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Jonathan_Graehl comments on Emotional regulation, Part I: a problem summary - Less Wrong
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I generally feel less anxious about my own ability when I give honest compliments about others'. Inversely, if I'm critical of others, I really feel badly when I fail (whether or not it's evident to others that I failed).
This has lead me to wonder if I'm being really obnoxious when I praise people while playing some sport I'm just picking up (e.g. soccer). Who am I, the guy who tells everyone whether they did well or not? :)
Wanting to be good at things can be an obstacle. Most often it leads people to sour-grapes away any hope of expanding their blob of competence. In your case it sounds like you instead gird yourself with discipline and it sometimes blows up.
If you're at all concerned with whether people think you think you're better than you really are, you're on the wrong path :) I don't believe that people fail in contests because they feel socially inferior, but being concerned with social relationships in the midst of a contest isn't helpful (if you want to win, or at least learn). Just try not to be obnoxious or needy in how you express your pleasure or disappointment in the outcome.
This happens to me too-I think it's based on the "setting yourself up as an expert" effect-you're giving off the impression that if you know enough to criticize someone about X, you must be good at X, and then you're showing everyone that actually you aren't, meaning the advice you gave is useless.
That being said, I know that I'm sometimes better at teaching skills than doing them. If I'm watching someone else in my taekwondo class do a move that I have a lot of trouble with (example: spin hook kick), I can usually still tell what they're doing wrong. I can see their whole body as they move, whereas they can't, and often I know what I'm doing wrong, too...I just don't have perfect enough control of my muscles to fix it. (This goes for first aid, too. I can watch a kid in one of my classes going through a first aid scenario and know exactly what they're forgetting, but put me in the exact same scenario and I might well forget it, too. Adrenaline does the weirdest things to my brain.)