The Battle for Information

Judges often use the phrase “every judge call is an investigation” to emphasize that we should always be vigilant to evaluate for potential cheating vectors even in the simplest of rulings. I agree with the general sentiment that we should approach every judge call with this thought in the back of our head. However, what does it really mean for every judge call to be an investigation?

I don’t think it means that we should assume ill intent in any given ruling; but at the same time we should not assume innocence. What we have is more of a Schroedinger’s Cheater and our investigation is the act of opening the box. The problem is that it isn’t as simple as just opening a box. Discovering whether a player is innocent or guilty of cheating means determining their intent, something that even a bad cheater will keep close to their chest. No one is going to outright tell a judge “I did this illegal thing on purpose to gain an advantage and I was hoping that you wouldn’t notice.” Their intent is going to be shrouded in mystery under layers of information.

The phrase “playing close to the chest” is apropo for this discussion. It comes from card games like poker and refers to keeping your cards hidden from the view of your opponents. For an investigation, think of information as those poker cards. You obviously want to know what information the player is holding, but equally important is that you don’t want the player to know what information you have in your hand. Put another way, if the player doesn’t know what information you’re looking for, they don’t know what to lie about.

One important piece of information that you don’t want the player to know early on, and something that I see far too many judges offer up for free, is the fact that the player is under investigation at all! An astute player should realize that something is up any time the Head Judge talks with them, but this is a piece of information that you want to hold onto for as long as possible because as soon as a player knows, they will get defensive, clam up, and become more careful about what they share with you.

This is why some Head Judges will start with some light small talk. “Hi. I’m Riki. What’s your name?” *shakes hand* “Where are you from? What’s your record?” These aren’t questions that are critical to the investigation, but they serve as a low key conversation starter. They’re more useful when you’re coming into a situation somewhat cold. This is common in a shuffling or marked cards investigation that happens away from the match table, possibly even between rounds. Obviously if it’s an active match and you’re investigating the player’s intent on an illegal play, you want to keep the small talk much shorter, both because the FJ has already spent some amount of time with their initial investigation, and also because it is much more obvious to the player that the Head Judge is trying to suss something out.

(As an aside, it can be equally important to lead with “You’re not in trouble” when approaching a player outside of a match while investigating the actions of one of their past opponents.)

The nature of the infraction or error under investigation is another key piece of information that you want to keep under wraps. For example, when investigating curved foils, you don’t want to just flip over all the curved foils and say “Look at how badly these are curved” because part of the calculation to determine cheating here is whether the player realized the problem at any prior point.

At one event, I watched a judge perform a brief investigation triggered by a deck check. The player’s decklist was missing one card, Darkblast, that was in the physical deck (Legacy Dredge). When the player was brought over, the judge started right in with questions about “What singleton cards are you playing?” Not only did this immediately let the player narrow their scope for determining what the investigation was about, but the judge also left the decklist out in front of the player. Instead of working purely off of memory, the player scanned the decklist a couple of times and rattled off some card names before naming the Darkblast that wasn’t on the list.

Even if you want to lead off getting the player to talk about their singletons cards, it’s better to get them to talk more generally about them. The question “What singleton cards are you playing?” is a dead end question. They will name the cards, and that’s it. Instead, get them to talk more about the strategy. Something like:
“I noticed that you have a couple of singletons. I guess with the dredge mechanic you’re more likely to see them if you dredge a bunch of cards. How often have you seen [card name] today How relevant has it been?”
In fact, my recommendation here is for the first card named to be one of the non-Darkblast singletons. Ask a few metagame questions about the card. Then ask about the Darkblast in the same manner. Now you’ve masked that your intent is to find out about Darkblast. Get the player to talk about what matchups Darkblast is good against.

“Have you faced many of those decks today? How often has Darkblast been relevant?”

The thing with this investigation is that you have to consider what the potential cheat is. Ask yourself why would it be advantageous to not list Darkblast on the decklist? The likely answer is to use that card slot as a “flex slot,” trying out multiple cards throughout the day depending on the metagame. In a meta with a lot of Death and Taxes, Darkblast can be an all-star in taking down Mother of Runes and Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. Against a field of Show and Tell decks, it’s just a bad dredge enabler.

Another good question might be to ask how long they’ve been maindecking Darkblast as a singleton. Obviously this question is getting very specific. At this point, you are trying to gauge the truthfulness of their answer. If they say that the card has always been in their deck and explain their reasoning, it becomes more believable that it was a simple error of omission rather than a sneaky way to try out different cards in this slot.

One unfortunate way that information can leak is from the opponent. I’ve had several judge calls where a player has said right at the table “My opponent is stacking their deck/ looking at my cards while they shuffle.” This is another dead end scenario. The player now knows exactly what they are accused of, can set up their story to refute or lie about what’s happened, and will not taking the offending actions any more for the duration of the match (or possibly the tournament) because a judge’s attention has been called to their shuffling.

From the perspective of the player who called it out, this might be a favorable outcome--the opponent is no longer cheating against them. However, from our perspective, we’ve effectively lost the ability to investigate the situation unless a spectator can corroborate the story or the offending player is really bad at lying. This is why for players I always advocate a more discrete conversation with the judge like “I have a question about a card away from the table” and then tell the judge your concerns out of earshot of the opponent. This way we have masked the key piece of information from the opponent, that we suspect them of some kind of shuffle cheat. We can then watch them shuffle from a distance and try to catch them in the act.

Finally, I want to address the issue of time management. Beating around the bush asking set-up questions can take time, so there’s only a limited amount of it that you should be doing. This isn’t a technique for every investigation out there. I used them as an example of how to use information, or the lack of it, to make investigations more effective and focused. Know what information you want to know, and what you don’t want the player to know, then strategically maneuver around those axes to further your investigation. I hope this was useful to you. Best of luck in your investigations!