Some people are lucky when it comes to games of chance, contests and the like. Me, I’m a loser.

As a result, I’ve given up buying raffle tickets, playing the lottery or going to Vegas. Those activities lead to only one outcome: the disappearance of my hard-earned cash.  

So it was a thrill to win one of the top prizes last month during the third annual Angie’s List Soap Box Derby.

My team’s car, a classically designed buggy that would have made the Little Rascals proud, broke a rear axle coming off the ramp and never finished the race. But that didn’t matter.

Winners were declared in several categories, including one called “Bill’s Pick.” This is perhaps the most coveted of prizes because the Bill in question is none other than Angie’s List CEO, Bill Oesterle, who presided over derby day activities dressed from head to toe in black-and-white checkered apparel. Lucky for us, he took a shine to our car and awarded us First Place in this category.

It helped that we had determined his favorite beer was Schlitz and that we had named our team Angie’s SchLIST Racing. It also helped to have a graphic designer on our team, who reworked the Schlitz logo to create professional-quality T-shirts emblazoned with SchList.

I’m certain we clinched our prize at the start of our run, before our engineering inadequacies were revealed. That’s when we presented Bill with an extra T-shirt and a frosty bottle of Schlitz. One thing I’ve learned, if you’re not lucky, it sometimes helps to offer a bribe.