Five-Aces Cheater

"Played five aces. Now playing the harp".

— Said to be an actual epitaph in a "Boot Hill" graveyard.

Cheating in games is almost as old as games themselves, but if you get caught, you will be instantly kicked out of the competition.

This trope however, is when a character is cheating in an obvious and blatant manner and all the other players and the audience can clearly see that. He may do something seemingly impossible that could be only be done with special equipment or supernatural powers that aren't allowed, or something that the game itself makes impossible. The best (and most infamous) example is the name of this trope, named after the very common gag in media of a character playing Poker and having a hand of five aces. This is because most fair games of Poker have a card deck that has only four of each rank of card regardless of color^note This can be possible in card games that are played with multiple decks at once, but the scoring rules might ignore duplicates, or something similar like having a hand of six cards, when in Poker you can only get five. To clarify further, the highest scoring legal move in a Poker game is a Royal Flush, which would require the player to have a straight flush consisting of the top five highest card ranks^note 10, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace with the same symbol and color, so if someone in the table says they win because they scored a five of a kind, make sure you have your BS detector (and your fists if things escalate) within arm's reach.^note A five-of-a-kind is technically possible, if playing with wildcards (cards that can have any value, not just their face value), and in this case, it beats all other hands except a higher five-of-a-kind.

In extreme cases, all the competitors are doing something impossible or that they can't do all at once, such as a card game in which every player has four aces, meaning all of them are cheating.^note Bar the one player that might have legitimately gotten four aces; but what are the odds of that?

This is pretty much a Paper-Thin Disguise version of cheating and it's almost always Played for Comedy. The more comedic version is when no one notices the obvious cheating and they maybe even think the character is just that good, or someone actually notices but does nothing about it. The less comedic version is when audience and other competitors notice it and complain, but the cheater still gets away, or doesn't. The Played for Drama version is when it's revealed or stated since the beginning that the whole game is rigged, and/or the cheater is such a powerful or dangerous person that nobody will risk standing up to him.

When adding examples involving supernatural powers, avoid cases where use of powers is allowed through Loophole Abuse or because all the characters regard "creative" use of superpowers as part of the fun.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Played for Laughs in this commercial, when the other players throw out over-the-top bets to call a wager of a bowl of avocados. The winner (the guy who bet the avocados) hauls in the pot with five aces, one obviously hand-drawn.
• One Wilkins Coffee ad had Wontkins produce a hand of five aces. Wilkins responds by showing a can of Wilkins Coffee, because nothing beats Wilkins... and a gun.
• A classic ad for Wagon Wheels featured two cowboys and a horse playing poker. After one cowboy laid down five aces, the horse responded with a "royal flush" (a jewel-encrusted toilet), but the other cowboy won with a pair (of Wagon Wheels).

Anime & Manga

• One Piece: The Davy Back Fight Arc has this in spades, especially during the Groggy Ball event. There's a "No weapons" rule that forces Zoro to leave his swords behind, but the other team shortly after have no problem whipping out their own weapons to use. Naturally, both the team and the referee are from the same pirate crew, and the ref always "Just happens" to be looking away when these obvious fouls are performed.
• Spy X Family has the Campbelldon tennis tournament, which is already noted to have something of an "anything goes" policy with regards to fouls—something initially showcased by a pair of competitors who are so jacked up on experimental drugs that they can crush tennis balls like grapes. Even by those standards, though, the Campbell siblings—being the children of the man who arranged the tournaments—are huge cheaters. They start out by pumping low-level nerve agents into the rooms of fellow competitors before matches, then show up with absurdly overtooled custom equipment, including a jet-powered racket, and use devices built into the court to do things like lift the net right before the opponent serves. When they get particularly desperate, they go so far as to have snipers shoot their competition (with rubber bullets, but still).
• Toriko has the heroes face the Arc Villain Livebearer in a game of Memory. While Coco's special vision can let him see which cards are matches, he still doesn't know the point total. Livebearer, on the other hand, wears special contacts that let him see everything about each card, and he wastes no time racking up huge points. Furthermore, players have to prepare and eat the foods depicted on each match, and Livebearer knows how to handle each ingredient. It's acknowledged that the game is stacked in Livebearer's favor to the extreme, and the goal becomes not to win through point total, but tricking Livebearer into eating a food combination that will cause him to give up.

