Cheating 101

Earlier this week YouTube suggested I watch a video called "Hand Quicker Than Eye", which details ways to protect yourself against dodgy dealers in the home poker game. This got me thinking about how when I first started judging Magic I spent some time learning how to cheat, and not just the obvious cheating as outlined in the penalty guidelines, but the more devious sneaky ways to bend the rules. An example of an extremely easy cheat that requires no skill and is accidentally done by a lot of new players is called the double nickel, this involves placing your lands on top of your non-land cards and then doing two five-pile table shuffles. This ensure that you get neither mana flood nor drought as the lands are now distributed throughout the deck in such a way that any stretch of seven cards will have either two or three lands.

Why am I telling you this cheat? Because many new players are told that pile shuffling is a good method to use for randomising their deck (at least until they become good at riffle shuffling) and usually they are told to use either five or seven piles, because these are prime numbers which makes them magical and extra random. The truth is that pile shuffling simply moves the cards around in a set pattern, so if the deck is stacked so is the outcome. However, pile shuffling is useful for counting the number of cards in you deck so you can make sure that you haven't lost or gained one prior to presenting it, but if you want to actually randomise the deck you must riffle shuffle.

What should you do if you just watched you opponent do this? In a casual game you explain to them what they have done wrong as you can be almost 100% certain that is was a mistake, I have the policy that if the last type of shuffle completed before the deck is presented to me is a pile then I will explain my objection and ask them to shuffle again. At a competitive event, while it might be tempting to "undo" the shuffle (the cards are in a predetermined order so you can easily move them around) never do this! Instead always call a judge and explain what happened and why you think it might be a problem, the judge will then ask both players some questions, they might also look at the order of the cards and then based on what has been said one of three things should happen, either a speech about good shuffling technique (officially this would count as an untracked caution), a tracked warning penalty for 'insufficient shuffling', or if the judge believes that the action was deliberate a disqualification for 'manipulation of game materials'. It is possible that the judge will go away briefly before delivering their ruling as the DCI (Magic's governing body) keeps track of previous penalties players have received and they might want to see if this is the first time the player has committed the offence.

What I like about the Magic penalty guidelines is that they take intent and the 'spirit of the game/rules' into account, with a slight modifier for how easy to do or difficult to spot an infraction is. For me it comes down to games are fun, one of the reasons I started judging was I disliked the serious 'unfun' attitudes exhibited by some players at high level events, and if you are going to cheat you really need to ask yourself why. I remember being young and sneaking the occasional $500 bill in a game of Monopoly, but I grew out of it as it doesn't make you better at the game nor does it make the experience better, and you run the risk of no one wanting to play with you again.