Playing to Win (How I learnt to stop worrying and not be a scrub)

In his classic articulation of what sets competitive gamers and amateurs apart, David Sirlin distills it down to mentality, not skill. The professionals play to win.

The scrub mentality is to be so shackled by self-imposed handicaps as to never have any hope of being truly good at a game. You can practice forever, but if you can’t get over these common hangups, in a sense you’ve lost before you even started. You’ve lost before you even picked which game to play. You aren’t playing to win.

A scrub would disagree with this though. They’d say they are trying very hard. The problem is they are only trying hard within a construct of fictitious rules that prevent them from ever truly competing.

The articulation is short and convincing, there is nothing I can add to it. However, it is easy to misunderstand, which is why a clarifying note might be helpful.

When Max Verstappen came on the scene, I disliked him for his arrogant bending of rules, brutish disregard of “gentlemen’s agreements”, and his cold conviction.

Now I am a fan. I feel fortunate to witness a fellow human reach new peaks of perfection - his arrogant confidence backed by results, his brutish ability to put a car where it doesn’t belong, his cold calculated laser sharp focus to do one thing and one thing only: win.

He has, as Sirlin describes, unlocked a new level in the sport where others will follow and expand on.

Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other player from stopping it so they can keep doing it.

The experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can imagine.

This is a hallmark of true champions before him too - the Sennas, the Schumachers.

Closer to home and more mundanely, I find myself often trapped in the scrub mindset when using computers to solve my, and as a professional engineer, other’s problems. But by preemptively restricting my universe based on arbitrary self imposed rules, I am not able to use either my brain or my weapon, the computer, to their full potential.