Quote Originally Posted by cdr View Post
They were backing off of this well before the Bertoncini thing; they flattened out the Players Club rewards and pretty much eliminated the stuff at the top for 2012. And to be fair, they were pretty much exactly folloing the WotC playbook.

If you think SCG isn't going to put a huge amount of effort into making sure something like this doesn't happen again, you're nuts. Part of that I hope is player education - in a competitive event with big bucks on the line, you have to watch your opponent whether you like to or not.
Agreed on both points. WotC seems to want to like the idea of having a small group of recognizable "pro" players, and to make the top events more exclusive to turn it in to a more spectator-friendly game, a la pro poker. If that really is what they're shooting for, they need to start adopting some of the protections that WPT uses like the table cameras, and possibly a table judge (or judges?) exclusively for watching for non-game-state-related infractions. Hell, if they're going to make pro events exclusive, high-stakes affairs, maybe they should have a judge shuffling decks too.

In big, open events the onus is definitely on the players to keep each other honest. If you're like me and you mostly just play to enjoy the game and meet like-minded people, the idea of treating everyone like a crook seems terrible, but so does getting cheated...