Tits for Tournaments: Cheaters Inside Team America?

A couple of days ago I started to receive reports of cheating happening with one of the members of Team America at an event held a few weekends ago. The ETC American player in question is Jonathan Willingham. I count Jon as a friend, so when I heard he was accused of cheating I was curious and shocked. Especially, when he is such a nice and gregarious person. It is well-known though that Jonathan does have a bit of a temper problem, from rage quitting events, to throwing dice, and what not. Still, I have never seen him cheat. Even with the blow ups Jonathan always steps away and apologizes.

With that said the story starts a year ago at the same ATC event,

In a game at the ATC tournament one of Jonathan’s opponents went off to the bathroom and when he came back Jonathan’s models had “magically” moved to be within charge range of some units. The player did the right thing and called over a judge, but since it was a case of hearsay the judge said tough luck.

<EDIT> To be clear. The following information is not the same accusation as the above one concerning Jon, it is another Separate incident that happened this year not last year.  <EDIT>

What makes this story more intriguing is that it looks like other competitive players are doing the honorable thing and doing the policing. Stranger still the policing is coming from the OG competitive 40k central: 40k Wrecking Crew. They have an entire thread about Jon and his “cheating”.

http://forums.40kwreckingcrew.com/

Sadly, you cannot get a direct link in the forum so go to “40k Tournaments discussion” then to topic “quote of the week” you will find all the gory details.

Now this wasn’t brought to my attention by the player in question, but others that felt the whole thing reeked of favoritism because of Jonathan’s name in the competitive scene and had a similar experience the year before. Throughout time  average players has seen favoritism at local events and what not. With the greater influence of the Internet this has changed; we are starting to develop real player name recognition on a scale not seen before. This will continue to create problems, for instance many events don’t feel legitimate unless a certain number “well known” players attend. So what happens if these events want to guarantee players have a good time? Favoritism can breed cheating, but worse it breeds a perception foul play. I have seen favoritism at events and sometimes even anti-favoritism, even with Jonathan being a friend, cheating cannot be defended, nor can favoritism. Worse yet, if you think it is hard catching a cheater, think how hard it is to prove favoritism?

In addition, to my knowledge Jon is still a member of Team USA for the ETC. I am sure by now plane tickets are bought, hotels booked, so I doubt anything will be done with Jon if this story is true. Moving forward though Team USA at least should have a zero cheating policy in place– if they don’t already have it.

Anyway, I will follow this closely and see if anything new develops.

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