Asian Animation

• BoBoiBoy: After losing to Tok Aba in the second round of checkers, Sleep Monster starts the next and final game with four king pieces (instead of none). While the heroes call him out, Sleep Monster counters by saying that since the game takes place in his dream, he can do whatever he wants. He loses anyway.

Comic Books

• Lucky Luke: 5-ace decks are a common sight when visiting the local saloon. In "Black Hills", the bad guy assigned to disrupt the scientific expedition gets them to play poker, then accuses them of cheating when they all have 4 aces.^note Well technically, one only has three aces, whereas his neighbor proclaims himself winner because he's got five. The crowd nearly lynches them, until Luke shows up and asks why they were playing with a deck containing 48 aces. In "Lucky Luke vs Joss Jamon" Joss decides to play a game with his gang for who gets to intimidate Luke. The goal is roll two dices and have the highest roll, the cheater of the team goes first and rolls thirteen which Jamon disqualifies.
• Played for laughs in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck with the poker game between Pothole McDuck and Porker Hogg. Porker lays down a full house of three kings and two aces, and Pothole responds with another full house of three aces... and two more aces. It turns out the "ace dispenser" up Porker's sleeve broke. Pothole then tells Scrooge that they were playing by "riverboat captain rules", in which not trying to cheat is an insult to the other players.
• Issue 13 of Marvel's Laff-A-Lympics shows that Really Rottens leader Dread Baron and Wacky Races villain Dick Dastardly are brothers. As youths they were said to be proficient cheaters. Playing poker, they try to one-up each other with additional aces until Dastardly produces a box with over 20,000 aces. Baron concedes.

Fan Works

• During a poker game in This Bites!, both Zoro and Robin have a royal flush in the same suit. Likewise, Boss and Chopper each have a royal flush as well though of different suits.
• In Queen of All Oni the Enforcers, Blankman, and Right are having a poker game. When Ratso notes someone is cheating, Blankman responds that with who is at the table, the question is who is cheating the best.

Films — Animated

• A scene in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks has the human Pinkie Pie and Applejack playing cards. Applejack shows four aces, which Pinkie counters with four Jokers.
• In the Death Montage in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, cheating with a hand of five aces was the cause of Puss' second death. This proved a bad idea when facing Canines Gambling in a Card Game as a cat.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Miles attempts to invert the trope by cheating to lose a test (he doesn't like his school and wants to be kicked out so he can go back to his old one) by deliberately answering every question wrong. His teacher immediately figures him out because his plan involved getting a 0% on a true-or-false test- something astronomically unlikely if you truly don't know the answers and guess randomly. She gives him a perfect score for obviously knowing which answers to avoid.

Films — Live-Action

• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: Billy the Kid enlists Bill and Ted to help win more money in a poker game. (He gets all their winnings as well as his own.) The game goes wrong a few minutes in when Bill reveals that he has three aces, causing the other cowboys to suspect (correctly) that Billy cheated somehow.
• Space Jam has both teams go haywire with cheating during the Ultimate Game. The Monstars gang-tackle Granny, dogpile on Stan Podolak, incinerate Foghorn Leghorn and beat the stuffing out of the Looney Tunes. The Tune Squad attach explosives to the Monstar goal, shoot out one Monstar's teeth with handguns, partially denude another Monstar with a rod and reel, and bring an angry longhorn bull onto the court.
• The Dictator: Aladeen, the titular despot, hosts his own Olympic Games where he participates in the event. The only event we see is the 100 Meter Race, where he not only has the starting pistol (which he fires a good full second after he starts running), but he uses said pistol to shoot one of the competitors (as well as a few bystanders), and has the people with the finishing ribbon carry it over to him. Needless to say, he won fourteen gold medals.
• A couple of gags in The Three Stooges involved this. One example has Curly and Moe bet pancakes during breakfast in a game of poker. Curly would always win with five aces (no jokers are seen), and Moe would always lose with five kings. Until Moe finds out (through a bonk on the head, natch) that Curly literally has hundreds of aces hiding in his clothing.
• John Wick: Chapter 4: John, Caine, Mr. Nobody, and Killa play poker. John gets a Dead Man's Hand, Caine gets four Nines and a Four, Mr. Nobody gets a royal flush, and Killa gets five Twos and declares he wins. Annoyed and unsurprised, Caine calls him out for it before he and the other two immediately pounce to kill him and his men.
  Caine: I knew you were a cheating prick.
• In the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, Harpo and Chico frustrate the other players in a game of bridge by repeatedly drawing Aces of Spades.
  Chico: I got Ace of Spades. [Harpo shows his card] He got Ace of Spades! [laughs] That's what you call coincidences!
  Mrs Rittenhouse: Two Aces of Spades?
  Chico: Yeah, he's got thousands of them.
• In Solo: A Star Wars Story, Lando Calrissian uses a green sylop hidden up his sleeve to achieve a full sabbaac, despite the fact that (as Han Solo points out afterwards) all the green sylops had been played.

