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BGonline.org Forums
Gray Areas
Posted By: Phil Simborg In Response To: Hustling (Keene)
Date: Friday, 15 March 2013, at 10:36 p.m.
As I stated in my previous post, whenever the subject is ethics, there will always be gray areas and there will always be people with different values and viewpoints.
But, even if you desire to keep the highest levels of ethics (which is my intent though I am not always 100 percent able to), you will run into gray areas.
For example, while I think it is clearly unethical to indicate that if your opponent will double you will take, and then drop, is it wrong to look confident and happy about the situation when you know you will drop? Of course not. If you are sure it's not a double, is it wrong to act worried and disgusted about your last roll and make comments about how unlucky you are to be in this horrible position, and then take the cube (or even beaver!)? I think you've crossed the line, but others may disagree, and there are no written rules to prove who is right.
Are you unethical if you take a long time to give a cube, counting pips, and counting "market losers" and going through all kinds of machinations when you know full well it is a drop? And then you "reluctantly" offer the cube. Who is to say if the player was really pondering the cube or trying to win an Oscar? But if you know it is a clear drop and do that, do you feel you've crossed the line? I don't pretend to know the answer, and I can tell you I have done this (on occasion) and certainly, in tournament play, even if it is a stone-cold-drop I am not about to whip the cube out there quickly and encourage my opponent to take. But if I take more time to cube, when I know it is a drop, am I "hustling?" Doing this is clearly within the rules, and I personally believe it is acceptable so long as I don't make dishonest or misleading remarks like, "Boy, I really don't think this is a cube but I feel like gambling." That would be dishonest and crossing the line, in my opinion. But it might be acceptable by someone else's standards. And, currently, I don't believe the rules specifically penalize this kind of behavior (though if I were tournament director and heard a player doing this I would caution him and penalize him if it continued under the heading of poor sportsmanship).
Here's another question. You meet a stranger or someone you don't know well who wants to play for reasonably high stakes. You are a top player, and he does not know that. If you do not alert him or warn him, are you "hustling?" Hell no, is my opinion. You are hustling if you pretend to be a bad player, or play a few games for low stakes and purposely play poorly to try to get the stakes up and then grill him. You are hustling if you say something like, "I'm not that good but I'll give it a try." But if you just shut your mouth and say, roll the dice, you are not hustling. By the way, watch out, because there are a hell of a lot of people out there you probably never heard of that can play a mean game of backgammon, and you might also find, as some Giants I know of found, that the fish you are playing has crooked dice.
There are so many gray areas and situations where there is a fine line between ethical and non-ethical, and hustling and just good gamesmanship that I don't need to go into them all. I think a lot of it depends on the norms of your particular area (and chouette), and your own conscience.
Bottom line, if you truly are the better player you don't need to hustle or play games with people; you are more likely to turn people away than keep them in the game in the long run if you do feel they have been hustled; and if you are a good person, you will sleep better at night if you don't hustle.
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