Scoring
It is always the case in scored slapslap that if the slapper attempts to slap one of the slappee’s hands and connects, the slapper gets a point. Apart from that, however, the way the game is scored can vary. Whether the slapper gets one or two points if he slaps both hands, or no points if he only slaps one while trying to slap both; whether when he serves but fails to slap he loses a point, the slappee gains a point, or the failed serve is point-neutral (though never turn-neutral); whether flinching at a fake loses the slappee a point or gains the slapper a point, or balking on a serve loses the slapper a point or gains the slappee a point — all of these rules depend on what has been negotiated by the players prior to the game. And the same goes for when the players switch roles. It is most common for the slapper to become the slappee as soon as he misses. In some games, though, players switch roles after every point scored regardless of who scored it, and in other games a player plays his role for a fixed number of turns (usually 3 or 5), as in ping-pong.
Agreement and Disagreement
It is not uncommon for a slapper to slap so fast that a slappee doesn’t see the slapper’s hand make contact with his own, but the slap will always leave a tactile trace — usually the kind that stings. Therefore, when the honorable slapper correctly declares that he has scored, the honorable slappee won’t doubt or deny it, for even if he failed to see it, he’ll have felt it. Yet even between two honorable slapslappers who have agreed beforehand on a given set of rules, disagreements are bound to come up. The disagreements will not be concerned with slapping itself, but with flinching vs. twitching, and balking vs. faking, which, because they involve no physical contact, can only be perceived (or mispercieved) visually. Though never quite resolved, these disagreements are dealt with practically via one of two means: do-overs or rotating gimmes. Both options are problematic for the same reason: it is in the slappee’s best scoring interests to claim that all flinches are twitches and all fakes balks; it is in the slapper’s best scoring interests to claim the opposite (that balks are fakes, and twitches flinches). And even among the honorable, who, by definition, do not make claims they believe to be false, self-doubt arises. How couldn’t it? How couldn’t an honorable slapslapper allow for the possibility that he saw what he wanted to see rather than what he should have seen (i.e. what truly happened)? And how could an honorable slapslapper with any bent toward rigor whatsoever fail to question whether his opponent’s ability to see what truly happened isn’t complicated by motives similar to those of which he suspects himself?
One Solution
Most great and honorable slapslappers eventually end up playing a form of slapslap in which the only way to score is by slapping, and the only time a turn is counted is when a serve has been attempted. In other words: balking and flinching are considered both turn- and point-neutral actions, thereby making it irrelevant to distinguish a flinch from a twitch or a balk from a fake.
This newer form of slapslap, which everyone initially referred to as simple slapslap, has become so dominant in the past few years that a great number of its adherents have seen fit to forsake the modifier; these days they refer to the form, simply, as slapslap. And the name they give to the original slapslap is olden slapslap.
On the other hand, adherents of the original form (of whom I am most certainly one) have continued to call the newer form simple slapslap, and to call the original form slapslap, even while — in order to avoid ambiguity when speaking in mixed company or writing mid-term papers — they will occasionally deploy the term real slapslap to describe the one they love.
Robotness vs. Roboticness
Though I can understand the motivation to play it, simple slapslap gets me worried and mournful. You cannot simplify what is complicated without subtracting subtlety, and thereby richness; and the willful subtraction of subtlety, no matter how practical it may be (or seem to be), strikes me as a non-scholarly — even anti-scholarly — endeavor. It is not true that a person’s urge to erase or prevent controversy via simplification necessarily indicates that he aspires to become a robot; that urge existed before anyone even dreamed of robots. Nonetheless, by giving in to the urge to render simple what could defensibly remain complicated, a person becomes more robotic.
Furthermore, real slapslap is just more fun than simple slapslap. The scholar Emmanuel Liebman once told me that the latter was checkers to the former’s chess. I think that’s an understatement.
Imagine the rules of boxing were such that boxers weren’t allowed any footwork, were forced to stand in one spot in the middle of the ring and trade blows, one for one, the block their only legal defensive move. The champions would always be the soundest-bodied heavy-hitters. Muhammed Ali would never have lasted a round with Joe Frazier, let alone ever rope-a-doped Foreman. Eventually, as scientific techniques of measurement grew more advanced, boxers wouldn’t even need to enter the ring, much less hit each other, to determine the winner of a given match; the same kind of violence-allergic people on the state boxing commissions who invented the TKO and made it illegal to fight for more than twelve rounds would employ hack physicists to measure the PSI of the boxers’ punches, the rigidity and pressure-aborption capacities of their upper bodies, their pain-tolerance levels, and the physical integrity of their blocks, then plug all these variables into an algorithm and declare the winner. To box, at that point, would be as barbaric as the haters say: two men clobbering each other to prove nothing that isn’t already known.
Just as the stronger will always win in such a contest of strength, so will the win always go to the faster in a contest of speed. And simple slapslap is but a contest of speed. Strategy is nearly impossible. Thinking is all but useless. The game allows for no details in which a devil, let alone a human being, might reside. It’s like a novel about people who use common sense to arrive at comforting, commonsense conclusions.
When, however, the distinctions between balks and fakes and between twitches and flinches are of consequence, a great variety of slapslapping strategies can’t help but develop; strategies based on faking and faux-faking, on drawing balks with skillful twitches, on toying with opponents’ expectations by establishing and then departing from rhythms, etc. Yes, gimmes and do-overs are frustrating, born of and then bearing only more epistemological discomfort, but for every instance of controversy over a balk/fake or flinch/twitch, there are, between honorable slapslappers, at least ten instances free of controversy; ten in which the slapslapper scores by his wits, by his capacity to be unpredictable, and is properly recognized.
Simple slapslap only wishes it were checkers to real slapslap’s chess. Simple slapslap is tic-tac-toe.
The Way It Was Done At Schechter
When I started kindergarten at the Solomon Schechter School of Chicago, Emmanuel Liebman and Samuel Diamond were the only great and honorable slapslappers there who hadn’t quit real for simple. That is one reason why, despite our differences in age — they were both in the third grade — I became such close friends with them so fast.
On the first day of school, I arrived twenty minutes early and went to the fenced-in playground, where scores of early students sat shiva for summer break. Some older boys were playing tournament-style slapslap-to-13 by the bigtoy. They needed a sixteenth, so I volunteered, and they told me I looked like a kindergartner. I said I was a kindergartner, but that I’d been slapslapping for approximately three-fourths of my life, which was true — my mom taught me slapslap before I’d learned to walk (I’m told that from the crib I aborted a round of pattycakes — I don’t remember ever playing pattycakes, but I do get a shake of disgust through my shoulders at the sound of its cloying melody — with a thumb-stab to her wrist, and she, as she explains it, figured, “And so why not?”) — and the older boys let me play, thinking they were humoring me.