Literature

• Star Trek Expanded Universe novel Planet of Judgment by Joe Haldeman. In order to stop an interstellar invasion, the senior crew of the Enterprise must engage in psychic duels with the invading aliens. Dr. McCoy's test involves a simulated poker game. In order to win a hand, the alien uses a non-standard card: the three of eagles. During the course of the game, McCoy and the alien use three non-legal cards: the king of green eagles, the king of oranges and the king of skulls.
• I'm In Love With the Villainess features a downplayed case: Yuu wins the round with a hand of four aces and a king, beating Claire's full house. However, Rei remembers that her own hand had an ace, which she got rid of in an attempt to make a straight. And then she notices that the dealer is Yuu's personal attendant.
• One novel in The Riftwar Cycle mentions a friendly game between four notorious card sharps. At the end of the evening, they examined the deck and discovered that it now had seventy cards in it, nine of which were aces.

Live-Action TV

• In El Chapulín Colorado, two mobsters "invite" an old man, Dr. Chapatín, to play pocker with them. He was asked to cut the deck and took a pair of scissors to cut one card. One of the mobsters was angry that he cut an ace, which he knew due to a little mark behind it, while the other said that's no problem since he had another one under his sleeve.
  Dr Chapatín: Good thing that we are playing among honest people.
• Mission: Impossible has Rollin Hand reveals during a game that he has a winning hand: five pair. For the record, this requires a ten-card hand, which pretty much no version of poker allows.
• In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk and the Game Show", the mystery of the week surrounds Adrian being asked by his television producer father-in-law to look into possible cheating on game show Treasure Chest. The reigning champion Val Birch (who is blackmailing the show's host Roddy Lankman over murdering his assistant), makes it blatantly clear he is cheating, as he not only gives the correct answers before all the choices are given, but also correctly answers a question with a visual clue without even turning around to look at the clue.^note The question was "Which US president lived in this mansion?", and the clue was a picture of Monticello. The answer, is of course, Thomas Jefferson.
• In The Wonder Years, Kevin and his friends have a poker night and Jeff is sweeping the table all evening long, until the last hand where Randy puts everything on the table and challenges his hand, calling out his cards as a bluff. Jeff congratulates him and folds. Later as Kevin is cleaning up, he notices that Jeff's hand is still on the table, face down. He starts flipping them one by one, finding one king after the other and realizing he had an unbeatable four of a kind of kings. He finds new respect in Jeff for yielding to Randy in a gentlemanly gesture no one would ever find out about... and then flips the fifth card that is also a king.
  Adult Kevin: He was a CHEATER!

Newspaper Comics

• In Winnie Witch And The Giant Potato, Winnifred and a lot of other witches are playing cards, and the cheating is obvious. Potato sees his hand get magically changed several times, and finally all the witches lay down their hands stating "Four Aces! King High!" Then then start giggling in guilt, realizing they've effectively all been caught cheating. Potato even mentions their cheating.

