Part 1: The Game

On the first day of the 2026 Philippine National Brewers Cup, Red realized his cup covers were still in the cart.

Going back for them meant risking disqualification. So he didn't. He stood there and rewrote his presentation on the spot, timing when he handed each cup to the judges so the gap wouldn't show.

On the final day, Gio's timer failed. Rattled, he got through his presentation and left out his brewing recipe entirely, the one detail that lets a judge trace what's in the cup back to what the brewer chose to do to it. He walked off the floor certain there was no podium left for him that year.

Same competition, two different kinds of trouble.

Red still won.

Second place went to Gio, co-founder and CEO of Good Cup, and the person who roasted Red's competition coffee.

Two people from the same roastery took the top two spots in the 2026 Philippine National Brewers Cup (PNBrC), out of a field of sixteen. The probability of that: 0.83%.

How did they do it?

To understand it, I looked at games. Bernard Suits spent a career studying what games actually are. Playing one, he wrote, is "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." (The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 1978.) Chess could be won by knocking pieces off the board. A race could be won by cutting across the field. You could make excellent coffee without a ten-minute clock, without three sensory judges, without having to name every flavor out loud before anyone tastes it.

Nobody forces a sprinter to stay in their lane. They do it because without that agreement, there's no race. Suits called this the lusory attitude: accepting a game's constraints because the constraints are what make the activity possible at all.

The Brewers Cup is that, dialed all the way up. Scoring criteria, time limits, official rules, trained judges. And even though it's built to reward skill, chance still finds a way in: a mic cutting out, a cover left in a cart, a timer failing. The design is skill. The experience is skill plus whatever the room throws at you.

Gio runs the company. Red heads its R&D and Innovation. Tasting exceptional coffee is already the job, no scoresheet required. Neither of them needed the ten-minute clock, three sensory judges, or the moment where you commit out loud to a flavor before anyone else tastes it. I kept coming back to the same question while I watched them prepare: why compete?

What Kind of Game Is This?

The Brewers Cup happens in what game-studies scholars, building on Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1938), call a magic circle: a bounded space where ordinary life is suspended and replaced by the rules of the game. The competition floor is that space. Once inside it, moving hot water over coffee grounds at a specific temperature in a specific sequence is no longer just making coffee. It's a scored performance with consequences.

Gio held a sensory class at Good Cup's headquarters in Manila last May. I asked a question about the competition, and his answer kept circling back to the scoresheet. He did it again in June, during a Behind the Scenes Masterclass with Red, walking through the three rounds of the Brewers Cup. I'd been looking at it from the wrong angle, assuming the players were competing against each other. It wasn't until I learned about games, and remembered how many times Gio had pointed back to that scoresheet, that my understanding of it changed too.

The structural fact that shapes everything else: this is a non-zero-sum game. You're not competing directly against the other players. You're working toward a perfect score, and your score doesn't come at anyone else's expense. Every competitor could, in principle, score perfectly. While there's only one golden dripper for the champion, the game is more accurately described as calibrating yourself to what the judges are trained to reward.

This is what makes the Brewers Cup different from tennis, from a sprint, from chess, where your opponent's move directly constrains yours. Here, the other competitors are largely irrelevant to your score.

What Do You Do In This Game?

You already know how day one went for Red. Nothing in the rulebook prepares you for the specific shape a mistake takes, only for how you're allowed to respond to it.

The competition runs in three rounds for a field of up to 38 competitors (2026 World Brewers Cup Official Rules and Regulations, via World Coffee Events). The 2026 PNBrC started with 16.

Round One is Open Service. The competitor uses their own selected coffee, with eight minutes of setup and ten minutes of competition time. Three cups brewed individually, one for each of three sensory judges, accompanied by a spoken presentation.

The Semi-Finals are Compulsory Service. The same provided whole bean coffee for every competitor, roasted medium to medium-light. Thirty minutes of calibration with the unknown coffee, eight minutes of setup, seven minutes of competition time. No presentation. No talking. The competitor gets disqualified if they speak to anyone.

The Finals return to Open Service. The top six carry their Compulsory score forward, added to their Finals Open Service score. Highest combined total wins.

There are known knowns: the format, the time limits, the scoring criteria. Known unknowns: the provided coffee in Compulsory, the palates of the judges assigned to your session. Unknown unknowns: Murphy's law.

