Re: Bro Kappa vs. Alexander., Week 9-1
In Round 1 of the Friday tour on week 9, Alexander and Bro Kappa were matched up. At turn 17, while being in the lead 6-4 and in a commanding, though not 100% won position, Alexander said "gtg" and forfeited. Despite saying "gtg", Alexander. was still online on SmogTours for an extended period of time, including when round 2 went up. Initially, Alexander. was infracted for his forfeit. In subsequent talks, Alexander indicated that Bro Kappa had asked him to throw the game, and a screenshot was shown where Bro Kappa had written to Alexander but deleted the messages, to which Alexander responded, paraphrased, that no one would get his account's password to see the messages anyway. Upon talking with Bro Kappa and requesting screenshots of the message history between him and Alexander on Discord, Bro Kappa showed a screenshot where the line previously shown by Alexander was no longer present, indicating that both sides had deleted their messages.
The TD team believes that Bro Kappa asked Alexander to forfeit the game so that he could advance further into Smogon Tour playoffs. While there's no direct evidence of this, there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that makes this scenario the most plausible. The TD team may act on circumstantial evidence if it believes that the case is strong enough and can find multiple pieces of supporting evidence, which has been done previously in the case of Grand Slam IV where no direct logs of Dice ghosting Bouff could be dug up, yet the amount of circumstantial evidence was enough to justify action. Similar story in this case - there are no logs available to the TD team where Bro Kappa directly asks Alexander to throw the game, but we believe that Alexander's response in PMs, subsequent forfeiture reason contradicting his behavior, and the proven deletion of lines is reason enough to act.
Alexander will be tour banned for one month for knowingly forfeiting a heavily favorable position.
Bro Kappa will be tour banned for six months for asking Alexander to forfeit the game against him.
Neither will be allowed to participate in the playoffs of Smogon Tour season 24.
The TD team has determined that the appropriate tour ban length for asking for a win is three months, however Bro Kappa has recently (OST XI, 2016) been involved in ghosting instances and will thus be given double the intended punishment.