Tabletop Games

• The supplemental book Tome of Artifacts features the Lucky Coin, a copper coin which, among other things, makes it so that if the user bets it in a game of chance, they always win, barring divine intervention. However, it's noted that the coin doesn't simply put the user ahead: it gives the user the most outlandishly good result possible (i.e. a royal flush in poker) every time. The book points out that once a gambler has gotten four consecutive royal flushes, no sane opponent is going to assume they did so through ordinary luck.

Video Games

• Batman: Arkham City: Victor Zsaaz's Start of Darkness was when he lost everything in a poker game with the Penguin. Zsasz had four sixes, but the Penguin had a straight flush that included a fifth six. Played for Drama in that, even years later and having a clear memory of the game, Zsasz never realizes that he's been cheated.
• The Curse of Monkey Island: One puzzle involves winning a poker game so Guybrush can get his hands on a Mineral Macguffin. The solution is to take five tarot cards and switch them for your rigged losing hand. They notice right away, and Guybrush is forced to steal the diamond in the ensuing struggle and run for it. It should be noted that if you lose over and again, your opponents will themselves engage in this, going as far as switching to completely different card games at random. Including the 'official' licensed Monkey Island card game.
• A Black Comedy example in Fallout: New Vegas. In Jacobstown, you can enter the various resort bungalows there to loot the place. One bungalow contains a long-dead skeleton in a fallen chair, in front of a table where a card game was being played. There's also evidence of drinking and guns involved. It's quite clear that someone was shot for cheating... what makes it hilarious is what the cheater had tried to claim. As per the trope, five kings. Not just five kings, but five kings all of the same suit. And his opponent's hand had a sixth king of that suit. And yes, the evidence points to only one standard deck of cards having been involved in the game. The collective IQ of the setting probably went up a point when the cheater was escorted off the mortal coil.
• In Golden Sun, there's a Tournament Arc where the player is encouraged to help Isaac cheat by having the rest of the party make his progress through an obstacle course easier. While psyenergy can't be seen by the other contestants or the crowd, he does well enough that the other contestants work out that he did something and show up as a boss battle in the sequel.
• Hard West2: In the prologue, Gin gambles his posse's souls against The Mammon, Archdevil of Greed, for his supernatural future-technology Ghost Train. Gin gets four aces and an eight - but Mammon draws four kings and a Joker. To which Gin comments that the deck they used definitely did not have a joker - except Mammon doesn't care about being caught, seeing as how Gin and company broke into his train in the first place and it's his 'house' to win in.
• Safe Cracker The 1997 game has a book about cheating in chess with an example of "minimal and discrete" cheating where there are 14 black queens on the board.^note Each player begins with one queen and a maximum of eight pawns can be promoted to queens, resulting in a max of 9 queens for one player. It would take a spectacular combination of ineptitude and skill to allow that to happen without the game ending.

Visual Novels

• In Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Shadi Smith intends to frame Phoenix for being this kind of cheater by conspiring with the waitress/dealer/pickpocket Olga Orly. The idea was that Olga would reverse-pickpocket a card into Phoenix's pockets, then deal a hand with five aces. Shadi would investigate Phoenix and 'discover' the hidden card, making it look like Phoenix had swapped it out for an extra ace. This would've ruined Phoenix's reputation as a poker player, but fortunately Phoenix discovered the card in his pocket and hid it in a grape juice bottle beforehand, and the fifth ace ends up being removed from the table when it turns out to be potential evidence against a murderer.

Web Animation

• In Hazbin Hotel when Husk is teleported to the Hotel, he was in the middle of a Poker Game, with a hand he claims is a full house. His hand included a joker.
• In Ted-Ed's video "The Cheating Royal Riddle", the king makes his 4 children play a game of dice to determine which of them will become his heir, has them each record their own scores and tasks the protagonist with analysing them. On closer inspection, it turns out that either this trope is in play, or three of the kids can't add: 2 of the children logged scores that were impossible - Bertram declares a score of 840 when the maximum possible score for the game is 700, and Draco claims to have rolled 423 on dice where every combined score should be a multiple of 5. A third player, Cassandra, declares 700, which would have required her to roll the highest score on her dice 40 times in a row, at odds of 1 in 13 nonillion - improbable enough that, under the rules laid down by the king, it's reasonable to assume she either cheated or miscounted, and disqualify her.
• During his review of Clustertruck, Yahtzee mentions that the scoreboard was hacked and all of the top 10 best times are 0.1 of a second.
  "Come on, guys, if you're gonna hack the scoreboard, at least come up with something believable!"

