Call a judge. Right. Right? (on Mori and cheating)
Rich Hagon is one of my favorite members in the meta-community of Magic. He's the reason I know the name of many more players than we see in the coverage and than I have met personally. He's why, anytime a player finally "breaks through" in the text coverage, I tend to find myself thinking, "Wait, I already know this name...right, because Rich interviewed him last year in his podcast coverage for a GP!"
Rich Hagon's article this week is about the Hall of Fame. It's not about his vote in particular so much as, in appropriate Rich Hagon style, it is about all the candidates.
Hagon on Mori
Since Rich is also a super-nice guy, the kind who is loathe to say anything negative about anyone, his commentary about Katsuhiro Mori really stands out:
Katsuhiro Mori – I like to see the good in everyone, and I tend to flinch when I see uncompromising views in print or in conversation. To me, the world is generally a much more rounded place than the black and white view sometimes professed, and I like to avoid making blanket statements unless I'm really sure where I'm going. A close friend described the final of Grand Prix: Yokohama earlier this year between Masashiro Kuroda and Katsuhiro Mori as 'Good versus Evil,' and I frankly thought that was, as they say, a bit harsh. Likewise, Sheldon Menery's one sentence dismissal of the 2005 World Champion, who also repeated Worlds Top 8s in 2006 and 2007.
All that said, let's see if I can actually force myself to type a full-on opinion:
Mori cheats. All the time. As far as I can see, in every turn of every game of every match of every tournament, he's either cheating, or working out how to cheat. At Grand Prix: Gothenburg this past weekend, I saw Mori play three matches. He got a Warning in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. One of these was certainly plausibly an error (a card had been flipped face-up during the pre-game shuffling, and neither player had noticed. Result, when the card arrived mid-way through the game face-up on top of Mori's deck: Looking At Extra Cards. Fine.)
[...cut two examples. Go read the article to see them.]
Mori got banned for accumulated warnings. He got three in twenty-four hours in Gothenburg. Maybe by the end of Amsterdam he'll be gone for good. Hall of Fame? Do you know - amazingly - I didn't vote for him.
The archetypal opinion, offered without a plan
In his own article about the Hall of Fame, Sheldon made this overly concise remark about Mori:
Katsuhiro Mori: You can’t question his resume, and you can’t question that he came by it dishonestly.
This stood out to me as the archetypal variation on a number of comments people like to make about Mori and about other players - basically, an unsubstantiated "This player cheats."
In the forum discussion for Sheldon's bit, I wrote this:
Add me to the list who'd like to have a more detailed breakdown of Mori's alleged dishonesty. I'd heard the examples cited above, but seriously, did he top eight Worlds 3 times purely by cheating? Did he get to top eight Worlds AND win a GP after his suspension by cheating? If so, well, that would be a super-disappointing commentary on judging, since it would mean that someone with a known history of cheating wasn't given any special scrutiny as he rocketed to the top of two events, cheating the whole time.
I'm more generally sick of people making vague yet emphatic assertions about shadiness without having the guts to say names and list specifics. In the past year, for example, I've read more than once about how "the Japanese" play in a shady way. Notably, that's rather less subtle than the issues Riki's bringing up, but I think it stems from the same place.
We can call out Gaetan Lefebvre, for example, because he was found with extra cards in his lap at PT Berlin. That's naming a name, etc.
But suggesting that Mori's resume came about strictly from dishonesty...well, I want to hear more specifics, or to have people make dramatically less sweeping declarations.
Saying, "Mori's dishonest" is just as useful as saying, "Sheldon makes unfair rulings because he dislikes Belgians." Unless we can produce an irked Marijn Lybaert to corroborate that claim, the safest assumption is that someone just wanted to randomly impugn Sheldon, has a mad-on against judges in general, or got up on the wrong side of the bed. All I can know, as another player in the game, is that (1) Mori was suspended for a time for sloppy play and (2) he untapped under a Yosei on camera, with Frank, Sheldon, and a host of other people watching and not noticing until it was too late.
And, you know, without more corroboration, that second event pretty convincingly sells the idea that Mori is simply tremendously sloppy. Cheating on camera in the finals at Worlds wouldn't just be brazen, it would be crazy.
