maleficent

When my nephew was a bunch younger, he used to like to challenge old auntie mal to a game of chess... at 6 i would never cheat, but I'd occassionally let him win... when he was 9 or so, he wouldn't let me get away with letting him win and he'd get mad if I got caught.. .Now that he's 13 - he's quite a good chess player (well, he can kick my ass at at but I'm not all that good) He learned to play and played by the appropriate rules, not some made up set of rules that tilted the game in his favor... but by occassionally letting him win - he didn't get frutrated with the game and learned to enjoy it.

Scrabble was a big game in my house when I was growing up.. and it's not something I ever enjoyed playing -having an english professor mother and attorney father across the board - i woudl get soundly thrashed every single time...

Cheating is wrong.. having certain sets of rules for kids doesn't help the kids al that much - but occassionally letting a kid win, isn't necessarily a bad thing if it gives the kid an apprecation of the game and doesn't m ake them want to quit.

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