James Carse drew a line between training and education in Finite and Infinite Games (1986): "To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated." The rules are public, World Coffee Events publishes the full document. Reading it keeps you in the game before you even start, while the scoresheet becomes your compass.

The Scoresheet

Red scored a perfect 36/36 on Accuracy of Coffee Descriptors, in the one category he'd later tell me was his weakest overall. I wanted to know how that was possible. The answer starts with what the category actually measures.

The scoresheet is the contract (2025/2026 WBrC Open Service Scoresheet).

Coffee Evaluation covers seven components: Aroma, Flavor, Aftertaste, Acidity, Sweetness, Mouthfeel, and Overall. Each scored zero to nine by three sensory judges independently. Four is Slightly Low. Six is Slightly High. Eight is Very High. Nine is Extraordinary.

Accuracy of Coffee Descriptors covers the same components minus Overall, scored zero to three with a two-times multiplier applied to each. Zero means no descriptors were given. Three means very accurate.

Barista Evaluation covers three categories, each doubled: Attention to Details, Coffee and Brewing Knowledge, and Presentation.

The Accuracy category is where the game gets specific. Before the judges taste a single cup, the competitor tells them what they're about to taste. Strawberry jam when it's hot, mango peel as it cools, a heavy mouthfeel.

Think of this category as a colon. Lane Greene, in Writing with Style, describes the colon as a pivot:

"The colon...says something that is about to happen. It is the pivot between promising something and delivering it."

The presentation is everything before the colon, and the cup the judges taste is everything after. Did the expectations you set meet reality? If not, your accuracy score goes down.

The judges are trained sensory judges whose understanding of what good coffee tastes and smells like has been built and rebuilt through years of deliberate tasting. Their expectation map is wide. The coordinates are precise and the tolerances are narrow.

This is where Wolfram Schultz's dopamine research becomes relevant, and where it reveals something larger about how learning actually works. Dopamine neurons don't simply fire when something good happens. They fire in response to the gap between what was predicted and what arrived, the reward prediction error. When reality exceeds the prediction, the brain backtracks to find the cause and forms a new association. When it falls short, dopamine dips below baseline, a negative prediction error. The dip is instructional: the brain files a correction, and whatever preceded that outcome loses value.

When a competitor describes strawberry jam and the judge tastes strawberry jam, the promise was kept, the system registers neutral. When the cup delivers something richer than described, the judge experiences a surprise, and the brain takes note of what caused it. When the cup falls short, the dopamine dip is immediate, and the brain files a correction.

The Math

Sixteen competitors. Two spots. One roastery.

I wanted to know exactly how unlikely this was, so I did the math.

Sixteen competitors. The baseline probability that any single player wins: 1 in 16. 6.25%.

The probability that at least one of Good Cup's two competitors finishes in the top two: calculate the complement. First place goes to a non-Good Cup player, 14 out of 16. Second place also goes to a non-Good Cup player, given the first: 13 out of 15. Multiply: 14/16 × 13/15 = 0.758. Subtract from one. 24.2%.

The probability that both Good Cup players finish first and second specifically: first spot to a Good Cup player, 2 out of 16. Second spot to the remaining Good Cup player, 1 out of 15. Multiply: 2/16 × 1/15 = 1/120.

0.83%.

These numbers assume all 16 competitors are equally likely to win. The Brewers Cup is agôn, skill, near-zero chance. When skill determines outcomes and two competitors share the same R&D pipeline, the same preparation discipline, the same accumulated knowledge, their results aren't independent. 0.83% is the baseline under randomness. Adjusted for everything that isn't random, the number looks very different.

To understand that adjustment, you have to look at what Red and Gio each brought to the floor. They belong to the same company. That's what Gio kept pointing back to, every time he mentioned the scoresheet instead of the other players.

In competitive strategy, this is called the metagame, the layer of information, preparation, and relationships that exists around and beyond the formal rules, a concept from game designer Richard Garfield, cited in Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 2003. The metagame is everything a player brings from outside the magic circle that the scoresheet can't measure but that shapes the result anyway. For most competitors, the metagame is individual. For Red and Gio, it was shared.

The question underneath the 0.83% was never whether they were lucky. It was how they built the right conditions, and how they executed under pressure.

Part 2: The Players

The Waltz

It's an odd thing to watch two people from the same company compete against each other on a national stage.

