> Such a person could *still* snipe. He distributes points and sets strategies every day, but he waits to spend all his gold for the qualifying round, and then he really loads up.
>

True, but then it would at least be pretty obvious to the astute observer what he was trying to do. "Hmm, so, he's not spent any gold for seven rounds, and yet he doesn't have any penalties. Gee, I wonder if I should prepare for a kamikaze attack?" (I usually refer to them as kamikazes because of their attack-then-die nature)

The thing is, you can't fully prevent kamikaze attacks, you can really only limit their effectiveness. If somebody really wanted to use their one account to screw with the upper ranks and sacrifice any chance of winning, they're going to do it one way or the other, even if they don't play the waiting game.

Just look at the 1st Elimination Round Alex went up against; if Haplay had decided, "Alright, screw trying to win the tournament, I just want to get to the next round." and put all his 400-or-so gold into temp. enhancements, he would still have lost, but he could have put another 30-50-point dent into Alex's game. Another setback like that could have completely killed the chance he still has at winning the tournament. A lot of lower-ranked players in the first couple of Elimination rounds could do this, and in fact, there's usually at least one or two top-ranked people who end up a round or two short of how far they could've gone because there's usually a few people every month who do this (I know I've had a problem with it before, heh). This kind of random-bad-luck is simply a less-extreme form of the type of kamikaze that Alex was hit with, ~the difference being that these people actually tried to play the game for a while before going for the short-term win~.

That difference is sort of where I draw the line. There's always going to be some aspect of luck in this game, so there's always a chance that you're just going to run into somebody who feels like making sure you have a bad run, but as long as they were at least making some effort to try and play the game ~normally~, I think that's about the best you can ask for.