Fundamentally, removing a piece from the chessboard is not playing chess. If you don’t understand that, you understand nothing. But playing in a particular way in chess, taking allowable actions, however counterintuitive, is always legal.

Its also worth noting that real life can be seen as a game of sorts. Remember, our rules are quite loose, but while you CAN do anything, you have to understand there are consequences. The more you cheat, the closer you get to reality, where the rules are more and more set by other people, and thus ultimately you have less and less control.

I guess the flaw in your argument that playing to win, is ok, however playing to win by cheating is not.

But if you dont cheat, in my opinion, your not really playing at all.

In the end, everyone is a scrub, there is nothing else.

For example, if a player gets injured and his team has possession of the ball, they will kick it out of play for a throw in so that he can get treatment, because the referee cannot stop the game just for this reason.(in the case of a head inury he can, but otherwise not). This is all well and good.
However, if the player is injured and the opposing team has the ball, they are not obliged, but are fully expected (by everyone involved in the game- fans, the coach, other players etc) to also kick the ball out for a throw so the ijured player can get treatment. Once this is done, the ball is returned to the team which had possession, usually by returning it to their goalkeeper.
Considering this second situation, there are ways that the team who has possession (teamP) can cynically use it to their advantage, and also ways in which the team who don’t have possession (teamI)-whose player is injured- can cynically use this situation to their advantage.
TeamP can do 2 things. One is done fairly regualrly, and the other i have only seen once ever, and i remember it because it happened against the team i support!
The first thing they can do is ignore the injured player and play on- ie attack, press forward, try to score etc. Remember they are not obliged by the rules to put the ball out of play. The fans of teamI will at this point start to whistle and boo against the ‘bad sportsmanship’ shown by teamP, and if teamP score (bearing in mind they have a man advantage) then usually the fans, coach pundits etc will be up in arms about the event, and it will become a major talking point.
ll this time the injured player will presumably be rolling around on the floor, and one reason teamP might carry on is because they think the injured player is ‘playacting’(which i will come to later)
The second thing they can do is the ‘honorable’ thing, and put the ball out of play, having it returned to them after.
The third thing(which is the event i have only seen once, and therefore i shall describe this to you through that incident) is this. TeamP put the ball out of play and the injured player is treated. All of teamP’s players advance upfield in the expectation of teamI’s return of the ball to their goalkeeper, who will restart with a long kick upfield. The teamI player who is taking the throw throws it back to the ‘keeper, but before he can get to it a player from teamI runs downfield, takes the ball and scores, as teamP’s defence is all upfield waiting for the goalkick.
This event caused so much uproar that the manager of teamI offered to replay the match(which actually happened), because he accepted that this was completely unsportsmanlike conduct (when they interviewed the teamI player who scored, it turned out he was foreign(from africa, which has a different football culture to europe) and this kind of practice would not be frowned upon there.
The final thing i promised i’d get to is the issue of playacting. This whole situation is now being turned on its head, so that if teamI loses the ball and teamP sprints upfield, & are looking like scoring, a player from teamI will deliberately pretend to be injured so that teamP puts the ball out and lose their attacking advantage.
It has got to the point now that the game states that teamP does not have to put the ball out unless the referee says so, deliberately to stop the kind of behaviour immediately above.

So teamI is acting completely within the rules by pretending to be injured(as there’s no way of telling for sure) or not returning the throw and using it to catch teamP off guard, yet there’s no way that the 2nd option would happen, simply because of the disgrace which would be placed upon the club and players afterwards. And teamP are acting within the rules by ignoring the injured player if they think he is playacting(sometimes he is, sometimes not, sometimes he really is injured but does a bit of acting on top)
By your definition, however, all the people(pretty much everyone in the football world) who would complain about this practice(im speaking about throwing the ball back here, playacting and the subsequent ignoring of it are fairly commonplace) are ’scrubs’ because of this. I would not equate this ’scrubbishness’ with the types described in your article, but there is no solid reason i can give for this opinion other than the extent to which this sense of ’sporting-ness’ is so deeply ingrained in football, to the point where it cannot be broken.

sorry to be so long winded, i tried to explain it as clearly as possible, i wonder if you have any thoughts on this matter.

In preparation for tournament this coming weekend, I’ve actually shed my entire character list to move up to Top Tier characters. My original cast included a low tier as my best character, and two high-mid tiers as my second and third best. I still don’t know the characters as well as my old list, but are statistically better. Plus, because of the huge rise in abilities of the characters I still do just as well, and possibly even better. I’ve even got down moves that do 100% damage as well as practicing another technique which is unblockable. When I play these characters, I play with the intent of taking down anyone I’m going against and have absolutely no problem applying such tactics against beginners. This once again begs the question if reserving my best characters for the top players is scrubby? Cause I’d like to think I’ve moved past that, considering in a casual I had no problem applying a constant unblockable move against a newbie because I didn’t want to pass the stick.

Is using a handicap and giving your all still playing to win… or is it scrubdom.