Tits for Tournaments: A Feast of Cheating?

I was planning on writing about all the fun experiences playing my Green Tide army at Feast of Blades last weekend, but as it turns out nothing can be fun and easy when I go to a tournament. The homing beacon of cheating (or whatever you want to call it) just had to follow. Often I’m accused of creating drama, but for Feasts of Blades it all unfolded for everyone to see without any light shinning from me. Feasts of Blades has never had any problems with players cheating or being accused of cheating, until this year. What makes this even more shocking is not only did the Invitational Winner forfeit his victories, but the runner-up had to do the same a few days later. I won’t really be injecting much of my own opinions on the matter, but I want to give an accurate chronology of what happened.

I have first hand knowledge, I was there for it and I got to hear everyone’s side. Since the event, I have noticed a few people trying to color things fit whatever particular camp they belong to, this is my attempt to cut through the crap.

The facts are simple. One player had rigged dice and another had an illegal list. The only judgement is if either incidents were intentional, and I doubt we will ever know with 100% certainty.

You the readers can decide.

The final table for the Feast of Blades Invitational pitted two good players one very well-known the other regionally known. The very well-known player was playing Chaos Space Marines/Daemon and the other player was playing a Space Marines with the Saint Tylus Battle Force formation. The very well-known player is the one with rigged dice while the other had an illegal list.

Let us start with the illegal dice issue.

As many of you know rigged dice isn’t new to games, in this particular case the player in question was using at least four dice that had their 2 side drilled and changed to 5s. That gives a player two sides with fives on them and no twos. This was out of a pile of dice between 50-70. So, unless you know which dice are which you will have a hard time cheating someone, but with that said having two 5s is extremely powerful for a Chaos Space Marine/Daemons list if it is intentional.

How was this discovery made?

A random player found one of the offending dice underneath the offending player’s table after he finished a game. While fooling around with friends this player discovered its odd rolling habits and on further inspection found tampering with, taking it to the judges they proceeded to wait for the final game to be over before inspecting the well-known players dice pool. Since the player was the winner of the tournament he was taken aside and asked about the dice. The player quickly DQed himself and made an apology in front of everyone in attendance.

http://m.ustream.tv/channel/feast-of-blades-2014?utm around the 55:00 min mark.

He then proceeded to take to his Facebook and make this statement about the whole episode.

“This weekend I had a blast at feast of blades. It was simply amazing. Everyone was awesome. There was however a dice issue. I am humiliated and embarrassed that this has occurred. I did not know that there were illegal dice in my dice box. It was simply a mistake on my part. I know this is only an excuse, and no one has any reason to believe me. I purchased a party pack of dice on eBay. It was a random assortment of dice. The seller listed it simply as one pound of randomly selected dice. 40k is more to me than simply winning. I have played for over 10 years and have professionally painted over 100 armies. For me, 40k is about hanging out with great friends and having a great weekend together while playing 40k. I often talk about there being a social-contract between each player for our 2-plus hour games. I am humiliated that I did not inspect my dice when I bought them and violated this social-contract with all of my opponents this weekend. I will now always inspect my dice and promise to show this amazing community that this situation is not indicative of me or my behavior. To my mother- who watched watched all of my streaming games this weekend, my brother, my friends, this community, and most importantly my opponents; I am sorry. This will never happen again.”

Now whether you believe these apologies is up to each of us personally. The only thing I want to point out is in all my time covering cheating at Warhammer events, never has a person publicly apologized for what happened. Usually they say nothing or hide behind friends who do the talking for them, it does show something about the character of a person to admit mistakes were made. I wouldn’t blame the event for something like this, it is very rare occurrence, my only suggestion would be for events to adopt having the final table use only specially designed event dice. Make it a fun with limited edition dice, that way both players go home with something and it maintains the integrity of the event.

Now on to part two of this equation, because the winner disqualified himself a new winner was crowned. It turns out the new winner was using an illegal list as per the army construction rules for the event. Now what makes this case particularly interesting is Feast of Blades knew about by game five and forced the player to change his list. The only problem is the person who changed his list should have DQed the player when it was discovered, per the event rules. As well, the player believed his list was legal having asked about it when he submitted it. Regardless, if this was a case of malicious exploiting or event oversight the way it was handled wasn’t good. It ended with two people playing for all the marbles on the top table who shouldn’t have. The backlash against the event and the “new winner” was intense. It all played out on Facebook, in the end this statement was made by the player in question.

