About Winning & Losing

Yesterday, I had a chance to take part in the Silk Air organized Monopoly challenge. Now a thing to note is, I haven't played a game of monopoly since primary 6 .. and that is like 19 years. When I sat down at my assigned table, I had to ask the banker to explain to me the general rules of the game and then i realised that it wasn't so much a game of chance as I recalled it to be. At the table of 4 players, I realised the other 3 players had a lot more in common than I do - they are there to WIN, while i just wanna have some fun. And in a way, their attitudes and behavior in the game really put me off. I mean, you're talking about a guy who laments that "My mother doesn't allow me to play monopoly" (he's looking like 40), this auntie who is like super gancheong about the game and asking questions to clarify the special rules for the 1 hr speed round, and this other guy, who laid out his MARs bars and had a monopoly notebook whipped out to do calculations and write notes while the game is happening. These guys are out to eat me for breakfast, and going into the game, I had no idea how nasty they could be. For instance, they had this rule that if you forgot to ask someone else to pay you when they land on your property, and someone else rolls the dice, you will have to forfeit that payment. Sounds fair enough, until you realise they were rushing the game so much so as to avoid paying and when someone is trying to settle some payments, they would take that chance to get someone else to roll the dice so that if they shld land on that busy person's lot, they would avoid paying. It pissed me off quite a bit when they were rushing me so that I would not notice that some prior person had to pay and had no time to even look at the board.

Now ... I am a person who hates to lose. And if I should lose, I wanna lose fair and square. I came to this game with a "happy have some fun" attitude and it was just my luck to bump into these bunch of kiasu people. I eventually was the one who bankrupted, and ended the game. Now I was really eager to do so, and was kinda relieved that the game ended so much earlier than those guys wanted to. The guy who bankrupted me would have done better if he wasn't so greedy, but I fed his ego by saying, "hey, I don't have enough cash, why don't u bankrupt me, and I can transfer all cash and assets to you??". I think on hindsight, he would have regretted his decision and tried to just take my assets and earned more cash since we had at least 12min to go before the end of the game. And in the end, though he won the game, I doubt he made enough to get into the 2nd round when compared to the rest of the 100s of players. And the other 2 were probably unhappy that I "gave in" so quickly, because it meant they had even lesser money to even be considered into the 2nd round. Eventually, it was a waste of time for them, and a rather entertaining Saturday morning for me.

And I am just so glad I took a picture with my good friend Kuangwei with the Monopoly Guy :)