“If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him.”
A hot-tempered rival can be moved to mistake if you stroke the right nerve; composure is a weapon.
The catalogue’s psychological entry: if your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Sun Tzu’s insight is not about temper at all — it is that temper is an exploitable load path, a channel through which inputs become the opponent’s decisions. The choleric general stops being the author of his own moves; the irritation is. Chapter 8 will later list this fault from the inside; here it is weaponized from the outside.
A procurement negotiation stalls against a vendor known for pride in his engineering. The buyer’s team, quite deliberately, lets slip a technical review that calls the architecture "dated but serviceable" — an assessment they do not fully hold. The vendor arrives at the next session angry, over-explaining, and eventually discounting to prove the engineering’s worth. Nothing false was claimed; the temper was real; and the discount was authored by the buyer’s two-word plant.
Exploiting temper is not license for abuse — the buyer’s probe was about architecture, not the man, and the line between provocation and harassment is where strategy ends and pathology begins. Note also the verse’s quiet warning to readers: everyone is someone’s choleric opponent, and the fault being exploited is one Chapter 8 tells you to fix in yourself.