The easy assumption is that someone is hiding something, that behind the shared workspace and the collegial smiles, there are locked notebooks and guarded recipes. That when the lights come on, it's every person for themselves.

That's not what happened here.

Red and Gio competed on the same floor, in the same rounds, against each other and everyone else. If you watched them on day two, the compulsory round, what you saw wasn't rivalry performing as teamwork. It was something harder to explain.

It looked like the Waltz. Two people with distinct identities, moving from the same source. Each step timed. Sorting, sifting, grinding, brewing.

Gio has a phrase for how they prepared: "I call it front-loading the effort. We've been roasting and sourcing for months already. We front-load the roasting, sourcing, and sensory alignment classes. We front-load the knowledge, and the R&D. By the time we reach competition, it's almost like we generated muscle memory. The elements that require a lot of brain cells, years of trial and error, it becomes easier when the rubber meets the road."

Seven minutes. Eight. Ten. Fifteen. Thirty. The time blocks that structure each round. They'd lived inside those blocks so many times that execution had become something closer to expression.

What made this possible wasn't the absence of ego. They both have that. There could only be one champion, one trophy with a golden dripper. But ego and respect aren't opposites, and these two understand that.

Before the competition, at Good Cup's headquarters in Parañaque, Gio ran through parts of his presentation. Red was in the room and said it was good. Gio knew Red's concept, the dripper he had designed, and the coffee he had chosen. Gio was the one who roasted Red's competition coffee. No partition. No concealment.

Red

"Gio, I want to compete."

Red said this in 2024, at a competition he attended only as a spectator. He was working in media then, years in front of a screen doing 3D animation and photography, putting in hours until dawn, learning things the long way. "I was a hermit," he said. This was surprising. The Red I met is outspoken. He'll speak his mind. You may not always like what he says but at least you won't feel anxious not knowing.

He didn't like coffee back in 2018. Then he saw a video of Tetsu Kasuya, who won the 2016 World Brewers Cup by introducing the 4:6 method, reframing what a winning routine could look like. It was hook, line, and sinker for Red.

He joined Good Cup in 2024. He won the Philippine National Brewers Championship in 2026. Two years.

In 2024, the company already had an accumulated record. Around this time, Gio had competed at world level twice: a World Brewers Cup appearance in Milan in 2021 and a World Barista Championship semi-final in Busan in 2024. This wasn't available to Red as a document or a manual. It was available as an environment, one where people are encouraged to learn and experiment on their own. A cookbook gives you the steps. But spending a few hours with a chef in the kitchen and watching them work teaches you the nuances you can't pick up from reading a book.

The knowledge extended beyond Gio. Classes with Jake Hu, founder of Taster's Coffee in Taipei and a World Coffee Events head judge with close to a decade of experience, across Bangkok, Malaysia, and Manila.

What Red and Gio each had, the other had access to. In a game where most competitors work in isolation, this is a structural asymmetry. Neither of them had to start from a blank map.

As Good Cup's Head of R&D and Innovation, part of Red's job is understanding what happens inside the bean at every stage: origin, processing, roasting, brewing. He also made the dripper he competed with. The first prototype in 2024 had problems and he shelved the project to focus on work. When 2026 came, he fixed the issues. He calls it the Singularity. The logic behind making it is the same logic he applies to everything: "Buying is just buying. You get it one and done. But if you know how to make it, you know how to make another."

Gio is clear about what Red did with that access: "His own effort dictated how obsessed he was to learn, and he did beat me."

Red said it after the competition: "I wanted to compete with them all. I wanted to compete with Gio." It's not unique to coffee. Djokovic, on Federer and Nadal: "They forced me to become a better player." Federer, on Nadal: "He pushed me to innovate, work harder, and to develop my game." Rivals who respect each other don't get smaller around each other's talent. They get sharper.

Red's preparation was an accumulation. Brewing classes with Erik Liao, a Taiwan-based competitor and 2024 World Brewers Cup competitor, in Bangkok. Time spent training with Carlos Escobar, who placed third at the 2025 World Brewers Cup, where Red and Carlos co-developed the brewing recipe Carlos brought to worlds. Client visits presenting coffee to founders and CEOs. "If you are so used to talking to high-profile people and letting them understand coffee, then you are in a way training for your presentation skills." Each time he came back from a course, he rebuilt Good Cup's training materials around what he had learned.

