Coin flips alleged to decide winners in NVIDIA Hearthstone tournament

A tournament where people don’t even try to win their matches?

This is a big deal if these allegations turn out to be true. The NVIDIA Pro-Am Hearthstone tournament was already being criticized for false scores and bad administration in its amateur division. But now we’re looking at a whole new level of problems, as several professionals who took part in the tournament claim that several of the unaired matches between pros weren’t even played. Instead, according to the allegations, players flipped a coin to see who won instead.

Why would they do this? Well, the professional players were guaranteed seats in the tournament — the matches were just to determine what seeds were in the bracket. The allegations first surfaced on twitter when one of Archon’s players, Sebastian Bentert, tweeted that some of his losses had been coin flipped. Both NVIDIA and CEVO, the company contracted to administrate the event, denied such ‘coin flips’ took place.

For a tournament that’s already had some pretty bad press, this is a huge black eye if it turns out to be true. It seems like future tournaments, if they use the Pro-Am approach, need to make sure there are stakes enough for the professional players to keep them from trying to circumvent the games, or simply not allow games to count without someone there to verify them.