Editorial

Monday, 15 December 2008 07:46

As human beings, we are supposed to be at the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder. We have the ability to think, to reason, to apply logic and common sense to problems and solve them. We have the gift of language so that we can accurately communicate with each other.

We are numerate and understand the concept of time and space. We can make decisions based upon what our senses and our observations tell us and we can, more often than not, cure ourselves when we get sick. We can do all these things and on the surface we would appear to be almost noble creatures. Yet we also have our faults. When faced with a choice of winning or losing something, we can of course accept the outcome gracefully.

Or we can cheat.

We also view the act of cheating differently from person to person. Some view cheating as immoral, sly and underhand behaviour to be vilified and ostracised, while others view it as healthy, cool and guileful to be admired and mimicked. It often happens that those that have been cheated tend to have a low opinion of the practise, while those who do the cheating see it as a natural extension of their options. They are likely to see the victims of cheating as fools for allowing themselves to be duped in the first place.   

Cheating is an age old instinct that humans have probably had from their earliest days. The invention of the wheel was not necessarily achieved because men wanted to next invent the Ferrari, but because they wanted to cheat gravity and make moving heavy objects easier, rather than dragging them along the ground. The huntsmen surely eventually figured out that catching and killing a large animal for food with crude weapons was a lot harder than simply cheating and chasing it over a cliff, then picking up the broken remains at their leisure.

As we have evolved into a technologically advanced race our methods of cheating have merely kept pace with us. In the last great world war, the Americans were tricked into believing that Japan wouldn’t dare attack one of their military bases. Hitler tricked his people into believing they were the master race and deserved to overrun Europe and beyond. Later, during the cold war the Russians tricked the rest of the world into believing they were the nuclear and military equals of the US, when it later turned out they were clearly not. The jury is still out on whether we have all been cheated into believing man really did land on the moon!

Certainly, despite overwhelming evidence to justify a total ban, the tobacco industry continues to cheat millions of people out of many years of their lives by making them believe that it is cool to smoke. Governments of all nations similarly cheat their citizens out of their hard earned cash as they enjoy the huge tax windfall that the tobacco industry hands them.

So despite the moral antipathy some people have with cheating, many of the most respected bodies and establishment authorities engage in the practise daily without conscience. While there is nothing noble or good about cheating, it is a fact of life that along with our ability and oft chosen intent to lie is our ability and chosen intent to cheat when it is clearly more advantageous to do so.

This leads us to game and gambling and the question of why do people cheat?
 
As human beings, we are competitive in nature. This again stems from our earliest beginnings when we had to eat to survive. If we couldn’t catch a big animal to feed our family, we’d just as likely go to the cave next door and fight with our neighbour for theirs. When we learned to work together to catch our food, we turned our intelligence to our advantage and overwhelmed a large animal by sheer force of numbers and with weapons devised from sticks, stones and whatever else we could use to either spear or bludgeon to death our prey.

So when we as modern humans are faced with a game which involves a prize that we covet, we will naturally use whatever weapons we have in our armoury to obtain it. If that entails cheating, then we will cheat if we can get away with it. After all, a casino cheats to get your money by introducing the house edge, making it statistically impossible for the house to lose. The same thing goes for sports betting, where the odds are arrived at in order to give the bookmakers an edge, so that they must always win.

Is it any wonder then that armed with this knowledge, players will continue searching for ways to get back at casinos and betting establishments by fair means or foul? Except when dealing with the betting industry and odds stacked against you, the only sure way to win is to cheat!