Game Breaker/Real Life

Examples of Game Breakers in Real Life include:

Sports are not immune from their own game breakers.
- In baseball, the bunt used to be a game breaker as it allowed a hitter to take as many pitches as he wanted, able to stand there and bunt off every pitch until he saw one that he wanted to hit. As a result, the rules were changed so that a bunt foul with two strikes would count as a strike out, preventing the bunt from being abused.
- Another famous baseball game breaker: since a batter's strike zone is dependent on his height, you might have wondered "so why don't they just send midgets to hit?" In 1951, the St. Louis Browns (now Baltimore Orioles) did just that; they signed a midget to a contract and sent him to hit, and when he was (naturally) walked, removed him for a pinch runner. When the commissioner's office found out, they promptly invalidated the contract and mandated that all contracts in the future be approved by the league. No word on whether or not the Browns (one of the worst teams in baseball in this era) planned to play a team of nine midgets and therefore score a theoretically infinite number of runs.
- Basketball used to have a game breaker of its own. It used to be possible to get a lead in the game, then literally sit on the ball, forcing the other team to foul, hoping that the player would miss the free throws in order to get the ball back and have a chance of scoring. To solve this problem, Danny Biasone created the shot clock, requiring a team to take a shot within 24 seconds or lose possession of the ball. This addition radically changed the way that game was played, making old versions of the game almost unrecognizable today.
- In (American) Football, the "Flying Wedge" is a very effective formation that tends to result in a lot of injuries, which is why it's been banned.
The Porsche 917 was such a good race car that the Le Mans organizers rewrote the rules after the 1970 season to ban it.
Pog has 2. One, Unoffical slammers were often larger and thicker than official Slammers, making it much easier to score if you were using then, for no real drawback. A much better one was to simply throw the slammer at the SIDE of the pile, which could often knock over more than half of the Pogs on turn 1, rendering the game unwinnable for anyone else.

Back to Game Breaker