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Comment by somehnguy | Hacker News Reader

Again, if you don’t want to gamble then you’re free to buy individual cards where you know exactly what you’re getting.

Even if you weigh the decks you’re still gambling, as you have no idea what is inside the packs until you break the seal. You’re just cheating to improve your odds.

If you don’t want to gamble then the obvious solution is to buy individual cards and not cheat others out of random decks.

I think it’s more ridiculous that your position is advocating bringing a gram scale into Target with you so that you can weigh cards off the shelf in order to gain a slight advantage.

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> then you’re free to buy individual cards where you know exactly what you’re getting.

Actually, he is also free to weigh the packs, as that is completely legally allowed.

There is nothing illegal about that. It is fully within his right, and the manufactures do not call it gambling anyway.

I know it isn’t illegal, and never claimed it was. I think it’s poor form, morally speaking. That’s why I added the ‘morals are subjective’ part to my original comment.

It isn’t illegal to cheat at your local pickup basketball game either, that doesn’t make it a good thing to do.

But it is a product, available for purchase, which the manufactures themselves strongly claim is not gambling.

The manufactures themselves are not setting up terms of service, or gambling rules, that prevent these sorts of things.

Its not cheating anything, when the manufactures are not preventing it and are not saying this is against some gambling rule.

Just because you have an opportunity to do something, and it's not explicitly forbidden by any laws or 'terms of service' or whatever, doesn't make it okay.

Imagine that I went to a store, identified every booster pack with a rare card in it via weight, and then bought all of them. Then let's imagine someone else walks in. This buyer is a reasonable person, but not savvy enough to know that booster packs with rare cards are easily identified. He buys the packs thinking that his chances of getting a rare card are 5% when they are really 0%.

Do you feel that that was wrong of me to do? Or was it the other buyer's fault for not being smart enough to already know that someone like me would have come along and done what I did?

> doesn't make it okay.

In this case it is OK, because this isn't gambling, according to what the manufactures claim, and they go to great lengths to claim that it is not gambling.

If it is not covered under gambling laws, and the manufactures declare that all cards have no monetary value, then I see no problem at all.

> Do you feel that that was wrong of me to do?

No, it is not wrong at all, because the manufactures say that it is not gambling. Therefore this is fair game.

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