White Flag Gambit

The White Flag Gambit is one performed by Mafia players in situations where they cannot bus at any cost; or equivalently, in games where the Town is primarily looking to identify living scum through their connections with the other living players. Without loss of generality, assume there are only two scum participating.

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 lynched over the Townie they are connected to. The chance of this happening is fairly low.

The gambit namer is the Open Setup White Flag, where the game ends if either of the last two scum die. This has also been seen in games like Polygamist and virtually any C9-style setup where it is very much to the scum's advantage not to prolong the game by bussing.

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 L-1 for a period of time and susceptible to a hammer, but town ultimately decides to lynch 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.