His core competition team was Max, Jarule, Chris, and Kate. Max was the sensory anchor, a former sensory judge who understood how the judging system worked from the inside. When Red described flavor notes in practice, Max responded as a judge would, the prediction was tested before the competition, not for the first time under pressure. Jarule brought a background in chemistry to the water formula, adjusting it precisely across competition days, and wrote the tasting note cards Red left for the judges. Chris was part technical, part sensory, and the person who showed up no matter what. Kate rounded out the team. They didn't just fill roles. They held a standard, and every honest critique raised the ceiling of what was possible on competition day.

In 2025, Red competed in the Philippine National Brewers Cup. He lost. He came back in 2026 and won. He isn't someone who dwells. As he put it, "I am proud of what I can do, but I don't care for what I've done."

In 2025, he was practicing for a performance built around someone else's concept. Someone watching his practice told him, "I see Gio in your presentation, I see Carlos, but I don't see you." In 2026, the concept was his. The script was his. "2025 I was practicing for a performance. 2026 I was showcasing myself. It's a very big difference."

He knew the risk in that choice. "That is you. Everyone that saw it says that's a very you presentation. But what if I lost, so there is a risk. But I really believed in the idea. I believe in the concept and I believe this is the best way to show that concept."

That's the moment this piece opened on: the cart, the covers, the rewrite on the spot. He still won.

Red's weakest skill, by his own assessment, is sensory, the precision of identifying and naming flavors at the level of trained judges. What he did: know what you lack, then find the people who have it. Max was his coach and the person who gave him sensory feedback throughout preparation. That's how the perfect 36/36 on Accuracy, mentioned back in Part 1, came out of his weakest category.

When he decided to compete, his standard for himself wasn't modest: "I always expect to win when I compete. If you want to compete, win. Go for gold. Otherwise, there's no point."

Gio

How do you write about someone who has already been written about in magazines, newspapers, and countless social media posts? I'll start with what only I could share: observations from my own experience and point of view.

The first time I visited Good Cup's office in Manila, I discovered what I now know is a typical day for Gio, a full schedule of coffee tasting and back-to-back meetings with potential hires, team, clients, and partners. Then a day in Cebu, morning meetings with different departments, a company-wide townhall, and an afterparty where he played as DJ. I kept looking for the twin. A backup Gio running a parallel schedule somewhere.

He's thirty years old. He was twenty-two when he and his co-founder started Good Cup. Eight years of running a company in an industry where the variables never stop changing.

"I bounce back easily because I have a high pain tolerance from past experiences. I don't dwell. I move to the next thing quickly."

Gio has this ability to choose people. When you ask someone to join your company, you're handing them your dream. You're asking them to spend a significant portion of their life making yours real. For them to do that well, and to want to, they have to believe in the goal and in you.

Good Cup isn't only an office. It's also a laboratory where the standard of the water, the grind, the sourcing conversation, and the sensory vocabulary don't exist only for competition preparation. It's where all of that is just another Tuesday. Ben Horowitz wrote in What You Do Is Who You Are that a culture is a set of actions. The 1-2 finish isn't an event but Good Cup's process made visible on a scoresheet.

"At Good Cup, the spectrum of application is limitless because we have a running field filled with people with the same mindset."

He won the Philippine Brewers Cup in 2020. He competed in Milan in 2021. He won the Philippine Barista Championship in 2024 and reached the semi-finals at the World Barista Championship in Busan. He joined the 2023 Philippine National Brewers Championship and didn't win. Red joined the 2025 PNBrC and didn't win either. This isn't a recount of failures. It's a record of two people who chose to put themselves out there again.

That record was built through deliberate accumulation. Learning from producers directly on sourcing trips. Sensory and roasting classes with Jake Hu, starting in 2024. The Loring Masterclass with Michael de Renouard in 2025. Being mentored by Patrik Rolf, founder of April Coffee Roasters in Copenhagen and 2019 World Brewers Cup runner-up. Then the knowledge moved in the other direction: coaching and roasting for Carlos Escobar, who placed third at the 2025 World Brewers Cup.

How do you curate eight years of obsession into seven minutes? You play the scoresheet. "Competition is about playing the score sheets. We assess quality, clarity, distinctiveness, complexity, and intensity. Since I have experience as a roaster and brewer, I can influence the potential of the coffee. It's like a chef tasting an ingredient and visualizing how to manipulate it to achieve a specific expression."

