Traveling at the Speed of Slowpoke: Navigating the Murky Waters of Slow Play and Stalling

[cardimg name=”Slowpoke” set=”Generations” no=”32″ align=”right” c=”none”][/cardimg]

Hey, everyone! Between YouTube, PokeBeach articles, and even just in-person chats, perhaps the number one request I’ve had for a skills topic has been what ways you as a player can do against both stalling and slow play. We’ll first set the stage for the definitions of stalling and slow play, their differences, and the importance of being prepared to address each. Next, we’ll go over all the relevant people involved in a slow play/stalling controversy, followed immediately by better understanding the various time-sensitive situations you could find yourself in. Finally, we’ll discuss the ways you can protect yourself from losing games unfairly on time, and the effectiveness of each method.
Because we only have a few moments to share with each other, I’ll only explain the basic problem briefly. Consider this an advanced course on how to handle slow play, so if you have more basic questions, you’re welcome to ask me in the message board thread for this article.

Brief Explanations of Slow Play and Stalling

Technically, and perhaps most simply, slow playing is when a player “…takes too long to make decisions…” (Page 18, last revised February 7, 2018). Practically speaking, however, slow play should actually be seen as the violation of the guidelines set forth under “Game Tempo” (Page 17). Please note that abuse of those guidelines is presumed to be slow playing, and probably stalling as well!

Speaking of which, stalling is just a subset of slow play. The only difference is that stalling is intentionally playing slowly for an advantage. Understandably, these players are subject to a whole other tier of penalties, unsporting conduct penalties, whereas the unintentionally slow players are limited to no more than a prize penalty.

The Importance of Advanced Defensive Strategies

Without a doubt, the first and most relevant benefit of being prepared for stallers and slow players is that you will increase your win percentage as well as lower your tie percentage. That’s why you’re here reading this article, and few things make such a rapid change in player success than simple preparedness for common concerns like these slow play matters.

However, that’s not to say there aren’t a lot of other things about being prepared to deal with slow play. For starters, the skills applied in the way you handle the people, situations, and remedies of slow play become useful in any dispute, especially against cheaters. There’s also a strong deterrent effect when your opponent, however honest or dishonest they may be, knows that you will do what it takes to protect the integrity of your games.

Defense against the ‘Poke Arts

So how do you do it? How do you protect yourself from the Slowkings among Slowpokes? The answers lie within the people, the situations, and the solutions available to you…

Step 1: Knowing the People

While every Pokemon game can be played alone and in the comfort of your own home, competitive Pokemon card-playing is the most uniquely, necessarily social of all Pokemon games. I could perhaps write a whole other article talking about the advantages of being a socially-conscious player in this game. But at least for today’s article, knowing the people involved is critical to resolving your issue with a slow player in the most efficient manner possible. Keep in mind that slow play disputes can have a lasting impact on future relationships, both in their potential incentive to slow play you as well as your need to be tactful and strategic in your efforts to defend yourself.

[cardimg name=”Slowpoke” set=”Guardians Rising” no=”48″ align=”right” c=”none”][/cardimg]

The Slowpoke Opponent

Ah yes, the opponent — otherwise known as the “frenemy”, the “rival”, or “that person sitting across the table from you.” This is the person who is playing slowly against you and is sadly your main obstacle in having a good, clean game. We’ll analyze the opponent from three angles: personal familiarity/knowledge, experience level, and most importantly, degree of culpability. While we factor in all three of these angles together and simultaneously, I’ll be addressing how each individually contribute to our “opponent profile.”

First, personal acquaintanceship or friendship with your opponent is a big clue to the degree and consistency of your opponent’s pace. If round one you are paired against your friend and testing partner and said friend / testing partner plays at the speed of rush hour traffic in practice. Then you will not be surprised at all if this person plays slowly in an actual tournament with prizes. By the same vein, however, your friend ought to know the consequences of their incredibly slow, turtle-like moves, and that their behavior could be interpreted negatively.

Second, experience level counts a lot. In general, I would say an experienced player is more likely to cheat the clock against you than a new player, who is more likely to play slowly out of honest, yet still disadvantageous reasons. Yet while both players are causing you problems, it’s advisable to handle your slow newbie players much more delicately than a slow, quasi-professional staller of five years. For new players, their slowness usually is because of an obvious lack of knowledge or even inability at basic playing; for the veterans, there is a much higher chance of something “active”. Whether that “active” thing is an honestly difficult turn or a deliberate effort to cheat, it should depend on the difficulty of the play as well as its impact.

Also, it’s very important to remember that experience doesn’t have to mean just playing Pokemon. A recently disqualified player at the Costa Mesa, California Regional Championship was previously banned from Yu-Gi-Oh for… you guessed it: stalling! Better keep an eye on people like that!

