The
2017 Swedish Championship was held 18-20 November.
On the classics tournament a player was disqualified from the tournament due to
abuse to a machine (ie kicked the leg very hard). The judges ruled that the
player was disqualified from the classic tournament and not from the main
tournament.
The aftermath of this is that the player complained about the result after
three months and Ifpa made a ruling where the player was not DQ from the
competition, but from the match and therefore received the WPPR-points he would
have gotten if he only lost the game. This changing all the previously given
WPPR in this tournament.
The answer from IFPA was: Final authority for any ruling, including rulings
that contradict or vacate anything written in this document or in other IFPA
materials, rests with the President of the International Flipper Pinball
Association, Josh Sharpe.
In my opinion, this is terribly wrong and I would like get some response from
the more experienced players regarding this.
Questions are:
Does the answer from IFPA mean that they have changed the ruling so that he was
DQ from the match and not the tournament?
Does it make a difference if Joe Average complains, or if a top player does it?
If this is the rule, I have to respect that. If I was the TD of that tournament and saw that person kick the game as you described, I wouldâve booted him from the tournament too. Whatever happens after that with him and the IFPA, thatâs out of my hands, but someone acting like that in a tournament is completely unacceptable and shouldnât even carry a warning imo.
In the general case, I will say that a tournament DQ is handled by assigning the player in question a score of zero for current game in progress (if any), and for any future games that the player would have played. But let the player continue in the tournament system and assign the finish position this will result in.
In a (very) severe case of abuse or outrageous behaviour, a player may be ejected from the finish ranking. However, it should be handled as above, but with the finish position for this player left empty. So players below are not bumped up. And the player in question is not given last place or anything like that.
This is for finals systems in progress.
If a player is ejected while in qualification stage, or similar intermediate stage, I donât see any problem filling up the finals system with players below.
I believe this is correct. And fair. Similar handling for players who leave a tournament at free will (a fair finish position may be given in this case though).
It seems like a really unusual situation to have actually come up, but I guess if we were to have it happen here the player would just receive a score of zero for that game and all future games. They donât lose the progress they made up to that point because they hadnât committed the abusive behavior at that point and if youâre going to retroactively remove them from the event, itâs pretty easy to argue that the other affected players should be compensated and then you end up in a really Fâd situation.
If I am understanding the situation correctly, I think the IFPA made the exact right call here to include the DQâs player in the rankings.
What Josh/Ifpa is saying, is that for IFPA World Ranking purposes, they are judge of how the IFPA rankings will be determined. And that makes total sense.
Just because a player was ejected from a tournament doesnât mean the matches/games the DQâd player participated in during the event magically disappear. The DQâd player still added challenge/difficulty to the event. In terms of determining how people rank globally, the DQâd player should be counted as a participant.
Imagine this scenario: The Top 64 players from the WPPR ranking play in a tournament. Its a full value WPPR tounament (and thus the most valuable wppr points possible as it includes the top 64 players). After 3 days of qualifying and finals, just before the tournament is over, the top 63 players all kick a machine at the same time and are DQâd.
How should the results be reported? Does player 64 get entered as having won an event with 1 participant (themselves) and get ~0.5 wppr points? The other 1-63 players are not entered for the event and thus their ratings do not go down?
At minimum imo all players who participated in the event need to show up on the WPPR submission (and, it sounds like that was not done in the situation described in the OP).
To be fair I explained my opinion to the TD in greater detail instead of the âbecause I said soâ verbiage. Hereâs some more of what I wrote back to the TD.
My response over the last 10 years has been consistent on this issue:
Should a player be disqualified and ejected from the tournament, the impact that player had on the tournament up to that point still stands. If Jorian eliminated a player in the round of 32, that eliminated player doesnât get back into the tournament because Player X was ejected later on. Our application of ejection rules is exactly what I mentioned to Mats (Swedish country director), a player can no longer advance themselves in the tournament, and will be deemed to finish in the worst possible position at that time of ejection.
The only caveat where I have deviated from this rule in the past is if a player was found cheating. We eliminated that player from the results entirely.
Player conduct issues are not rare, especially in the US. Our line regarding FairPlay with respect to eliminating a player from the standings altogether focuses on whether their play was in fact done fairly (no cheating).
We can certainly update the verbiage in our rules to explicitly state where our line in the sand falls on this if you believe that will help clarify our stance.
Fair enough, but i do not think the player who is DQ from the tournament should be rewarded WPPR-points. Include his/hers value for the ranking, but do not reward the points.
Understood . . . and itâs fine to have that opinion.
As the TD of the event, where do you stand on that player having won any awards for the position he was in at the time of DQ? If 4th place was a trophy and $1000 cash, does that player forfeit those winnings?
To be clear this isnât us deciding that a match DQ is the same as a tournament ejection DQ. If this player had any further matches scheduled, my ruling would simply be that he forfeits all of those matches that he would no longer be able to participate in (versus a match DQ where that player could play the following round).
I agree with this. But wouldnât there be other instances of a tourney DQ that would warrant complete exclusion from the results and disqualification from receiving prizes for the finishing position theyâd earned up until the tourney DQ? For instance, if a player is violent toward another player or staff, or if a player sexually harasses/assaults another player/staff/patron?
Looking at the impact the player actually had up to that point, my answer would still be to include them in the results.
Iâm purely focused on whether the playing itself was done fairly and without issues of cheating.
Not included them in the results submitted to the IFPA isnât about some sort of âpunishmentâ to the player. Weâre simply looking to accurately reflect the results of those that participated.
I would imagine for issues like you mentioned, thereâs a good chance that player wonât be allowed back for future events, as depending on when this issue happened, itâs likely they would be put near the bottom of the standings anyway.
A result is good if the play is fair, regardless of how big of an asshole that player may be.
If i had been TD for this event, i would definitely not give any trophys or price money. Let us not forget that the player broke the rules in such way that an elimination from the tournament was the desicion. Not a slap on the wrist, but a get the hell out of here.
Let us not forget that tournaments of this kind relies on the good hearts of pinball people who lend their machines wich now can be worth a lot of money. The disrespect for other peoples properties will eventually lead to people not lending their machines and we will have no more tournaments.
When the games was kicked, he was in the lead with no more balls left from his opponent, Wouldn´t that mean that he should have third place according to this desicion?
That incident occurred during the game and in your case was immediate grounds for a DQ. It doesnât matter how well you scored, if you break the rules it turns into a 0.
Safe to assume this player is banned from participating next year?
I would have no problem DQâing him from the game in question (scoring a 0 for that game played), and then telling him to get the f*ck out, in which he now forfeits every future game he would have to play. The fact this was his âlast gameâ was simply a coincidence with respect to the rules I mentioned.
The comments regarding disrepect for other peoples property is far from a WPPR discussion.
If Iâm a volunteer bringing my equipment, I could care less about a player receiving WPPR points or not, and far more interested in making sure that player is never allowed back to an event where Iâm bringing my equipment to be played. Two completely separate issues here IMO.
I think this, plus DQing the player from the game in question, is within the rights of the TD. Like @pinwizj has been saying, the fact that WPPR points were earned is a separate issue. If I were kicking someone out of a tournament, I wouldnât let them take their prizes with them; theyâre forfeiting that benefit by behaving poorly. But WPPRs arenât prizes. Theyâre a reflection of how tournament play itself shook out.
Based on the constant deluge of fervor and ire we get when the rankings arenât correct, I always assumed they were some form of currency that I just hadnât been hooked into yet