His stated philosophy: "My coffee philosophy is methodical, craft-driven, mixed with the right amount of art, the right amount of science, and the right amount of past experiences."

The Pressure Cooker

Why bother? Why enter? Why spend months on a single cup of coffee that a few people will taste and score on a sheet of paper?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described the state a person enters when the challenge in front of them is precisely matched to their skill level. He called it flow. Games are designed to create the conditions for flow. But competition does something practice alone can't: it makes the prediction errors real.

In practice, you know what to expect. You've run the routine and there are no surprises. Competition changes that. The coffee provided in Compulsory is unknown. The moment you hand a cup across the table, you've committed to a prediction, and you're about to find out how accurate it was. Every outcome, every score, teaches the brain something it couldn't have learned in a rehearsal room, the precise distance between your preparation and reality.

I asked Gio, "You're already running a company. Why add competing to that?"

"It places us in a pressure cooker to prepare a run within a short period. Red and I actually only rehearsed officially five days before the Nationals, but we have been training for years. It's a way of testing what we've learned and the systems we've created. The data is valuable individually and as an organization. For example, we were not heavily rewarded with mouthfeel scores, so now we are identifying how to improve our calibration around that. It's addicting to test what we know in a high-pressure environment."

Five days of practice backed by years of everything before it. The competition is where you find out if the work was enough, and then you go back and do more. The mouthfeel note is a negative prediction error made visible. The score fell below what was expected, and now the map updates.

The preparation improves the coffee served before the competition and after it. The standard held in the room becomes the standard brought back to the cafe, the lab, the team. The result on the scoresheet becomes data on what to fix, what to build on, what to do next.

Red and Gio didn't just compete. They raised the standard of what Good Cup does and what Filipinos in the coffee industry can show the world.

On how Good Cup took the top two spots, Gio said it was: "Through our culture of continuous pursuit, obsession with learning, and multiplying that knowledge across the organization."

Is What You Do Who You Are?

Ben Horowitz writes in What You Do Is Who You Are (2019): "The samurai called their principles 'virtues' rather than 'values'; virtues are what you do, while values are merely what you believe. As we'll see, doing is what matters." You are not what you intend. You are what you repeatedly do.

Red is a maker. He has been one since long before he knew anything about coffee. As a child, he fashioned swords out of broken golf clubs. He forged his and his wife's wedding rings by hand. He learned to make a knife from scratch, not because he needed one but because understanding how a thing is made is different from owning one. The Singularity, the dripper he competed with, began when he noticed that the people he gave coffee tools to as gifts weren't as emotionally invested in the process as he was. Instead of dismissing their indifference, he asked what it would take to make it simpler for them. He designed a dripper. This is the pattern. He doesn't just encounter a problem, he finds or creates a solution.

I once told him how I see him: "He who makes things, he who builds things." He laughed.

Gio moves differently. Where Red builds inward, toward the object, Gio moves outward, across people, across departments, across problems. He's involved in more things at once than seems possible. What holds it together is discernment. He has learned, over eight years of running something, when to act and when to wait. He doesn't dwell not because he's careless but because he has developed a high enough pain tolerance that he can extract the lesson from a loss before grief turns it into a story about why things can't be different.

His most underrated skill is who he chooses. When you invite someone into something you're building, you're making a bet on who they'll become, not just who they are today. Getting that right, consistently, over years, across roles, is a practiced form of attention.

What's Red & Gio's Secret?

There isn't one.

I wish I could tell you that there's this thing that only the two of them know, but I can't.

They work hard and they work smart, patient with what takes years to build, impatient with what can be tested and fixed this week. But if there's one thing that actually explains it, and I can already see you rolling your eyes: they learn from their mistakes. The cart. The 2025 loss. Every course either of them came back from and rebuilt something around. Sounds simple and cliché, but difficult to execute.

Is it easy? You'll have to ask them. But from the perspective of someone who has witnessed how they work and what a typical day is for them, what I can tell you is that they don't have a day off. Sure, they may take a break from being at the office, but what they do and how they do it is woven into their daily lives. They're playing an infinite game.

James Carse wrote that a finite game is played for the purpose of winning, and an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. The 2026 PNBrC was a finite game. What Good Cup is building, the standard, the knowledge, the pipeline from one competition to the next, is the infinite one.

Which game are you playing?

Red will represent the Philippines at the World Brewers Cup in Bogota, Colombia in 2027.