Finally, and perhaps in tandem with the first two points, we determine our slow opponent’s degree of culpability, or guilt. Even new players can stall you out, in which case their guilt is through the roof. Likewise, even the best players need extra time to think out a long sequence of events. Players manipulating the guideline are “almost certainly stalling” according to the penalty guidelines (Page 17), so if you’re opponent starts spouting off wild claims like, “I can take 15 seconds on every single thing I do,” then even an inexperienced judge might see that as worthy of disqualification.

The Judge

Unlike the players, which can in impact your slow play defense in so many ways, the judges really only come in two forms: active and passive. As the names suggest, active judges are “actively” looking for problems, while passive judges only resolve disputes when called to do so. There are many theories and reasons behind being an active or passive judge, but for the purposes of successful slow play resolution, we can only safely rely on active judges to do their job.

So how does that affect you? Well, if you know you have at least one active judge on staff who is likely to watch your game, then you can trust the effectiveness of your judge-related remedies, which we’ll discuss later on in the article. Unfortunately, if you know your local judges are either passive or — worse yet — just bad at being judges, you are the only person left not only to protect the event’s integrity, but to educate the judge.

That’s not to say it isn’t helpful to be a little independent and self-reliant when you have active judges at your event, since resources can be stretched. However, your set of judge-related remedies change somewhat when you know you’re in good hands.

Yourself

Finally, there’s you. You know when you yourself play quickly or slowly, and thus know that getting a judge called for slow play ends up being silly when they discover that you yourself travel at the speed of Slowpoke, albeit honestly. That’s not to say a slow player can’t be stalled out of a win, but you do have to be acutely aware of both the context as well as how your opponent’s pace fits into that context.  There’s also value in being self-conscious about your reputation in the tournament you’re at. That by no means you should be afraid of raising your hand and calling for a judge if you’re a newer player! However, if you’ve wildly claimed a guy taking five seconds on a search is “too long,” you might not be believed.

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Step 2: Knowing the Situation

So now you know everyone playing or staffing in the tournament. How then do we handle calling judges or adjusting our own pace based on the situation itself?

The Matchup

[cardimg name=”Wailord-EX” set=”Primal Clash” no=”38″ align=”right” c=”none”][/cardimg]

One of the unsung advantages of knowing how to play matchups is knowing when you suffer the most against slow play. If I’m playing [card name=”Wailord-EX” set=”Primal Clash” no=”38″ c=”name”][/card] in Expanded and am up against [card name=”Zoroark-GX” set=”Sun and Moon Black Star Promos” no=”SM84″ c=”name”][/card] in a best-of-one swiss round, you had best be sure I will be playing as quickly as I can, as well as being as aggressive as reasonable in protecting my rights against the slow player.

However, don’t let slow playing get confused with decks that simply are bad choices in particular timed environments.  The well-known and often despised [card name=”Sableye” set=”Dark Explorers” no=”62″ c=”name”][/card]  / [card name=”Garbodor” set=”BREAKpoint” no=”57″ c=”name”][/card] deck of the Expanded format is very good at taking 35 – 40 minute wins, but struggles not to tie in a best-of-one swiss with 30 minutes. Sure, this player is vulnerable to be stalled out or especially played slowly against, but at this point it is mostly in the deck’s nature to suffer from shorter time limits for single games.

Early Game versus Late Game

Just as important as knowing your matchup is knowing the importance and incentives associated with how much time is left. While the first turn will have far more reasons to execute lengthy turns (explosive set up turns, checking prized cards, etc.), the middle and late games should not be full of painfully slow executions in normal matchups. With the exception of a few tough calls, all plays should essentially be within what the guidelines suggest — maybe even shorter. When you start seeing huge deviations from this normal, natural flow of the game, you’ve probably got a staller on your hands.

Single Game versus Match Play

In so many words, match play is far more vulnerable to time exploitation than a 30-minute single game ever could be (above referenced examples notwithstanding). Your opponent’s slow play or stalling can easily turn a win for you into a tie, or a rightful tie into a loss. Single game swiss is not without its time complications, but they are much rarer than the oppressive 50-minute time limits for best two out of three at Regional Championships.

Age division

Finally, age division makes a big difference! Juniors (the youngest age group of ages 10 and below) are the most likely to play slowly for honest reasons. Normally these age groups are stretched less thin, so when a junior calls a judge to watch their opponent’s slow pace of play, the result has a chance to be more effective — hopefully resulting in a time extension! Us older players might not have the same sort of effective results, but a knowledgeable, articulate kid always makes a good impression…especially when they know it’s not allowed to take 50 seconds on a [card name=”Professor Sycamore” set=”XY” no=”122″ c=”name”][/card].

Step 3: Knowing the “Real” Remedies

To close out our discussion, we need to take a comprehensive look at our best options to avoid getting slow played by our opponents. These options combine each of the previously discussed points into effective solutions.