Web Original

• In the Questden quest The Oremor Trail, caravan leader Durk Nuuk'erm joins a poker table where everyone cheats, and he's commanded to "outcheat the table". When the time comes to reveal the cards, each player reveals four aces plus another card◊; true to this trope, Durk's fifth card is a fifth ace, from a fifth suit.
• In Freefall, Sam Starfall went gambling, added a few extra cards to his hand, and got found out when his four kings beat someone else's two kings.
• Neopets:
  • When playing the card game "Cheat!"^note A Bowdlerized name for the real card game "Bullshit" on Neopets, you won't be stopped from attempting to say you're laying down five (or more) of a given card, but even the early opponents that are characterized as not-very-bright pathological liars know that's impossible; the game is hard-coded so that you'll always be caught if you use more than four cards.
  • In the "Brucey B and The Lucky Coin" plotline, when Brucey B — one of the aforementioned early opponents — is playing Cheat with R.S., near the end of the game, R.S. plays a single four. Brucey calls him out on it, but R.S. reveals his card to be the four of diamonds. Brucey ponders how such a thing is possible when he had played four fours not too long ago.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons
  • In "Bart the Murderer", we see the hands of a group of mobsters playing poker. The first one has four aces and a king. The second has five aces. The third has six aces. And then it pans over to the discard pile, which is nothing but aces. Most of them aren't even standard card suits.
  • Happens accidentally on a deleted scene from "$pringfield", as seen on "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular". Homer is the dealer for a James Bond stand-in, who loses because Homer forgot to take the jokers and the "rules for draw and stud poker" cards out of the deck.
  • Another example involving the Springfield mafia occurs in "Mayored to the Mob", when, during a poker game, Louie declares a hand of six Queens, only to be beaten when Fat Tony declares seven Queens.
  • On a smaller-scale example from "Kamp Krusty", Bart's attempt to forge his grades was immediately spotted by everyone who looked at them because he gave himself straight A+'s. As Lisa put it, "Oh, Bart, why couldn't you at least forge plausible grades?"
• In an episode of Quick Draw McGraw, the villain is having a Poker game, his opponent shows four aces, but the villain has five aces in his top hat.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: The episode "Swindlin Wind" ends with Eustace playing cards with the tick that Muriel had on her toe throughout the episode (Now on his toe), with the bet being that the tick could move up to his earlobe if he wins. Eustace goes in with five aces, only for the tick to go in with six aces.
  Tick: I'm moving up! (laughs)
• Futurama:
  • In "Hell is Other Robots", Bender finds himself sat at a poker game in Robot Hell, and tries to cheat by producing extra cards from his torso compartment. The Robot Devil catches him, grabs him by the wrist and reveals the cards he tried to add to the game - five copies of the Ace of Spades.
  • In one of the movies, this happens to Bender by accident during a Texas Hold'em Poker tournament. Only Fry and Bender are left in the tournament due to a combination of Fry having the ability to read minds, and Bender having stolen a lucky charm. Bender figures out what Fry is doing and opts to play without looking at his own cards. Fry has two aces, and the community cards are three kings and the other two aces (which means Fry would win regardless of what Bender has). Bender casually flips his cards over to find out that he has the fourth king...and a coaster from the bar that looks like a king (The kings of beers!). The judge (Penn Jillette) rules that this counts as five kings, winning Bender the tournament.
• Looney Tunes
  • In "My Little Duckaroo", Daffy Duck plays poker with outlaw Nasty Canasta. He deals one card to Canasta and takes the rest of the deck for himself, giving him "a royal straight flush full house with four aces high." Canasta only has the three of clubs... and a gun that he aims at Daffy's gullet.
    Daffy: Beats me.
