If you have a Netflix account, there’s a very good chance you’ve seen at least a little of the smash hit series Squid Game .
According to Forbes , it’s far and away the most popular series the service has ever had as 111 million accounts have watched at least two minutes of the Korean drama.
But while the idea of raising the stakes of simple children’s games by giving them deadly consequences has obviously proved captivating, it has also inspired a lot of fans to think of ways to beat the odds and survive anything the games can throw at them.
However, few are as likely to be successful as one woman’s foolproof method to beat the marble game in the sixth episode. Not only does her method ensure that nobody dies, but it’s also about as simple as it gets.
On September 30, a woman who goes by LadyAnne on TikTok uploaded a video in which she posited that nobody needs to die while playing the marble game.
For those unfamiliar with the episode “Gganbu,” this game provides each player with 10 marbles and instructs them to choose a partner.
As we can see here, the object of the game is to take all 10 of their partner’s marbles. With the way the show’s characters interpret this, it becomes their job to manipulate their partners into handing over their marbles, thus killing them.
But LadyAnne noticed a small detail in the game’s rules that make this fate completely unnecessary.
As she pointed out, “The rules said you must take your partner’s marbles, but it didn’t stipulate that you must have all 20 marbles.”
With that in mind, she ran through a scenario in which the main character’s childhood friend Cho Sang-woo and his hapless opponent Ali could have satisfied the game’s rules without getting each other killed.
To make her strategy easier to spot, LadyAnne gave Sang-woo all white marbles and Ali a set of multi-colored ones.
Then, with each of her hands playing each character, she simply arranges a series of trades in which each hand takes a single marble from the other’s pile at a time.
As you can see in her TikTok available here, this ultimately leaves Ali with a set of white marbles and Sang-woo with a set of multi-colored ones.
Both players end up with the same amount of marbles that they started with, but they also technically manage to take all 10 of their opponent’s marbles in the process.
Pretty brilliant, huh?
Of course, it’s hard to imagine that the people running the game wouldn’t change up the rules in future versions so players can no longer beat it this easily. But that’s a problem for the characters in Season two (assuming there will be one) to worry about.