even necessarily the ones he cheated against.
So how much money does he have to steal, I'm sorry, defraud, before he's on par with a meth dealer? 5K? 10K? 50K? Or can we just agree that what he does is wrong and has a massive deleterious effect on others?
Why did these eyewitnesses not call a judge? It'd be like the bankteller in your example not calling the police, except that Saito wasn't pointing a gun at anyone's head. There really isn't a good correlation here between stalling and a true criminal offense.
If you enter into a tournament with the intention of winning, it is your responsibilty to know the rules since they are made publicly known. This goes for people cheating (ignorance of the law is not a defense) and also those being 'swindled' by their opponent stalling. Time management is not something most magic players probably focus on, but is an essential part of winning any sort of organized tournament. It is your responsibility to make sure both you and your opponent are playing fairly, whether this means keeping accurate life totals, maintaining the proper card rulings, or stalling.
I was there at Columbus, there was a judge sitting right next to Saito and the guy playing Jacestill for most of the match since they both got deckchecked and had a time extension. For some reason, he just didn't do anything.
Until we know the specifics of the Saito DQ at Florence, I don't think there is enough against Saito to strip him of his HOF bid.
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I think the thing to read into this is that Wizards is addressing the problem of slow play by hanging Hall of Fame prospect Saito out to dry. I think we've all seen people employ Saito like tactics at competitive events, wasting time scrutinizing over obvious decisions. The slow play rule was only been partially effective because Wizards didn't want to impeed on people using excessive amounts of time to contemplate hard decisions, because there is no objective way to establish which decisions are easy and which are hard. This ruling is a good move because it addresses the slow play rule's problem by looking for a general pattern of wasting time when that is beneficial to a player. Establishing this as cheating will give judges a much better tool to stop this act, definitely a good way to improve tournaments.
I'm with Spikey. Professional Magic has a serious culture issue. The fact that anyone sees a guy favorably who routinely bends the rules to gain an edge over players who either don't know to call him on it or are not as cut throat is evidence. Nobody reading this thread should be thinking that bending the rules successfully makes him a better player. It only seems that way because Wotc has never been able to remove the dick factor from tournaments. And we are so used to reading about it that we have accepted something we should not be willing to accept. If you are possessed of superior play skill and/or have the superior deck, you should win. Ability to cheat your opponent out of his deserved victory over you because you are willing to break the rules is not a one of these. This is a question of class, and it is conspicuously absent from the tournament scene.
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http://www.channelfireball.com/artic...t-gp-florence/
Here is Saito's statement on the matter. Surprisingly, he has been dropped as a writer from Channelfireball, although I have to say I agree with the decision (but was not expecting it).
EDIT: The comments will give you AIDS, so don't read them.
That aside, it is interesting that he is so unrepentant in his statement, given how widespread and repeated the allegations against him are. One would think that the best move would be to at least appear apologetic, regardless of whether or not he actually is, mostly because not being so is likely to make the DCI take a harder stance against him. You don't become famous for slow playing game threes you're losing and then claim you "didn't know you were stalling." A pattern across multiple events suggests either a deep-seated inability to play the game like other players of similar caliber, or a deliberate attempt to stall the match into a draw.
What's really shocking is that people in the comments - and on this site, no less - keep labeling this a "minor" cheating offense. That kind of mindset is why competitive Magic is such a crapshoot; if players spent less time trying to justify ripping you off and more time focusing on being good, competitive games would be both more pleasant and more legitimate.
I don't think it's a surprise at all, especially when you consider the fact that most of his articles are about proper magic etiquette, not strategy.
Seriously? That comment page was probably the most innocuous user-submitted content I've ever read on that site. Rather than, "Magic is fukin gay, and you guys are fukn fat." (actual copy-pasted comment from the MTV #65 thread, though admittedly I lol'd), there's a reasonable discussion taking place, which is far more than I can say for here.
People are welcome to (wrongly) insist that Saito's manipulating the clock within the limits of his warnings is cheating. Opinions are something everyone's entitled to regardless of factual basis. By no means is this a possible comparison to actual cheating. If you've got a problem with slow play, call a judge. That's very literally what they're there for.
But strip him of his deserved HoF induction and cancel his tenure at CFB all over a pending accusation? One which WotC and the DCI have yet to indict him for? Rather than something sarcastic, I'll just say it's tragic to see one of modern Magic's greatest players and strategists is considered guilty until proven innocent.
Great success!
You would think. But given the number of people defending him in the comments ("How could a person who writes about tournament etiquette POSSIBLY be a cheater?!"), this move is likely to be a bit contentious.
Either way, they did the right thing by dropping him.
EDIT:
So, you are playing game three. You are winning. Your opponent reads Jace once per turn, checks your graveyard once per turn, counts cards once per turn, tries to figure out whether to Waste your Factory once per turn, and thinks about whether to Daze your spell when you have four mana up and know the counter is a Daze. And this is not attempting to manipulate the clock to deprive you of a win...how, exactly? Furthermore, the fact that similar accusations have been made by his opponents from previous tournaments doesn't point to a deliberate pattern of behavior to you? Or are they just lying because they're butthurt they lost to Saito?
The fact that some players consider breaching rules that are very explicitly defined to not be cheating is part of the reason why it's so rampant at large tournaments.