  • Bugs Bunny, dressed as a southern gentleman, is involved in a game of poker with a Col. Cornpone on a riverboat ("Mississippi Hare"). Cornpone shows five aces in his hand. Bugs shows six.
  • "Bonanza Bunny", another one involving Bugs, has him play Blacque Jacques Shellaque in blackjack. Bugs draws his first card and chooses to stand. His opponent proceeds to blatantly cheat by drawing a 10 of Spades, and then pulling a second 10 of Spades out of his sleeve. Bugs flips over the 21 of Hearts.
• On the Disney short Sport Goofy in Soccermania, the Beagle Boys discuss their plan to beat Scrooge McDuck's soccer team while playing cards. Throughout the scene, an ace of spades keeps getting passed around, as each Beagle Boy keeps stealing it from the other. In the end, they all deal their hands and all the cards are the ace of spades.
• In one episode of the Dilbert cartoon, Dilbert, Dogbert and Dilmom are playing Scrabble. When Dogbert plays "Quizzing" for 188 points, Dilbert comments that he thought the Scrabble set only has one Z. Dogbert brushes this off by saying that that's the kind of thinking that made Dilbert lose 400 games in a row, but the next shot shows him carving his own Scrabble tiles under the table.
• In Summer Camp Island, "Mr. Softball", to avoid doing a chore, Susie challenges all the campers to a game of softball where the loser has to the chore. Hedgehog tells Oscar that Susie will definitely cheat during the game but Oscar, who knows Susie will cheat, accepts it but wants to beat her fair and square. During the game, Susie blatantly cheats by using biased umpires and using her magic, such as freezing the players, slowing the softball to hit it, and reversing time to undo their first point. Oscar finally has enough and decides to cheat, too, after his team keeps telling him they need to cheat to win, and by doing this they're able to score.
• In a western-themed episode of The Harlem Globetrotters, the main villain cheats at poker in a recycling of the aforementioned Quick Draw McGraw example.
• In The Real Ghostbusters, "Ghost Fight at the O.K. Corral", Peter gets forced into a game of poker with the ghosts of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. After Peter deals the cards, all the ghosts reveal they have "Aces & Eights. Dead Man's Hand." Peter then shows his hand of four Aces. The ghosts say this means someone at the table is a cheat, causing Peter to dive out the saloon doors.
  Peter: Good thing I didn't show them that fifth Ace.
• One episode of The Fairly Oddparents had Timmy wish for a lawyer to help him deal with a Jackass Genie. Said lawyer is a fairy who, sans context, pops in with a hand of cards declaring "Yeah, five aces," as a quick shorthand to show that he's not exactly on the up and up.
• In an episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic plays strip poker against Scratch and Grounder and his first winning hand is five aces. Scratch and Grounder, both due to being idiots, don’t realize that he’s cheating.
• Johnny Bravo: In "Hunted", Bunny Bravo plays poker against Colonel Fatman. Fatman wins with 5 Kings. It isn't until the end of the episode that Bunny looks up the rules and she realizes he was cheating, at which point she finds him and beats him up.
• During the Townies vs. Farmers game in Amphibia, Toady throws dust in Anne's eyes. This gets him immediately expelled, which the Townies considered a necessary sacrifice to take out the farmers' star player.
• In the first episode of The Venture Bros., Brock plays poker with a Tijuana gang boss. Brock lays down a full house of queens and twos. The boss lays down what is, to all appearances, a jack-high (an abysmal poker hand) and declares it to be a royal flush under "Tijuana rules." As it turns out, those rules are that he always wins regardless of what his actual hand is, which he's been using to "win" Brock's clothes and knife, under the idea that if Brock disagrees, he'll kill him. Tragically, he doesn't realize Brock is humoring him.
• The Betty Boop Screen Song "One More Chance" ends with an entire gambling house being thrown in the back of a police wagon (literally the entire house) save for one dog character while he was in the middle of a poker game. When the dog notices he somehow has five aces, he chases down the police wagon and jumps back into the gambling house in order to play his hand.

