Big Brother Canada 2: Adel's Gameplay in the HoH Competition

Did Adel cheat during "The Eyes Have It" Head of Household competition?

Here is the transcript of Arisa's instructions to the House Guests:

There are five riddles on the side of your station. each of these riddles describes a current or former house guest. They are not in chronological order. So you must read each of them, figure out who they refer to, find their face and put it in the five piece puzzle in chronological order of events - earliest at the top. When you think your puzzle is complete, try to drop your ball through it. If the puzzle is correct, the ball will go all the way to the bottom. The first person to get their ball to the podium is the new head of household. You understand?

And here is the transcript of Adel's Diary Room/added voice-over description of his strategy:

I'm not much of a reader. Riddles? I don't know them. My strategy is straight up guessing. I am going to put up as many things as I can and drop the ball. Whatever happens, happens and I am going to go from there.

Here's my opinion. Arisa's instructions were as clear as could be. They had to read the riddles and figure out who the person was and then determine the chronological order of the event. Adel explaining that he is not much of a reader and not knowing riddles is not a free ticket to override the rules. Therefore he cheated.

You can call it whatever you want. You could say he didn't follow the rules. You could even say he was smart enough to find the flaws in the set up of the game. It's the same thing. He cheated.

Here are a couple of other things I noticed:

The slots for the puzzle pieces were wide enough to see the plexiglass tube behind it, making it easier to find the matching cut-out on the puzzle piece. I saw both Adel and Jon taking a peek. Adel also looked over the top to check the first puzzle piece.

The set up for the game made it easy to check out the other players' boards. The puzzle pieces were laid out upside down in a row along a very long lane for each player.

The edit showed Adel making only two attempts at dropping the ball. In the first attempt, he had all the pieces right except for the top piece. What are the odds of that happening? In simple terms, it was highly improbable. You could counter that argument by saying it was just the edit we were given, BUT Adel's reaching that point happened very quickly in comparison to the other players.

During Arisa's commentary, she pointed out that Adel was going right to the puzzle pieces (and not reading the riddles). Production could have stopped game play then and there, but they allowed him to continue. You can decide the motivation in that, but my take is that they gave him preferential treatment, which in turn makes me think they wanted him to win the comp.

Would they do anything about it? Even if they wanted to, the game cannot be replayed and events have progressed past that point. The nominations have been set, the Power of Veto comp has been played and the Veto Ceremony has already happened. The house guests have even altered their strategies because of Adel's win...and formed new alliances to get them through to the final 3. If production can do anything it would have to be a punishment of some sorts, and I just can't see that happening.

The game goes on.