Suicide Kings
by Anne Loucks
A couple times a year, I travel to my mother's house, where all of us get together to play games. My stepfather is particularly good at cards, word games, and board games. He usually, though not always, wins any contest which is not strictly luck based. My mother is not a particularly good gamer, so when she defeats him, her conquests are great events to be remembered and cherished.
My natural father is also an excellent gamer, but he and I are not particularly competitive. One time, we were playing the card game Hearts as a family. When the game was over, he tried to lie and tell my sister that she had beaten him, so she would not be in last place. I was a little slow on the uptake that night and insisted repeatedly that she was last and that my father had his math wrong. Eventually, he gave up in a huff. At the same moment, I realized what he was trying to do, and felt particularly foolish. I simply had not been able to imagine my father lying, even for her benefit.
Perhaps because of this incident, I formulated an evil plan to defeat my stepfather at games by winning them for my mother. A little fudged math would not cut it, so I needed to be more subtle. I could tell that he generally won by being particularly observant and a good card counter, but he expected all participants to play an every-man-for-himself strategy. As winning was no longer my goal, I figured he could easily be defeated by subtly twisting events to my mother's favor. Of course, part of the game was not to alert either my mother or him to what I was doing. All students of game theory know that two people working together are much more likely to win than one single person working alone. I bet that I could assist my mother in order to bring about the desired result, assuming she was working for her own benefit.
In some games this sort of trickery would be difficult, so I waited until we were, coincidentally, playing Hearts, where it is easy to make small tweaks which look innocuous, but add up over time. My stepfather fought hard all the way. Still, he went down by just a hair. My mother was victorious. The evil plan had worked. Being so perceptive though, I think he wondered about just how the last few tricks played out and why the cards from my hand went down the way they did. I never said anything though. My mother looked too pleased at her victory.
