I hate los­ing. I don’t hate it so much as I used to, but then again, I don’t lose often now, so it’s hard to say whether my reac­tion to los­ing has soft­ened over the years or whether I just enjoy the nov­elty of los­ing from time to time.Please don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not brag­ging. Nei­ther am I try­ing to be a dick. I just hap­pen to win at a lot of games. Scrab­ble, rummy, chess, video games, dice, cross­word puz­zles — com­pet­ing against oth­ers, com­pet­ing against the clock, com­pet­ing against myself. I just tend toward the win col­umn. There’s no real expla­na­tion for it.

Well, there might be. Some peo­ple in this fine life of mine, the ones who refuse to play me at some games because of my sup­pos­edly innate skill, tell me that I’m a nat­ural at games, that some­thing in my brain picks out the nec­es­sary plays and strate­gies needed to win, even if I only just learned the rules.

Case in point: Years ago I went with my fam­ily to the house of a fam­ily friend for a hol­i­day evening. They intro­duced me to the game Rum­mikub. For those of you who’ve never played, it’s sort of a cross between rummy and domi­noes. I’d seen the game in the store before, but it was always in that sort of lame adult-oriented, card-game sec­tion that I never paid atten­tion to while lust­ing after my own copy of “Axis & Allies” or “Risk.”

I lost the first few hands of the game, but then some­thing hap­pened. I started win­ning. Not only that, but I started win­ning quickly and deci­sively, not just a hand here or there, but all of them. All of them. It was weird, and I don’t think any­one has played me at that game since.

You see, there are prob­lems with win­ning. First of all, you could be a poor win­ner — I’m not, or at least don’t think I’m a poor win­ner. The poor win­ners are those who obnox­iously rub their vic­to­ries in the faces of their defeated foes. You could call these peo­ple brag­garts, but a more apt descrip­tion would be to call them assholes.

There are the unin­ten­tion­ally poor win­ners, who don’t real­ize that they are act­ing supe­rior after a win. The nam­ing of these peo­ple as “poor win­ners” usu­ally has less to do with their own asshol­ish behav­ior than it has to do with the atti­tude of the per­son they’ve just beaten. Usu­ally the unin­ten­tion­ally poor win­ner is declared so by an unknow­ingly poor loser.

I don’t think I’m often an unin­ten­tion­ally poor win­ner, but I do think that a third issue with win­ning does apply to me: acci­den­tal impoliteness.

You see, games are not only com­pe­ti­tion. They are social inter­ac­tion. When you win over and over again, you vio­late a social more. You offend other peo­ple with what appears to be your focus on com­pe­ti­tion, rather than on the social nature of the game. The con­stant win­ner doesn’t allow for the game’s nat­ural rhythms to take hold. There’s no give and take, no back and forth, no true “play.” Just a one-sided deal that’s raw for all but one player.

In such a sit­u­a­tion, the win­ner — who may be win­ning acci­den­tally, innately or pur­pose­fully — becomes an unde­sir­able, unwel­come. The win­ner is pushed from the social cir­cle so that the focus of the game can return to con­ver­sa­tion and good times, rather than what it can only focus on when the win­ner is play­ing: “Why the hell does that guy always have to win?”

Usu­ally this means that the win­ner is not invited back for game night, or the oth­ers grum­ble about him behind his back (or to his face). In my case, this amounts to not being able to play games with the peo­ple I know because they just refuse the chal­lenge outright.

I’m sorry I win so much. I’m not being face­tious. I really am sorry. It’s not my fault, and it would be even more demean­ing to myself and to every­body else involved if I were to throw a few games just to make it inter­est­ing. So please, every­one, accept this hum­ble apol­ogy and play me at games again. Please?