Mario Kart World Players Think Avoiding First Place Is The Best Way To Win

While the online conversation is full of debate on the best Kart, the fastest characters, and the suspiciously accurate bomb-sniping bots, the real Mario Kart World chefs are cooking up the most broken strategy for winning races… by purposefully losing for most of them.

“So Unfun Online”: Mario Kart World Fans Are Already Getting Sick Of “Item Spam” In Races

Double the players means double the items.

Mario Kart World is topping sales charts and is the main driving factor for the record-breaking sales of the Switch 2, with 79 percent of buyers in the U.S. also purchasing the game. With so many players joining the race, the meta is quickly evolving and not exactly for the better.

The Final Lap Is The Only Lap That Matters

With So Much Chaos, There’s Safety In The Back

The strategy is not really new and has been around in all iterations of Mario Kart. To keep games fun and competitive (and always chaotic), Mario Kart gives players items based on their placing, with the last few places having the highest chance at the best items, and keeps the top places fed with plenty of boring bananas and green shells.

If you’re in first, you know it’s only a matter of time until you are assaulted by a barrage of lightning bolts and blue shells, and even my meager skills are enough to know to drop back to second when you hear the blue shell alert.

As reported by Polygon, the emerging meta in online racing, most recently shown off by YouTuber ShortCat, is to take a losing place during the race to abuse the item system and then save those powerful items for the final lap. Holding on to a star or a lightning bolt and blasting through everyone has never been easier, thanks to a few new factors.

So why is this an issue? Mario Kart has always been the house of chaos. Well, Mario Kart World made many key changes to a few systems, not only by doubling the player count, but also fundamentally changing how the item system works.

Wadsm, a competitive Mario Kart player, did an in-depth analysis on his YouTube channel to figure out the item distribution system. Essentially, until Mario Kart 8, your item chance was purely based on position, but Mario Kart 8 and Deluxe changed this to a distance-based system, meaning the further you were from the first-place player, the better the items.

This works better to help players stuck in the back to catch up with the front. Now that place-based items are back, combined with the increased player count, it’s become very easy to be in a position to get great items while not being too far from 1st place, and use those items to overtake them on the final lap.

Other strategies are evolving, with some players becoming rail-grinding experts or mastering the shortcuts. The discussion is ongoing about which system is best. While a position-based system has its merits, encouraging players to drive slower is hardly the most thrilling way to play. It’s also not the first unconventional strategy to emerge in Mario Kart World.