If the guy cheated, it doesn't matter how "deserving" he is of his HoF induction. The fact that judges at the event seemed to have been on the lookout expressly for Saito's stalling (he was busted after having played only three rounds, since he had three byes) would seem to indicate that a pattern had been detected previously and that the DCI wanted the maximum amount of evidence before proceeding. Given that a common defense for him has been that "stalling is subjective," this scenario seems to me like the DCI is hedging its bets by being thorough.
But apparently people are willing to defend cheaters by rationalizing the cheating...
I agree that the discussion there is more reasonable (from what I can tell the above poster has a problem with some people there defending Saito), but, assuming you aren't being sarcastic, it's worth nothing that this isn't pending. He was found by judges to be stalling, which is considered cheating. There is a more a gray area with stalling than other forms of cheating, but it isn't "guilty until proven innocent" situation.
You misunderstand Slow Play and Stalling, two very different parts of the infraction rules. There's no relation between the two. A player can be Stalling without even necessarily being in the range of Slow Play.
Not playing fast enough is Tournament Error - Slow Play, with a warning the first time and a game loss the second. The slow play rule is effective for what it is because it does not try to take account anything but how fast a player is playing - you get the same amount of time whether the board is complicated or empty, or whether your decision is easy or hard. The goal of enforcing Slow Play infractions is to encourage players to play fast enough to be able to finish their match within the allotted round time.
Wasting time intentionally with the intent to take advantage of the time limit is Cheating - Stalling. Stalling is only given when there's a reasonable certainty that the player has been trying to manipulate the clock.
“It's possible. But it involves... {checks archives} Nature's Revolt, Opalescence, two Unstable Shapeshifters (one of which started as a Doppelganger), a Tide, an animated land, a creature with Fading, a Silver Wyvern, some way to get a creature into play in response to stuff, some way to get a land into play in response to stuff (a different land from the animated land), and one heck of a Rube Goldberg timing diagram.”
-David DeLaney
And this is why everyone who plays Legacy should also play Vintage as practice... it's fairly easy to play TES against Dreadstill if you've played Gush Tendrils against Tezzeret Control a few hundred times.
I think this just deserve to be quoted. I see a lot of people claiming that stalling =\ cheating. It is not. It is even worse that drawing an extra card or two, since if it works it guarantees you don't lose a game you deserved to lose. Anyways, I don't know personally Saito, nor did I witness any of his attempt to cheat, but if indeed he has repeatedly:
a) ruined the game for a lot of other people
b) robbed them of a bunch of money
c) given a bad example to some thounsands of young kids
he deserves a long DQ and no HoF membership at all.
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I hate stalling as much as anyone, let me just say that right now. I haven't come across it very often simply because I tend to be very liberal with calling judges at the first sign that my opponent is attempting to use time to his advantage. Sometimes I'll even call the judges before I see any signs of my opponent using time against me just because it seems like it might be a possibility and I want a judge to come watch for it as time is suddenly a valuable resource (example, we are both playing slow decks but I'm favored to win after SB and we just started game 3 with 10 minutes left in round). Yes, stalling is cheating, obviously. Anyone who says it is not cheating is glossing it over. There are many times when slow playing will give you a much bigger advantage than if you had marked your cards and could always tell what was on top of your deck. There's just no way around it slow play can be huge.
That said, I think a lot of people use time to their advantage even though they don't slow play and thus are inclined to call slow play a lesser infraction and an equally large % of players have slow played at some point in Magic but would never mark cards or lie outright in a game. I don't slow play, I never have not even once. That said I have used time to my advantage. Sometimes I might see there is one minute left in the round on your turn and then when you pass it to me with 20 seconds left I will quickly draw and pass it back just so I get that one extra turn. I see slow play as cheating because you are attempting to win the game outside of the rules and without actually winning it. Of course I don't see it as serious as marking cards or lying or drawing extra cards for whatever reason, but yeah it's still cheating.
The worst thing about stalling though is the grey area it presents to judges. I've been in games where a judge was sitting there watching on my request and never said or did anything as multiple infractions went past. I've also been in games where something I wouldn't even call slow play was called by a judge not called to the game and penalized (there was still 5 minutes left in round the play decided the winner/loser and it took the guy about 2 1/2 minutes to make decision with a combo deck). Like it or not a lot of judges are timid to call on grey areas. It's easy to call most penalties, either your cards are marked or they are not, either you drew extra cards or you didn't, stalling is harder. When a pro player is involved it gets even dicier. If Saito has absolutely no decision to make and he draws a card, looks at a hand full of basic land and a hopeless board for 30 seconds then passes every turn do you give him a penalty? Then you have to be that guy that gave Saito a penalty, what if he gets a non-related penalty later and combined with yours it makes him lose, then he goes on his blog or whatever and "explains" that what he was actually doing was trying to make the opponent think he had a play when he didn't so that the opponent would misplay a card and give him the opening to win. Now you have the whole internet jumping down your ass crack. Now imagine if you're not even standing where you can see his cards or he holds them close to the vest, it only gets harder because he might actually have a trick in his hand.
big links in sigs are obnoxious -PR
Don't disrespect my dojo dude...
Sweep the leg!
But Woods apparently did feel a need to cheat in another way.
Quit playing Legacy but could still play Goblins (Rgw, Rg, Rw, Rb)
ジェームス・ブラウン
I'm staring in the mirror looking at my biggest rival.
Actually Tiger Woods did cheat. That's why he crashed his car. (edit: ah boo, I'm ninjaad by a Vulvaap)
On topic: I'm glad they finally caught Saito. He's been at it for a quite a while now, and he's finally caught. I hope it''ll be an example to everyone out there trying to cheat.
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