a) Scrabble rules are not perfect; they require more attention in order to prevent cheating. Improvement could be achieved by borrowing some already-trialled rules such as North American Rule (III.A) requiring one to show an empty palm before drawing tiles. Personally, I do not like American rules, but they must have had a reason for this one.
b) Pretending that cheating does not exist exacerbate the problem instead of solving it. My own personal experience, after half a decade of playing, yielded the following statistics:
* About one third of the players I competed against in tournaments were potential cheats. Albeit that most cheating attempts were in the form of simple peeking into the bag.
* This ratio is much higher at a couple of clubs I frequented.
Your personal experience could be quite different from mine. Scrabble players are diverse; they are not expected to see eye to eye on every issue. As far as I am concerned, I can put players who categorically deny the existence of cheating into three categories:
(1) A small number of naive trusting individuals who believe that all humans are intrinsically honest;
(2) hypocrites who would rather deny the obvious, for whatever reasons. An example is the rambling on the internet of one individual who wrote, "Mohammed, stop your crusade against cheating. Stop accusing everybody; the reason you always lose is because you are not good."(punctuation corrected). Obviously, I never accused everybody and I do not always lose; I do win a few games every now and then;
(3) the cheats themselves. A funny example that comes to mind is a certain lady. I once moved a motion aimed at cheating players who pretend to have physical impairments that prevent proper bag handling. The motion was unanimously defeated. As the lady in question walked past me, she made the solemn pronouncement, "This is a sad day in the history of scrabble." I felt guilty for hurting the feelings of the poor innocent-looking lady, until I faced her in a recent tournament. She had the collapsed bag in her lap and freely sifted through the tiles. My guilty feeling was eased. Poor trusting "J" might still be wondering why he also lost to her that night.
"S" blamed me for taking a harsh stand against another player. When "S" played me the day before, she was struggling to keep ahead. So, she began to handle tiles with both hands, on top of the bag. I watched quietly and preferred to give her the benefit of the doubt. She benefited, no doubt!
according to a scrabble player of the name Steven Alexander (stevena@teleport.com): "People get away with things for years because no one pays close enough attention."
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