[cardimg name=”Random Receiver” set=”Fates Collide” no=”109″ align=”right” c=”none”][/cardimg]

Communicating with Your Opponent

The primary category of slow player in the penalty guidelines is not called “stalling” — it’s specifically called “slow playing” because slow players are simply far more rampant than stallers, who slow the game down intentionally.

This might sound like common sense, but I have heard time and time again of players complaining about their “slow Poke dad opponent.” When I ask them if they ever did anything to solve the issue, though, I receive dead silence. It may sound dumb and even a little too basic for a “premium” article, but in taking an advanced look at the issue, sometimes we have to remember the basics. And here, the oft-ignored basic solution is opening your mouth and making word-like sounds that vaguely resemble a request for a slightly better pace of play.
Of course, that’s not to say open communication with your opponent who is deliberately stalling you out is all bad. A few words to your opponent can quickly dispel the notion that you will let them get away with stalling.

Adjusting Your Own Pace of Play

Say for whatever reason your opponent’s pace is still stuck, no matter what you say or do. Much the same way the rules protect us from slow play, they also protect us from rushing — that is, attempts to unnaturally speed up the pace of play. Unfortunately, in our pursuit to protect ourselves from slow play, even the nicest remark might come off as “rushing” to your table judge, meaning you will now be on a short leash to do anything without their help.

So, when all else fails, you must speed up. Try your best not to start tripping up and making misplays, but it’s actually in tight spots like these where I again find great value in knowing my deck very well: If I’ve used a deck so much it’s become second-nature to me, then it won’t be too much pressure to speed the whole process up a bit more than I would normally be comfortable doing. But beware of rushing yourself…there’s no rule against that, and it could cost you dearly!

Also, adjusting your pace does not always mean significantly speeding up your pace — sometimes it means only a very slight tweak. It can even justify a slight downgrade in your pace if you found yourself to have been rushing yourself in the first game of a best two-of-three. In Andrew Mahone’s article “A Great Competitor“, he suggests to “sit back and relax and let your opponent dictate the [pace] of play after you win your first game.” I more or less agree with this idea: Whereas you have no idea what path a best two-of-three match will take before it happens, if your opponent’s slow pace resulted in your first game taking 35 minutes instead of 25 even though you yourself were taking lightning-fast turns, why should you keep playing at a lightning-fast pace? Although the penalty guidelines rightfully require judges to monitor any changes in tempo, such as the change advocated here, they should only make corrections “if needed.”

Watch out, though! Pace of play issues are case-by-case, so you need to be very self-conscious and honest with yourself about if you are actually a naturally fast player. If your perceived “downgrade” from lightning-fast to normal is actually just a downgrade from normal to slow, then both your judge and your opponent will call you out for slow play, or maybe even stalling.

Calling the Judge

[cardimg name=”Judge” set=”BREAKthrough” no=”143″ align=”right” c=”none”][/cardimg]

Ending our conversation is perhaps where all judges would like us to start: with a raised hand and a quick shout of “JUDGE!” Sometimes this can be effective, especially for younger age groups and players with active, dedicated judges who aggressively issue time extensions. But I threw in “real” in parentheses because in many instances, this solution simply isn’t a good one.

I had at least one match last season where a player was very flagrantly taking every chance he could to stall me into a tie: taking an absurd amount of time on easy plays; conveniently being distracted when something loud would go on in the venue, among other things. Of course, I called the judge to watch our game, but after less than a minute of watching, he just wandered off, never to be seen again and without so much as an explanation for what he saw. My opponent then went right back to stalling and almost got the tie, but lost to some very quick, accurate Feather Arrow beat downs.

In that situation, fast-playing such as in point two saved me, but I would have honestly been better off with more communication with my opponent than I was with attempting to get results out of this particular judge. It’s at this point where I did not know whether my judge was active or passive and had to make the call blindly.

This in turn raises an important question of how helpful judge-related remedies can be when you aren’t quite sure about individual staff members. The first thing you should look for is in the overall judge culture in that area. For example, in a European event, where judges are comprised of many former top players who know what to look for in slow play, or in Florida where an aggressive schedule of time extensions have been historically imposed, you should feel a lot more at ease when spending those precious few seconds calling a judge. The second category of things you should look for is obvious signaling from the organizer or head judge that they are actively combating slow play. These include pre-tournament announcements, but publicly available clocks and a relatively engaged-looking staff.

Conclusion

If you’ve never experienced stalling or slow play in a tournament before, then I am truly glad you did not have to go through it. Nevertheless, it is vital to be prepared for either of these, whether it’s from a new player taking 10-minute turns or a seasoned veteran who will deprive you of your fair time.

Hopefully today’s article brought a new perspective into the slow play debate, as well as advanced tips for newbies and pros alike. However, even though this is an advanced article on a crucial skills-related subject, this is by no means the end of the conversation! I encourage you to post in the forums and ask hypothetical questions about any pace of play concerns you might have.

Cheers!

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