To anyone involved in the 2014 Feast of Blades Invitational,

I have watched the backlash over the past 24 hours in regards to the Feast of Blades Invitational this year and feel that at this point I needed to step up and say a couple of things.

I contacted the FoB staff in regards to what I was going to run for the invitational this year a couple of times to make sure that I was running my list the way they wanted. I know that 7th edition has created a situation where there is an exorbitant amount of information and sources out there to choose from when building a list and it can get confusing.

When in the 6th round the head judge brought it to my attention that the list I was running was not a valid list as per their rules, I asked what they wanted me to do about it. I was told that I would need to modify my list to make it legal. I asked how they wanted me to modify my list that they would be comfortable with the changes and was told to remove enough from the list to add one troop choice to the list from the Red Scorpions chapter to make the Red Scorpions character I was using a legal allied detachment. So I made the appropriate changes to my list.

I took a couple of minutes to ask the head judges whether they felt it would be better overall for the tournament if I stepped down and forfeited right then and was told that the changes that were made were done so I can play it out, and that I should play if I wanted to play. I am not going to lie when I say that I really wanted to play and so with their endorsement I played on. I came to this tournament with the intent to play a legal list and thought I was. Obviously there was a miscommunication somewhere before the tournament occurred as I thought I was doing so. It was never my intent to take advantage of the tournament or to “cheat” in any way.

The fact that now the integrity of the Feast of Blades staff has been called into question along with myself, my team, and others has made if very clear to me that maintaining that integrity and the integrity of this community is far more important than a pretty trophy (and it is pretty) and a couple boxes of Eldar that I got as a prize.

I feel that the only thing I can do to assist in trying to fix the issue that has arisen as a result of this past weekend is to step down as the winner of the Feast of Blades and give my prize support to Vince (I can’t remember his last name) from El Paso, TX. He was running a beautiful Daemon list led by the Forgeworld Lord of Change (the 999 point one). If by chance anyone on any of these forums knows how to contact Vince and let him know to get in contact with me I would be more than happy to send him the trophy and prize support from the event. He fought well and played hard and is truly deserving of the prize.

The only other thing I can do is offer my deepest apologies to any individuals that came to this event and felt they didn’t get their fair shot. I sincerely do apologize to you for any wrong you feel victim of. I know it costs a lot to go to these events, I spent a hefty sum myself coming out to this one. And I know that feeling like you got cheated hurts and can even make some question whether it is worth making the trip again. I can only pray that what I am saying here will fall on open ears and hearts and you will know that these events are still worth going to and such a great time to have been able to experience.

I have held to the motto for years in my life that “I don’t judge people by the mistakes they make in life, but how they deal with those mistakes.” I am hoping that I have dealt with this mistake as best I can. I hope to have a chance to come back next year and make a good showing for both my team and the Feast.

Once again the player stands up and takes responsibility for what happened. My only problem with the whole affair is why wasn’t anything done at the time they discovered his list was illegal? Personally, I wouldn’t have changed the list, but told him to play out the rest of his games and make sure he didn’t earn any further points. Why go to the trouble to make the list legal? It creates a whole host of other problems.

Here is Feast of Blades follow-up response as well.

We would like to offer our thoughts as well:

Josh isn’t standing alone in the hurricane here, we join him in offering up an apology, this was a case where, due to miscommunication, the event and players were affected and we directly had a hand in it… We honestly try the best we can to make an event people want to attend and come back to every year. Sometimes, we get a call wrong and it sucks. We have spent the last couple of days reviewing exactly what happened and how to prevent it in future years.

The take away we hope everyone leaves with is that THE COMMUNITY is what is important, not winning, not shiny trophies, and not attacking each-other for problems. Obviously, for us, the saddest part of all of this was the insults and personally hurtful comments that were thrown around not only about us, but about the people involved. Hopefully, we can all be a little more forgiving and little less raging. Mistakes happen and they MUST be made right but remember that there are other people who love what you love on all sides of this and we should treat each-other with dignity and respect, while instilling the virtues we want to see in OUR community.

Thank you, everyone.

Unlike other events and situations, this is really the only time everyone took some sort of responsibility for what happened. Should it count for something? I think so, but a little bit of shaming does go a long way and think everyone involved understands that. It looks like everyone got out ahead of this story before I or people like me had to bring it up and really get the pitchforks going. I for one had a great time at Feast of Blades going once again 3-2 with my Green Tide, and time I can say I only lost to one army, just happened to be the same army twice.

If you want to follow more of this discussion I suggest checking out these links.