On Sportsmanship

Yesterday I got an email from the BPA (the people who run WBC) which had, among other things, this year's nominees for the WBC Sportsmanship award. I took a look to see what sorts of things get nominated and one name really caught my eye. He got nominated for doing pretty much the exact opposite of something he advocated happening 3 years ago. I went on a bit of a rant on here at the time so I figured it would only be fair to point out the change now.

The background is the game Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit. This is a card driven wargame with unbalanced sides. The dark side basically wins by killing everything in site. The light side wins by keep at least 3 people alive while winning a side-game with Anakin. You get to take 4 actions each turn and actions taken with Anakin basically have no game effect. Using actions on Anakin is, I think, very bad. It gives up board position for no real advantage. Eventually you get enough successes and win the game but I think you should establish a strong board position and then work on Anakin.

This means if a game goes long it is almost certainly the light side's fault. Pretty much every action the dark side takes is a direct progression towards winning the game, but if the light side wants the game to last a long time it probably will. In order to make sure games finish in 2 hours they added a rule that if time runs out the light side just loses. If people are playing at a good pace this will never come up but there are a lot of people out there who don't play at a good pace so it does happen.

Three years ago in the semi-finals of the tournament I was playing as the light side. I had completely ignored Anakin in favour of getting good board position and it had worked out. In fact, I was guaranteed to win. I killed every single dark side unit that could attack my guys. I blocked the way in so he couldn't get more reinforcements. Now all I needed to do was advance Anakin and the game was over. I had over an hour to go and it was pretty much impossible that I'd fail enough dice rolls in a row. Unless my opponent started stalling in a way that is incomprehensible.

At any rate my opponent conceded when I established the board lock. A spectator who it turned out had something to gain if my opponent won made a big deal about it. I hadn't actually won yet, he claimed, and I should be forced to roll out those dice because it's possible I'd fail to win 5 coin flips out of the likely 100 I'd be making. He went so far as to call the GM over and the two of them combined managed to convince my opponent to unconcede. And set the game back up. And keep playing in the hopes I'd fail my coin flips. My opponent didn't take any actions and just let me win. (He could have thought about what cards to play. He could have taken actions that wouldn't impact the game in any way but which would involve rolling dice and eating up time.) I won in about 5 minutes.


Here's the nomination for the 2011 WBC Sportsmanship award:

"STAR WARS; QUEEN'S GAMBIT: Three-time champion Larry Lingle had his elimination round game all but won by merely playing out his hand normally, but he didn't want to win by time limits so he passed his own moves, allowing his opponent to beat the clock and win the game as Anakin brought down the death star - knocking Larry out of the tournament."

Larry was the spectator to my game 3 years ago. He's the one who wanted my opponent to abuse the clock in order to win an un-winnable game. He's the one who wanted my opponent to take worthless actions to waste time. And yet here he is, nominated for doing the exact opposite! And by the same GM that forced an undo of a concession and a re-setup of a game! (Though, to be fair, I'm pretty sure he knew that if we just played it out I'd win anyway and was likely just trying to appease Larry.)

Now, maybe things have changed in the last 3 years for Larry. Maybe he's realized what a jerky thing he was advocating 3 years ago and changed the way to approaches the time limit. What I think is a lot more likely is he holds himself to a higher standard than he does other people. He wants to win the right way, within the rules, and doesn't want to win by cheesing his opponent out. But he knows that cheesing people out is possible and wanted to make sure my young opponent was aware of his options. Maybe he thought I'd badgered my opponent into an early concession and was trying to undo my imagined bad sportsmanship? I can respect that!

I know he's a good guy in general. He's a popular GM of multiple events and I had heard a story of him conceding in a different Queen's Gambit game after realizing he'd been inadvertently cheating by moving guys too far after the real Queen died. But I'd painted him in a bad light 3 years ago and I don't think that was very fair in retrospect. I'll never know his motivations at the time and I'm glad to hear he didn't cheese out a win last year!