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Here's a video by one of my current favorite Youtubers, Merphy Napier. She's vivacious, smart, and like a lot of 'booktubers' she reads an ungodly amount of books, and that's beyond her job as a voice reader for audio books. It's an interesting discussion of book one in the HP series, but especially she brings up that weird Qudditch rule that makes all the difference in the game.
The purpose of the rule, of course, is to put all the pressure in the world on Harry. No matter what anyone else does in the game as in the whole Wizarding World, if Harry doesn't succeed then whatever everybody else does doesn't matter. If we didn't almost universally accept this, then we'd scoff at this theme through the books and think the series was a pile of junk. But we do accept it and expect it from the very first book on.
The Snitch rule isn't just a unique thing in Quidditich. There are real world games that work in a similar manner, although there are usually other factors to keep the real games from being as lopsided as Merphy points out Quidditch is.
In college the guys in my dorm started playing a particular card game called 10-point Pitch many nights a week. (There are other versions of Pitch which have similar rules, but play out much differently.) It took me a time or two of playing to figure out the game, but I got pretty good at it. Another guy who was good at it started playing as my partner and it wasn't long before we we beating all comers. My partner was a math major and was a whiz both at bidding his hand and playing the cards. I was a conservative bidder so when I got to choose trumps for the round I rarely lost. I was also a whiz at making the other team fail to make risky bids. My partner and I did not lose for months, and this was true even though the game had a rule like the Snitch rule , that meant nothing else mattered if you could succeed in predicting you going to have a perfect game (win all 10-points) and accomplish it. But it wasn't easy to do that, and there was a substantial penalty for failing. I thought the rule ruined the game. Everything I learned to make myself good at the rest of the game wouldn't matter if the other team got lucky and used this rule and succeeded. The kicker was that it was a trap. The other guys in the dorm decided our team was so good, they couldn't beat us any other way. Games they might have won were thrown away, because they decided we were so good they couldn't possibly win using the regular plays. The statistics of the game were badly against that kind of thinking. The rule increased the tension, which I wasn't crazy about, but it probably kept our winning streak going much longer than should have.
The purpose of the rule, of course, is to put all the pressure in the world on Harry. No matter what anyone else does in the game as in the whole Wizarding World, if Harry doesn't succeed then whatever everybody else does doesn't matter. If we didn't almost universally accept this, then we'd scoff at this theme through the books and think the series was a pile of junk. But we do accept it and expect it from the very first book on.
The Snitch rule isn't just a unique thing in Quidditich. There are real world games that work in a similar manner, although there are usually other factors to keep the real games from being as lopsided as Merphy points out Quidditch is.
In college the guys in my dorm started playing a particular card game called 10-point Pitch many nights a week. (There are other versions of Pitch which have similar rules, but play out much differently.) It took me a time or two of playing to figure out the game, but I got pretty good at it. Another guy who was good at it started playing as my partner and it wasn't long before we we beating all comers. My partner was a math major and was a whiz both at bidding his hand and playing the cards. I was a conservative bidder so when I got to choose trumps for the round I rarely lost. I was also a whiz at making the other team fail to make risky bids. My partner and I did not lose for months, and this was true even though the game had a rule like the Snitch rule , that meant nothing else mattered if you could succeed in predicting you going to have a perfect game (win all 10-points) and accomplish it. But it wasn't easy to do that, and there was a substantial penalty for failing. I thought the rule ruined the game. Everything I learned to make myself good at the rest of the game wouldn't matter if the other team got lucky and used this rule and succeeded. The kicker was that it was a trap. The other guys in the dorm decided our team was so good, they couldn't beat us any other way. Games they might have won were thrown away, because they decided we were so good they couldn't possibly win using the regular plays. The statistics of the game were badly against that kind of thinking. The rule increased the tension, which I wasn't crazy about, but it probably kept our winning streak going much longer than should have.