Incident: Major scramble secrecy and solving procedure issues

Status: Resolved

7b 7f1a 7f2 A2c1 A2c1+ A3b2 A7c4 scramble-secrecy

CSPOpen2015 CSPOpen2016 CSPOpen2017 CSPOpen2018 DaNangCityOpen2017 HaNoiBigCube2013 HaNoiChampionship2018 HaNoiCubeDay2014 HaNoiCubeDay2015 HaNoiCubeDay2016 HaNoiCubeDay2017 HaNoiOpen2013 HaNoiOpen2014 HaNoiOpen2015 HaNoiOpen2016 HaNoiOpen2017 HanoiOpen2022 NhaTrangOpen2017 NhaTrangSummerOpen2016

Incident description and resolution:

Through the years (2013-2022), several Regulations and Guidelines were violated in many competitions in Vietnam. This included:

Using illegal timers (previous Regulation 8a7, now Regulation 7f1a violated)
Using score sheets instead of cube covers (Regulation A2c1 and Guideline A2c1+ violated)
Using Stackmat timers that are not attached to mats (Regulation 7f2 violated)
Inspection not measured due to missing stopwatches (Regulation A3b2 violated)
Blank competitor's fields in score sheets (Regulation A7c4 should lead these attempts to be changed to DNF)
Spectators staying right up against the solving stations (Regulation 7b violated)
Scrambling area not isolated at all

After investigating each competition based on the delegate reports and publicly available evidence, the WRC agreed to keep/remove the results based on the following criteria, where removing results supersedes keeping them:

Competitions using unattached/missing mats - keep results.
Illegal timers: remove all results from affected competitions.
Score sheets instead of covers:
- Prior to 2013, keep all results.
- 2013 onwards, remove all results from affected rounds.

The decision was approved by the WCA Board of Directors.

For more details, see this investigation report and this announcement. See this related incident.

This incident was created on .

This incident was marked as sent to Delegates in a WRC digest on .