In order to handicap, subjects must have an inaccurate assessment of their own abilities. Otherwise, there's no self-esteem to protect. If I believe my IQ is 80, and I get 80 on an IQ test, I have no incentive to make excuses to myself, or to try to explain away the results. The only time I would want to explain away the results as based on some external factor was if I'd been going around thinking my real IQ was 100.

I used to be pretty good at this videogame called Dance Dance Revolution (or DDR for short). I've won several province-level tournaments (both in my own province and in neighboring tournaments), did official internet rankings and ranked 10th place in North America, and 95th world wide.

People would often ask to play a match against me, and I'd always accept (figuring it was the "polite" thing to do), though I had mixed feelings about it. I very quickly realized it was a losing proposition for me: If I won, nobody noticed or remarked upon it (because I was known to be the "best" in my area), but I figured if I ever lost, people would make a big deal about it.

I often self-handicapped myself. I claimed that this was to make the match more interesting (and I often won despite self-handicap), but sometimes I wondered if perhaps I was also preparing excuses for myself so that if I ever did lose, I could blame the handicaps (and probably do so accurately, since I truly believe I could have beaten them in a "fair" match).

I had the fortune of traveling to Japan and a DDR player named Aaron who had ranked top 3 worldwide. He agreed to play a match with me, and I won the match, but it was very obvious to both of us that I had only won because of a glitch in the machine (basically, the game had unexpected froze and locked up, something I had never seen before, but when the game unfroze, I had been lucky and anticipated this before Aaron had).

So after the match, I turned to him, pulled out my digital camera and jokingly said "I can't believe I actually beat you. I gotta get a picture of this." But he had a rather serious look on his face and said something like "No, no pictures." I was a bit surprised, but I put away my camera. We didn't talk about it, but I suspected that I understood how he felt. I often felt like my reputation as the best DDR player in my province was constantly under attack. I figured he felt the same way, except world-wide, instead of provincially.