OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Letting someone merge in to traffic ahead of you on a busy road isn't really about winning, it's about manners and flow of traffic.

It also depends how you define winning. To use your analogy, letting someone merge in to traffic ahead of you on a busy road is also about you winning yourself, you win because you feel good about yourself because you helped someone. By redefining the situation, it becomes a "win win" situation which is the ideal outcome.

In haggisv example, the key to me is as BRS said "If you would feel cheated, then it probably is not the right thing to do."
Would you feel cheated if you let someone out in to the traffic ahead of you? Or would you only feel cheated if you let them out and that person never thanked you?

Would you feel cheated if you found out another team threw a match to ensure "you didn't win" which is the reverse of wording it as "let my team mates win"? I would. Alternatively you could take the approach, if "we" won all our matches, it doesn't matter what any other team does, so let's take it out of their hands and win all our matches so this situation doesn't arise. Use the "fixed outcome" as motivation to improve and become better. In that case you have learned something so you are a winner in yourself.

Everyone has different morals and values. Each to their own.

if It is me on the team I would not try hardest to win against my club if my team has no chance to win and the other team from my club does have a chance. Even if my team wins we will not advance, so in my opinion it is best to maybe just play them in a challenging way but not winning against them, to let them advance.

It would make it a harder decision if some prize or rating points were on the line. Probably I would still prefer the other team to win. I wouldn't want to make it obvious that my team is throwing but maybe if I Know my opponent has trouble with a serve I will not do that serve, and tactics like that...

That's what I meant. The part I objected to was that this "applied to life in general". Sports isn't a good analogy for life in general. "Winning" isn't everything, or even the objective, in many of life's situations.

Iskandar