During the depression, from about 1930 to 1938, my family - two brothers, two sisters, my mother, and myself - lived in a Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles. We met several pleasant Mexican youths at a settlement house and invited them to join us at our house for some sessions of poker. We played for stakes of atomic minuteness, but even so, we soon became aware that our new friends were cheating. Embarrassed, we pointed out that we didn't play that way. The Mexican boys smiled amiably and said, 'But this is the way we always play. We can't play any other way.' So we gringos held a discussion and decided that we too would cheat. But this worked out very badly for us because we were very clumsy cheaters. Besides, we had played our kind of poker for so long that we could not really enjoy cheating even when we got away with it. So we held another discussion. This time the Mexican boys suggested that we all play as usual. They would cheat with might and main and we would play fair. But if one of us caught one of them cheating, the catcher would get all the cheater's chips. This new set of rules worked marvelously well. The Mexicans outdid themselves in clever deceptions, and we, in the course of many sessions, became phenomenally expert at detecting 'aberrations' in their play. Best of all, the new system evened out the odds, so that neither of us won consistently from the other. Occasionally, fascinating moral dilemmas arose. Our dog once snapped at the seat of a Mexican youth's pants just as he was sliding an ace between himself and his chair. My sister contended that she should get the pot by reason of the alertness of our dog; the Mexican youth contended that she ought to be penalized because her dog had not behaved like a true sportsman. The debate was so wonderfully entertaining and lasted so long a time that I do not remember how it was resolved.

Rosalie Wax (1971)