About the worst thing one could do is ''win'' a contest using insane position size
Very true, this (and that's what
often happens).
I'll be customarily outspoken and mention that I think these trading contests are misleading and close to useless.
Their
entire orientation is one of profit-maximization, rather than risk management.
Typically, they reward gamblers and penalize patience and discipline.
Realistically, they can be won only by the consistent use of trading habits/methods/systems that would typically be absolutely hopeless and excessively dangerous for live, funded trading.
At the "newbie level", they inculcate dreadful habits and grotesquely mislead beginners, at the most basic level, regarding what trading's all about.
[And - digressing slightly here - even at the "pro level", they're widely used to mislead the public about "who's likely to achieve what": for example, the NFA fined Larry Williams for
not reporting to potential clients that, while his personal account in a promotional 1987 contest was very profitable (a gain of $900,000), his managed accounts for clients lost substantial funds (over $6,000,000) - that was held to constitute deceptive and unbalanced promotional material and disclosure statements. And in July 1988, the Larry Williams Financial Strategy Fund was launched, followed in March 1989 by the World Cup Championship Fund, managed by Larry Williams, Jake Bernstein and two others: the 1988 fund lost more than 50% of its clients’ equity in barely one year, and the 1989 fund also lost more than half of its original equity by May 1990. These are
not obscure, isolated incidents: they’re actually fairly typical of the motivations of pro-competition performers, precisely because
it's the ability to use competition results misleadingly in sales materials that often attracts "pro-players" to these horrible competitions.]
(/rant

)