Real Life

• Team Fortress 2:
  • This was brought up during the WAR! Update, which involved a contest where Soldier and Demoman players would try to kill each other, with the winning side getting the Gunboats item. Naturally, the developers discovered that some players were getting outrageous kill counts—the highest scorer on either side had accumulated over 200,000 kills. Keep in mind that the contest lasted a week, so that translates to getting a Soldier or Demoman kill every three seconds, in an online FPS where only a fraction of the base plays Soldier or Demoman, and doing this every second of every day. Or, as the Administrator put it:
    "He is either cheating, or he is a hallucinating sleep-deprived psychotic with severe constipation and unerringly good aim. In either event, I am confident he is ashamed of himself."
  • This is exploited by bot accounts. They use low-quality aimbot programs that are very easy to spot (since they cause their users to spin in place with their guns pointed skyward before locking onto a target) and routinely pull off impossible feats like headshotting cloaked Spies from across the map. In their case, the fact that they're obviously cheating is part of the point. They're designed to grief servers and exploit lax moderation standards, and the fact that they're able to run around not even hiding their cheating without fear is much of what makes them demoralizing to face.
• Todd Rogers used to hold many high-scores in videogames, most of them achieved in the 80s. They didn't have any photo or video proof, but were still accepted by the organization Twin Galaxies, a partner of the Guinness World Records. A lot of these records were either impossible, way higher than the second place, or would take days of constant play to achieve. In 2018 all his records were removed. Here's a list of his suspicious records, with some notable examples below:
  • His most famous example is a downplayed one, finishing the race in Dragster in 5.51 seconds, and that record stayed unbeaten for over 35 years, also giving him a record of longest-standing video-game world record, but he never managed to do it again in front of cameras even with so many people asking, and extensive analysis of the code claims that the minimum possible is 5.57, some players achieved 5.57 legitimately.
  • Centipede (Atari 5200): An exact score of 65,000,000 points, when the second place was 58,078.
  • Barnstorming: 32.04 seconds, even though that time is impossible even if you remove all the obstacles by hacking.
  • Wabbit: 1698 points; not only does the game end when the player gets 1300 points, but the score counter increases in 5 point units.
  • The Legendary Axe: 99,999,990 points, even though the score increases in fifty point units, and the second place was 30,068,300 points.
  • Fathom: A claimed 1,110,500 points while the second place was 142 in 2.5 minutes. Doing the math, he would have taken over 325 hours to achieve it, meaning he should also have a record for most time without sleeping. Admittedly, the current record is now 19,566 points in 29 minutes with video proof, which drops it to a mildly less ridiculous twenty-seven-hour-straight marathon.
• The literal version of this trope can be averted with some specialty decks of cards which indeed have five or more suits.
• Karl Jobst's video "The Worst Fake Speedrun on Youtube" talks about a Badabun video where Tavo tries to fake a Super Mario Bros. speedrun by splicing together various runs, one of which is a TAS. Karl Jobst points out several mistakes that make it clear that the run is impossible, but a couple of them are particularly blatant:
  • The display is taken from the TAS and combined with gameplay from other runs. It sometimes appears too early or late, it may be misaligned, and at one point the coin counter (whose flashing does not match that of the coins in the level) increases by 12 even though Mario only collected 11. It gets worse when actual gameplay happens at the top of the screen, such as when Mario "disappears" while going for the Warp Zone in 1-2, or when stuff randomly appears there because it was there in the TAS.
  • Between 4-1 and 4-2, Tavo reaches for a slice of pizza and doesn't manage to put his hand back on the controller before Mario starts moving again.
  • The timer is inaccurate. While Karl thinks the most likely explanation is that Badabun just used it incorrectly due to incompetence, he also proposes the explanation that they intentionally made the final time too long because it would be too obvious that Tavo's "run" was fake if they had used the true time, which is faster than the world record.
• In the 2012 Olympics, several Chinese and South Korean badminton teams realized that if they lost in their first-round, they would face easier competition later and avoid fighting against their other national teams. However, they tried far too hard in throwing the match, failing to even get the badminton over the net. This got both teams banned.

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