White Flag Gambit

The White Flag Gambit is a WIFOM gambit in which mafia members deliberately bus in setups that heavily discourage bussing to throw the town's associative reads off.

When To Use

When a mafia team has a lot to potentially lose from bussing, such as in White Flag, Polygamist, or even many C9-style micro setups in which there are only 2 mafia members.

Execution

Supposing a setup in which the elimination of either participating mafia member immediately results in a town win, town will often look to identify the living scum through their connections with other living players.

In these situations, one of the scum performing this gambit will attempt to bus their scumpartner anyway, allowing the Townies a chance to hammer for an assured win. In practice, the Town will not take this opportunity, but rationalize that the scum would not do something so rash as to open the door for some idiot Townie to hammer. As a result, the busser and the bussee are no longer considered a viable pair at all when the Town tries to concoct theories about who is in the scumteam. Thus, the scum can only lose if they are caught via incorrect association with a Townie, and get eliminated over the Townie they are connected to. The chance of this happening is fairly low.

History

The gambit was codified by its common use in the Open Setup White Flag, where the game ends if either of the last two scum die. The first occurrence of this gambit was in Day 3 of Team Mafia: White Flag by mith and Llamarble.

An example of this gambit can be seen on Day 4 of Open 393 (White Flag), when Equinox begins by voting her only remaining scumpartner, SnakePlissken. SnakePlissken is brought to E-1 for a period of time and susceptible to a hammer, but town ultimately decides to eliminate a different (town) player for a variety of reasons, one of them being that SnakePlissken was considered unlikely to be partnered with Equinox or the other players voting him.