Is exploiting the rules of a game "cheating"?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was playing cards with some of my friends recently when I stumbled across a rule which I exploited. I don’t know if any of you have heard the game “May-i” but basically what I did was take low point scoring cards (the game scores similar to Golf) rather then try and do what I was supposed to be doing, which was trying to form a winning hand, such as a straight, four of a kind, a flush, etc.

As soon as someone gets a winning hand, they receive zero points and everyone else gets points based on what cards they have left, some cards are worth more then others. Then they go on to another round.

The deck sits in the middle, you draw a card, and if you want to keep it, you have to throw another one down, but if you don’t want it, you sit it face up next to the pile. Whoever is next (clockwise) has first dibs on taking that card, or one from the pile. If they don’t want it, someone else can say “May-i” and take the card.

So anyway… we were in the final round and a low card was thrown down and someone said “May-i”. It was a low point scoring card, so I said “no” and took it. I leaned over and he glanced at my hand, then accused me of cheating because I didn’t need that low card to complete a winning hand. I said I was going for low cards, because if I finished with all low cards, it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t get a winning hand, because I would score too few points to lose.

Everyone else branded me a cheat and now they won’t play it with me…

So… my question is, if I play within the rules of the game, but maliciously exploit them in my favor, am I cheating?

I believe there was a snooker player who used to be able to exploit some sort of rule that made him invincible, so they had to actually change the rules to stop him from doing it…

2

Definitely not cheating. It’s not an uncommon practice in competition for the leader to play it safe rather than risking losing. By your friends’ logic, a football team that’s ahead in the fourth quarter is “cheating” by running the ball to use up the clock.

(BTW, this is probably doesn’t belong in GQ – more like IMHO.)

3

I’m not familiar with the game you’re talking about, but it sounds fairly simple from your explanation.

My opinion- no, you’re not cheating. The rules, if they are “officially” written anywhere, might verify this.

Are you ruining the game? Probably. If everyone in your group played eith your methodology, you’d have a pretty boring game (even moreso than it sounds already.) I’m all for exploiting game rules to one’s benefit, but your approach sounds more frustrating than ingenious, and your friends might be waiting for you in the alley. :wink:

BTW, before any mods can get in to say it- you may be posting in the wrong column for this question/

4

This thread was supposed to be in IMHO.

manhattan, you better move it over. Or Chronos, but I’ll take million dollar bets that it won’t be Chronos!

5

You are not cheating since you are following the rules. You are just playing not to lose, rather than playing to win.

I thought this thread would be a discussion of (1) basketball where most players deliberately cheat [foul] since the penalties are mild vs. (2)football which has severe penalties for cheating.

6

Doc Moss said:

That sounds pretty cut & dry to me.

Then you say:

I take this to mean that somewhere in the rulebooks there is a specific provision allowing you to do what you did. Again I say, cut & dry IMHO.

7

I don’t see your actions as cheating, it’s just a strategy, within the rules, that you chose. Similar to JeffB’s football analogy.

I do, however, believe there are times that someone can cheat within the rules. The best example I can think of is when Jerry Glanville coached the Atlanta Falcons. If his team was ever punting in the last couple of seconds in a half, he would send 13 or 14 players on to the field to cover the punt. Although a half can’t end with a defensive penalty, his team was on offense so time would expire. Hardly within the intent of the rules, IMO.

8

Yeah, this goes over to IMHO. I’ll just move it now, since I’m reading it.

Lynn

9

Doc:

I’ve never met anyone (outside of my family) that knew of May-I! This is cool!! :slight_smile:

Your question was answered pretty well… suffice it to say that I agree with the crowd; your play is legal. But, if you played that way at my table, I am certain that I would cream you. :smiley:

There just aren’t enough low-value cards in the deck to protect you.

10

It depends on what rule you’re exploiting, and how extreme the exploitation is.

If I understand what you did correctly - no you weren’t cheating. It was a strategy, anyone could have come up with it - and playing not to lose is just as valid as playing to win or (one of my favorite) playing to keep someone else from winning.

BTW, you definitely need to get better at holding your cards.

11

Here’s a very close parallel I can draw: I play spades quite often online, where (as we all know) people do not hesitate to speak their minds & call you a scum sucking mother freaking cheater if the mood strikes them.

For the benifit of those of us who aren’t familiar with the rules of spades, you are supposed to be penilized when your team wins tricks in excess of your contract bid. Each overtrick counts as a “bag” and when you get ten bags you go down 100 points. This rule encourages people to bid their hands accurately.

Anywho, I often turn this around to make use of bagging as an offensive strategy, rather than simply a punishment for underbidding. If I see that the opposing team is far ahead in score, or about to win the game & I can’t bid high enough to beat them, I will underbid with the intention of pushing their bag count to ten. Granted they have to be fairly close to ten for this to work, but it often does work.

My point is, the rules (AFAIK) do not state that the purpose of bags is to allow opponents to drag your score down 100 points, rather the rules say that bagging helps make sure that everybody bids their hand as accurately as possible. But since the rules don’t specifically disallow tactical bagging (or as I like to call it, “strategic underbidding”), it is therefore not prohibited.

