[Editor's Note: Apologies for not having more content today. The combination of the content light holidays and sickness that has kept me bed-ridden all day means we're a bit short. It will improve again soon.]

No, this column is not going to be all about how Kai Budde is trying to get his groove back. Whining is something all us Magic players do, some more than others, and some more rightfully than others.

But what's the point? When your buddy walks up to you after a round to check up on your result, do you think he's interested in the story? As Josh Ravitz always says, "Not interested in the story, just tell me your record," yet we share the story anyway. It's useful for us to be able to disregard the bad plays we made and blame it all on random chance.

Let me tell you something about a Dutch Magic player I'll refer to as Pete. Pete splits his spare time between cleansing his mind by practicing karate and letting all his worries out by playing Magic. If there would be a scale of how often a person whines, Pete would be waaaaaaaaaaaay up there. There was this draft game, and he had 6 lands in play on turn 6 and all spells. Not a bad draw, but when he untapped and drew his seventh land, he said "Another land why not damn it, this is ridiculous." I took a glimpse at his grip and saw Myojin of Cleansing Fire which he proceeded to cast on the next turn. And Pete is not the kind of player that would trick their opponent into thinking that a land is a bad draw for him.

What can we learn from Pete? First, you should never ever whine during a game, even if it's only to not give away information. When you start to do it anyway, you'll lose concentration and not realize the outs you may have, or that you're not even losing. Second, whining has a purpose, and it should only be used so often - otherwise your actual good bad beat stories (if there are such) will lose their value, and you don't want a good story to go to waste. Last, we should try not to embarrass ourselves by trying to whine up the tree. With this I mean, don't whine when you lost to a player who is better than you are. I mean, he's better than you, right? How would you win if it weren't for your better draws?

I'm sure everyone has some great stories about how they turned a loss into a win, and everyone who does knows the feeling of winning such a game. I don't want to win because my opponent got mana screwed both games and I had the nuts turn 3 kill, even if it means that I'll have time to get a bite between rounds then. In my opinion it's a lot more fun to struggle throughout the entire game and then pulling off a great play to win you the game, or to get back from a mana screw with a single point of life left and take the game from there on.

Another problem that's often the result of whining during a game (not necessarily out loud) is that you might concede too easily. Unless there's very little time left and you're quite sure you're drawing dead, it's always correct to finish the game until you're dead. This could make your opponent give away information for the next games (by showing you more cards), or you might have forgotten about the outs you have.

A Magic player's ability to stay focused during the entire match no matter how things play out is rare and most Japanese players I've met possess this skill. If you keep on thinking about how to win the game rather than that you're probably losing, it'll help you a great deal, as all of your plays have a meaning and you're not just going through the motions anymore. You might not win a lot more games by improving your mentality, but you need only very few to turn a Top 32 into a Top 8, for example.

A perfect example of a Japanese player not giving up is Kenji Tsumura's quarterfinal match against Rogier Maaten in last season's GP: Salt Lake City. He had to mulligan down to four and adapted his game plan perfectly: he played his Legends as aggressively as he could, and Rogier simply couldn't keep up with him. Anyone else might have just shaken his head and not applied the beatdown plan properly. As in any other game, you're not dead until the last points are dealt.

That's it for today,

Julien