I don't know if it's something that's obvious to people around me: I'm not good at competitions. Coupled with the fact that I'm a slow learner, that makes me a connoisseur of being a loser.

When I was five or six, dad made me join a neighborhood walkathon, a marathon to race around the entire residential area by walking. Dad was a jogger all his life so this was right up his alley. I joined in the kids category where I competed against other kids and walked a much shorter distance.

I struggled so bad I came in dead last. I came so dead last the kid before me was not in visual distance.

That's not the first time in life where I lost at anything. It was the time when dad introduced me to checkers. He went through the game with me, taught me the rules, proceeded to capture all my pieces. I thought "now what?" Then I was told that I lost the game. I was such a loser that I didn't know a game means you're supposed to try and win it. Only then did I gained the concept of winning and losing. I was maybe four, I couldn't hold in the pain of losing and burst into tears.

Being a loser is not the same thing as not being good at games, if 'games' are defined broadly. I'm typically good at Carse-ian infinite games but not at games that require making other people lose.

Finite zero-sum games don't have to involve balls and scores. Social status games too is deceptively competitive, the stakes are unquantifiably much higher. Opting out from playing to avoid losing isn't always an option, humans are not built that way.

The competitive games I play in recent years are poker and Street Fighter. Friends who spend no effort would beat me while I try too hard. The historical losing patterns are so stark I couldn't ignore it. I am consistently the first among losers at any and all games. As long as the game is zero sum, I would come out negative. Bare knuckle fights is one notable exception.

If I do win any round, it's either luck or because I've learned to be good enough at the same skill that took my friends one tenth the amount of time to learn.

Well so what? Ego damage aside, there are subtle implications to consistently losing games. Friends find it awkward to accommodate not wanting to hurt my feelings when I visibly try too hard and fumble even harder. I know they want me to stop losing (because I would want the same for them) but win at my own terms without being a charity case.

This led me to the conclusion that all I need to do to win is to do the exact opposite of what I've been doing. The question is what exactly was I doing that was so effective at losing?

I wish that is clear cut so I can simply flip the bit and call it a day. The upside of this ambiguity is if I can find the answer, it can be generalized to all domains.

As an expert on being me, I have two strong clues so far. I'll cover them in the next post.