Breakdown of Nawet gdyby nie miał skurczu, byłoby mu trudno wygrać.
być
to be
mieć
to have
nie
no / not
mu
to him
Questions & Answers about Nawet gdyby nie miał skurczu, byłoby mu trudno wygrać.
Why do we use nawet gdyby here instead of nawet jeśli?
Why does the second clause use byłoby rather than byłby?
Byłoby is the neuter third-person singular conditional form of być. Polish uses this neuter form for impersonal expressions involving adverbs, like 'it would be hard' (byłoby trudno). If you used byłby, you would be saying 'he would be hard', which changes the meaning completely!
Why is skurcz (cramp) in the genitive case as skurczu?
This is because of the negation. In a positive sentence, having a cramp takes the accusative case, which looks identical to the nominative for this inanimate masculine noun: miał skurcz. However, the word nie triggers the genitive of negation, changing it to nie miał skurczu.
Why is the dative pronoun mu used here?
In Polish, to say 'it is hard for someone' to do something, you use the dative case to express the 'for someone' part. So byłoby mu trudno literally translates closer to 'it would be hard to him'.