History LoopholeAbuse / Taskmaster

** In "Snooker Cue Umbrella Chin", one task's time starts when Alex interrupts the contestant reading it. John talks fast enough, with carefully placed pauses, that Alex can't interrupt him, then refuses to speak when Alex admits he's missed his opportunity. However, Alex then interrupts him physically by grabbing him as he tries to run away.

* In "The Curse of Politeness", one of the tasks involves unravelling a ball of string. Printed on the other side of the task sheet was another task to put a neat ball of string on a provided cushion. Jenny is rolling up the ball of string again when she realises that the second task doesn't specify how big the final ball has to be, so she breaks off the string and places a tiny ball on the cushion. [[spoiler:Jenny comes second in the task.]]
** Mae's solution shaves some time off--instead of re-wrapping their ball of string, a quick glance through the drawers behind them reveals a pre-made string ball.

* In "Premature Conker," one of the tasks is to get a sheet of toilet paper as far away from its original location as possible without tearing the toilet paper, letting it touch the ground, or taking it off the inner tube. Jamali and Lee both note that nothing in the instructions say they can't detach the toilet roll holder from the wall while still keeping the toilet paper on its inner tube at all times. [[spoiler:Jamali wins the task, but Lee gets disqualified after it's shown that he briefly removed the toilet paper from the inner tube to make it easier to detach the roll holder from the wall.]]

* In "Grappling With My Life", the contestants are asked to throw a hula hoop over Gary, an inflatable gorilla, as he drifts down the river in a rubber dinghy, before he reaches the finish line. Having exhausted his supply of hula hoops and being forced to get into the river, Nick has the realisation that he can simply pull the boat's tether towards him, allowing him to simply place the hula hoop around him. While Nick only gets fourth place, his decision still allows him to score two points.

* In "Moments of Silence," the task is to extract and then drink a tablespoon of coconut water. The task takes place in the lab and each contestant is provided two whole coconuts and several implements on the table. There is a caveat that if two more more contestants choose the same extraction method, they would each be disqualified. Katherine, after pondering all the items, takes another look at the task, then walks out of the lab into the kitchen and grabs a coconut water drink. [[spoiler:Despite being the slowest, Katherine wins the task because the other contestants were all either disqualified, or used similar but non identical methods to each other.]]

* In "An Orderly Species", the first task is to continuously say "metronome" between every tick of a metronome while performing three smaller tasks: blowing a balloon bigger than your head, neatly gift-wrapping the balloon and eating three whole poppadoms. Jamali does the first two tasks but realises he can't do the last one without slipping up, so he records himself on his phone saying "metronome" a bunch of times then plays it back while he eats. [[spoiler:This earns him second place alongside Lee with three mistakes since Mike manages to do the whole thing with only one mistake.]]

* In "Croissants is Croissants", the task is to prevent Alex from scoring a goal: Alex must kick the ball from a red dot, and the contestants must be at least 12 yards away from the dot while Alex is attempting to score. While the other contestants created barriers to block the goalpost, Guz instead moves the dot and ball inside the house, covering it with furniture and taping the doors closed for good measure. [[spoiler:Unfortunately, [[HoistByHisOwnPetard Alex turns it around on him]], as nothing in the rules state the ball couldn’t be recovered and moved back to its original position. Furthermore, because of the aforementioned "12 yard distance" rule, Guz can't move the ball again. Because of the 3 minutes it took Alex to recover the ball and 2 and a half minutes of goalkeeping the old-fashioned way, his attempt earned him third place.]]

** In "Brother Alex," the comedians were told to pass three pineapples amongst themselves, so that Greg could guess which three competitors had the pineapples at the end of it. It took exactly one round for Lucy to realize that nothing said that there had to be one pineapple per person, and two for the Sues and Sam to realize that nothing said that the comedians had to stay on stage or ''keep'' their pineapples. [[note]]In the second round, Lucy made Julian hold two of the three pineapples. In the third, Sue and Susan each left the stage to hide one each and Sam took his to hide behind the Taskmaster.[[/note]]

* From "Never Packed A Boot":
** In the fortune trail task, Sue interprets 'toss five heads in a row' as allowing her to somehow 'toss her own head', which in her mind means lying down on the ground in the push-up position and circling her head around. [[spoiler:Greg disallows her reading of the task, as it specified a standard coin toss. Sue failed to convince him that somewhere in the world, that could well be standard.]]
** In the 'convince this child you're asleep' task, Sam doesn't even try to make it look like he's sleeping, just placing a plastic flamingo in the bed instead. However, he has the flamingo open its eyes and talk to Flossie, promising her £100 if she claims he's asleep - effectively bribing her into giving him the win. [[spoiler:This works, and Greg allows him five points.]]

* In the task to 'be the best waiter', the contestants have to first find Alex, then serve him his food without spilling it. Sophie finds Alex, but gets around the problem of spilling by forcing Alex to come with her back to where the food is, rather than carrying it to him. Kiell, on the other hand, never finds Alex at all, but instead claims one of the decoy Alex mannequins to be an 'Alex', citing the task from Series 15 where Mae Martin successfully argued that pictures of pineapples counted as pineapples. [[spoiler:Greg allows Sophie's reading of the rules, and she wins the task, but Kiell gets disqualified.]]

** For the "get this duck into the lake without touching the boundaries, the pineapples or the flamingos" task, Sue Perkins realises she can spread the boundaries wider and move the pineapples and flamingos out of the way. Notably, Lucy Beaumont reacts with shock verging on outrage in the studio, having [[GenreBlind not realised they could do that]].

** In the fortune trail task, Sue interprets 'toss five heads in a row' as allowing her to somehow 'toss her own head', which in her mind means lying down on the ground in the push-up position and circling her head around. [[spoiler:Greg disallows her reading of the task.]]