I was watching an episode of the Australian soap opera Prisoner (Prisoner: Cell Block H)
In the episode Lexie is sent to good old Wentworth Prison because she’s a card shark. She’s really good at cards. Someone accused her of cheating and she wound up in prison.
Anyway while in Wentworth prison, Lexie challenges Marlene, the current prison bookie, to a game of poker and purposely loses.
So of course when the time for some real play comes, Lexie has no problem beating Marlene in poker.
Then Marlene who is a jerk anyway, is all upset and accuses Lexie of cheating.
Lexie says, “I don’t have to cheat, I’m really good.” And in her defense, she isn’t cheating, she IS good at poker. She is a really good poker player.
So then we have to have these shrews screaming for the rest of the episode, one screaming “Lexie cheated,” and Lexie saying “I didn’t cheat.”
Of course Lexie didn’t cheat, but she totally led Marlene, on previous occasions to believe she was bad at poker. It’s not like she had aces up her sleeve.
So my question is, is this REALLY cheating. Is being a hustler at cards or pool cheating?
There’s no rule in poker that says you have to play your best. Within the rules of poker, it’s not cheating.
However, it might possibly be fraud, given that she’s tricking people into engaging in a financial transaction they wouldn’t engage in if she’d represented herself accurately to them.
On the third hand, poker is all about tricking people into engaging in a financial transaction they wouldn’t have engaged in if they knew all the facts. You know people are going to try to bluff you in a game of poker. She took that bluff up one level, sort of a metagame bluff, but I can’t get too worked up over it.
It’s not a particularly friendly thing to do, but I can’t see how it’s cheating. It’s not like the loser was going easy on the hustler with her poker B-game in the interest of friendship; in fact, she was presumably was in the game for the very purpose of taking advantage of someone who was apparently weaker.
I always try to represent at least one bad play (providing it doesn’t cost a lot of chips) early in a tournament. You’d be surprised how much action you get in later rounds when you’ve called three over-cards with a busted flush early on.
I voted “No” to hustling – but I’ve read McGoorty’s autobiography, and I’m more of a pool player than a card player, so what he says about cats developing elaborate hustling techniques in the 1920s and 1930s and beyond seems plenty OK to me. If they weren’t sheep, would God have wanted them shorn?
ETA substitute Zeus or Jupiter or whatever for “God” – I find some of the best expressions have L’Innomable in them somewhere. Atheist card not revoked!
Like pool hustling it’s deliberately misrepresenting your skill level to get people to make wagers with you. While this might not be “cheating” in terms of the rules of a particular game many people consider it (effectively) “cheating” because they would not have wagered with you if they knew your skill level.
Suppose Lexie hadn’t been faking her lack of skill and she really was a bad poker player. Would Marlene have then been cheating by winning with her superior poker skill?
There’s two elements in poker: the random draw of the cards and the skill of the players. Cheating is when somebody interferes with the random draw of the cards. But determining how much skill your opponent has is just part of the game. Marlene lost at that twice - once by not being as good a player as Lexie and once by not realizing Lexie was a better player.
It’s sandbagging (a term of racing origin), and it’s a longstanding and widely used strategy. The naive are fooled the first time they encounter it, but if sensible take a good lesson from it. Frankly, I don’t see how it could fall under any reasonable definition of cheating. Playing someone for a sucker, yes, but cheating? No way.