Your Opponents Should
Fear You.

This book will teach you how to win in the most ruthless way possible.

What you’re about to read can be applied to whatever it is you play, whether it’s a mainstream sport, a board game or a first-person shooter. No matter what your skill level is, you will become more effective as a player after you read it - that is a guarantee.

The focus here is on strategy as a concept. To be more specific, a strategy is a system for exploiting unfair advantages, also known as edges. If edges aren’t involved, you aren’t strategic, nor are you tough, cool or courageous. You’re a sucker.

An edge is an asymmetry of some kind - a difference between two opposing forces that provides an outsized benefit to one side. Think of a heavyweight fighting a bantamweight, and you can begin to see where edges emerge. The larger fighter has size and strength, while the smaller fighter can leverage speed and agility.

Competitive games worth a damn are zero-sum, meaning there can only be one winner and one loser. One player’s gain is another player’s loss, and vice versa. These types of games punish the kind-hearted and reward the ruthless.

You become a sucker whenever you walk into such a zero-sum environment without an edge and still expect to win. If you think luck, good looks, or in-born talent alone will carry you through, you’re wrong. Therefore, the single most important rule of competitive strategy is Don’t be a sucker.

The first sucker mistake many people make is that they think about games through the lens of the game alone. They believe they’ll get better results if they spend their lives in seclusion, learn every tiny detail about the game, and transform themselves into a walking, talking library of knowledge.

If there’s nothing else you take from what you’re about to read, at least remember this: competition is not about who knows more about the game, it’s about who knows how to win. Winning is built on knowledge of your opponent, especially their human weaknesses, and then shaping their competitive behavior.

Much of competitive success is about forcing your opponent to make bad decisions and shaping their thought processes so they become a sucker against their will. Your goal is to make them mentally implode, throw away any edges they may have, and then give up before the match has even been decided.

Make them submit mentally, and it won’t matter how much bigger, stronger or better than you they are. That’s what edges, and this book, are all about: overwhelming advantages that convince your opponent they stand no chance. If you did your job, your opponents will walk away from matches with a look of frustrated bewilderment - “How did this happen?” should be written all over their faces.

You do need to have a clear understanding of the game itself in order to win (which is what the first section, Play the Game, is all about), but if you only think about competition through the game itself then you’re missing the point. You aren’t playing against the game, you’re playing within it. Your opponent is the thinking, feeling human in front of you, and that should therefore be your primary focus once you understand the game at an acceptable level.

Some of the best competitors are simple-minded terminators who can barely describe what they do in the game, much less teach you anything useful. This is a frustrating fact for many aspiring competitors, but it’s a harsh truth that you need to internalize if you want to break the chains of suckerdom.

The purpose of this book is to teach you how to impose your will on your opponents and shape them into players you can predict and defeat. This is both art and science, filled with both concrete examples and abstract, often paradoxical, concepts.

But as you read through these pages, the message remains the same: to win, you must ruthlessly use every edge at your disposal to strike down your opponents. You won’t make many friends, and no doubt you’ll make enemies, but you’ll win.

Although there will be examples to help you understand, at no point will this devolve into specific formulas for winning. The overall goal with this book is to help you become a sharp player — someone who knows how to find edges and win. This is an ongoing evolutionary process that never stops, because the games we play never stay static.

Only suckers believe there’s a single, sustainable algorithm for defeating other thinking humans. All competitive success is temporary, and what works in one era for one type of game may not translate into different scenarios.

If you pay attention to what’s ahead and build upon it in your own way, you will tilt the odds strongly in your favor. In other words, you’ll have an edge.