Birmingham Bike Polo (Wednesday nights / Sundays - info in the thread)

I thought mallet hacking was legal. It is isn't it?

To clarify
You can only 'hack' people who are on the ball.
Hacking is frowned upon, hooking is allowed. Excessive hacking can lead to you being penalised.
You can only 'hack' a goalies mallet if your team are in possession (based on cambridge rules).

is there a rule set, set in stone, or is it like playing Black jack around other peoples gaffs?

So varied.

It changes at different tournaments - worth checking at each one if you're a hacker.

Defining hacking is hard, and I've never seen anyone actually get penalised for 'excessive' hacking. However, like Fin says, it's frowned upon and people will heckle/shout at you if you do it a lot. Also, it gets on your opponents nerves, so you'll find they start playing harder against you.

I quite like the Cambridge rule, but it's sometimes hard to know if your team is in possession or not, and how are you supposed to punish rule breakers? Tap-out is hard to instruct people to do, and probably wouldn't work. Sin-bin, too excessive.

Everyone in Brum is okay by my reckoning. Si stretches to the limit sometimes, but I don't think he'd get punished at a tournament.