So, if we're going to keep seeing claims like these, I want a detailed breakdown of the thoughts supporting them. Otherwise, it's just people calling each other names, which does nothing to build community or grow the game.
Now, some other people - Rich, Gavin Verhey - have given these breakdowns, with Rich providing the actual, "I was there" commentary in his article this week. With that in mind, well..
Isn't that a "super-disappointing commentary on judging" then? And on players, too? Seriously, if it's a known issue that Mori cheats like crazy all the time, then why aren't we running a Riki Hayashi-style* experiment where a judge shadows him in each round at the next Worlds (or every other round, whatever). I'm well aware that, despite the fact that many people volunteer to spend their time judging, we don't have anything close to a judge per match. That said, this seems worthwhile.
Mori won GP Yokohama this year, along with Japanese nationals. That puts him back at Worlds, an event he has top eighted three times already.
If "everyone knows" that Katsuhiro Mori is a cheater, then it's perplexing that "everyone" hasn't been more proactive about it. I understand that not everyone he plays (certainly at a GP) will know his reputation, but I don't understand why judges like Sheldon, who accuse Mori of cheating, don't have a watchdog on him round-by-round at the PT.
Here's Mori at PT San Diego (on Sheldon's watch) playing very slowly with his Empty the Vaults deck:
His opponent eventually called a judge, but only toward the tail end of the round:
Why this matters
This always feels like a "duh," to me, but here goes - openly calling out a player over and over again as a cheater without aggressively handling the problem severely undercuts the confidence of the average player in tournaments at all levels, from FNM up through the PT. It's probably not the biggest deal in the world if Joe Normal Player and Jane NP feel like the Pro Tour itself might be full of sharks, except that this percolates down to their weekly tournament at their local game shop, and when nothing has been done about the problem, it eventually translates into this idea:
All successful players cheat.
That's how we can have people equating Kibler missing his opponent's trigger in the quarterfinals at PT Austin 2009 with blatant, "I'm stacking my deck" style cheating. If many players didn't believe that cheating goes unpunished, this would barely be an argument - we've all missed one of our opponent's triggers, especially when they're playing cards we don't normally see or use.
Heck, I accidentally let my opponent Prowl out a Notorious Throng once, only to have Toby Elliott stroll up and point out that although my opponent had hit me with a Faerie, he had not hit me with a Faerie Rogue. Oops.
I don't think my opponent was cheating, and I certainly wasn't, but the idea that cheaters are allowed to "roam free and prosper" sets it up such that anyone I defeat at anything from and FNM up through a GP may head home, disenchanted, and give up on the game.
A two-fold solution
I wasn't being facetious in suggesting having a judge just watch all of each and every match Mori is in at Worlds this year. My hypothesis would be that if Mori does cheat like crazy and he needs to cheat to be fully successful, then either (1) he'll play it safe and do horribly or (2) he just can't help it, and he'll either be caught with clear intent or accumulate so many warnings he nets a second suspension.
The general solution is, of course, to call a judge. In the snippet of PT San Diego I included today, recall that Mori's opponent called the judge to watch for slow play very late in the match - but he also called for a judge after Mori had eaten up a significant amount of time on just a few turns. It's imperative to just go ahead and call a judge at the first hint of slow play or any other shadiness.
The judge will give the benefit of the doubt. You don't have to.
Yes, some opponents will act insulted at the prospect of you applying some degree of rigor. Back at GP Oakland one opponent complained when I counted his deck going into game three, citing a lack of time...after his slow play, and his having presented 61 cards (well, 60 + Marit Lage token) in game two. People will be people, but overall the gaming environment will be more pleasant if we just call a judge are polite.
So, yeah. For all of us, call a judge. For the community at large...if someone is going to travel in a cloud of suspicion, we really need to do more than just talk about it, because it undercuts the faith players have in the game.
*Riki Hayashi-style not in that Riki is a stalker, but in that he runs these cool "what would happen if..?" experiments around event planning and judging.
Additional note - Gavin Verhey talks about some more specifics about Mori's record here in the forum discussion on his own Hall of Fame article.