I think that a lot of people think that it is a dirty trick and probably outside of the rules’ intent, but since the act isn’t specifically prohibited there isn’t much they can do about it- except launch into a temper tantrum & call me every name in the book including “cheater” but since I am not breaking any rule (and they know it) I don’t feel like a cheater, and that’s what counts. The justification they use for calling me a cheater is that they have bid their hand accurately and therefore should not be bagged.

Do you feel like a cheater?

12

Lemme get this straight.

You employ a strategy that is not prohibited by the rules…

Your friend PEEKS AT YOUR HAND…

And they call you the cheater?!?

Get some vertebrate friends next time.

13

Attrayant, that’s exactly how I play Spades. I sometimes have more fun setting people back than winning a given hand.

The other point is that Doc Moss said he was doing this in the “final round” as opposed to doing it throughout the game. Although it still wouldn’t be cheating to do it in every hand, it would be darn annoying.

14

To answer the OP, no, you are not cheating.

But the real reason I posted to this thread was to tell OrcaChow that I love his/her name. Even though I don’t know you, that name does it for me on so many levels!

15

You are definitely not cheating. The game sounds quite similar to Rummy, and any good player will take the point penalty into account while playing. You were most certainly not cheating, indeed hardly even “exploiting” the rules. You were simply playing better than your friends. And c’mon, he looked at your hand?

The spades thing sounds a little iffier, though not really cheating either. If anything, the strategy simply indicates a need for more revision in the rules.

Off on a tangent, my college roommate would often suggest that we both sign onto an e-mail Diplomacy game and work together to beat everyone else. This, while not explicitly forbidden by the rules, would have been totally against the spirit of the game, and would have made the game unfair for the other players and boring for me. I refused.

16

I love that game! I’ve always played it called “Shang-Hi” (sp?), but I instantly knew that was what you are talking about. I was on a vacation with my family and we played it every night.

BTW, that’s not cheating. If you are in competition for the low it can actually be a great strategy.

17

No, that’s not cheating, but there is one importatn caveat: in casual, social play of any type a lone individual playing “cutthroat” is irritating, and I suspect that that was what may have irritated your friends. I don’t know about your situation (and I don’t think it is really like this,since you were playing to “not lose”, not to win), but when everyone else is being laid back and unconcerned, a person who seems to be gloating over figuring out a stradegy and winning something that no one else is even fighting for makes an ass of himself.

18

<slight hijack>
May-I is a big hit in my family… how do you play?
we play two sets of three
a set of three and a run of four
two runs of four
3 sets of three
two sets of three and a run of four, no discard
2-9 worth 4 point, 10-K worth 10, Ace=20, and joker=50
</slight hijack>

FWIW, that’s how I play May-I as well. However I do feel bad about coasting, where the other player is so high you have won by default and you don’t have to really try in the last hand. I guess you could liken it to running down the clock, and it is legal but feels really cheesy…

19

I agree completely with MandaJo about the irritation of someone playing by cutthroat rules in a friendly game. However, is this really an example of “cutthroat”?

When I was growing up, my best friend’s dad, a hypercompetitive ex-Marine officer, was virtually unbeatable at most games and sports. He might have been a “storm the beach” kind of guy in the Marines, but his personal strategy was to hang in there until the other side made a mistake. His own wife used to get so pissed at him when they’d play a simple game of ping-pong. He wasn’t spectacular, but playing him was like hitting the ball against a wall. And the more I thought about it, the more sense it made–and the less unfair it seemed.

IMO, “cutthroat” is invoking bullshit rules everybody else has agreed to overlook. It’s vying for a humiliating win when the object is fun. It’s throwing forearms in a flag-football game. It’s doing a Pete-Rose-on-Ray-Fosse in a friendly softball game.

Is cautious play “cutthroat” play? IMO, nope.
Is it aggravating. Hell, yes.

(Thanks, JuanitaTech!)

20

Back when BBS’s (remember them?) were popular, one of the most widely played online games was Tradewars. There were various releases of Tradewars, but one thing most of them had in common were bugs- flaws in the software that a player could exploit to do things that were otherwise impossible. I remember endless debate over whether strategies using “bugs” were cheating or not. Eventually by default, the following conclusions were reached:

  1. The only real cheat in an online game was deliberately dropping carrier instead of logging out, so that you could “undo” things that had happened during play by not having the game update your stats.

  2. One man’s bug is another man’s strategy. I used to play in a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) called Omicron. I discovered that although my character was not a thief, and therefore had zero Thieving skill, you could still rob anyone who was under an enchantment of sleep (a fairly cheap common spell), since they would not wake up unless attacked. So I found some extremely rich mobiles, robbed the heck out them, and quickly amassed a fortune. Next, I went to the pet shop and bought 100 trained wolves as my servants. I then found a High Paladin, sicced the wolves on him, and then ducked into the next room to wait out the slaughter. I lost most of the wolves, but robbed the guy’s corpse before the game engine removed it, and acquired armor and weapons usually only obtainable by characters 20 levels higher than myself. The sysop sent me e-mail demanding to know how I’d gotten my equipment and I told him, whereupon he reduced the maximum number of trained animals you could own.

  3. If you don’t like the game, don’t play.