“For goodness sake, you just had all the good cards.” my father yelled, darting from the couch and shoving his cards to the table.

We had been playing our favourite card game for an hour and this was the first game I had won. We had played five.

“Well, can’t always be you, can it dad? You won four games.”

“And I deserved, I did a lot of math in my head to figure out which cards had come out and which had not.” he spat. “But you, you were just lucky.”

I giggled which I think added to his irritation. I had never seen anyone losing their temper so quickly just because of a game.

“Like the other day when we were playing soccer on your PlayStation. Your net was a wall while mine was a broken basket.” he went on.

“Sure... whenever you win you deserve it, when other people win they’re just lucky.”

“I don’t like those games where we totally depend on luck.”

“Well, it’s always a mixture of luck and skill.”

“In your case, you always have Lady Luck by your side.” he carried on, his face as red as a chilli pepper.

“Right, hey. I suppose I have no skill at all.” I said pretending to be offended. In good truth his bad temper whenever he lost amused me.

“You don’t do math in your head like I do, so you shouldn’t have won this game. It was all luck.”

I rolled my eyes and started packing the cards back to their box.

“No, no, no way. Let’s play another game. I’ll show you who’s the boss here.”

(Based on a true story as indeed my father is the biggest bad loser ever and the dialogue above was true, even though not quite like this, but that’s how I remember it.)