A few years ago, I asked Chris Richter to critique my judging — what I should change, what I needed to work on and so forth. His review — “suck less.” Since my online play has sucked recently, that review came to mind. I decided to analyze my play, online and off, and look at the different results.
Last week I talked about my less than stellar performance in the Morningtide release leagues and events on MTGO. I played in three straight Premier Events. I went 3-2 in all three. That is not particularly good. In fact, it was pretty bad. Then I played in another, and reported on the cardpool and deck, and did badly. So I entered another one.
The result? 1-3.
That was pretty sickening.
The day before, however, I went to FNM. It was a LLM draft, and I won the draft. Actually, I have won about half the FNM drafts I have played in this year.
Before the PEs started up on Saturday, I drafted LLM. I was eliminated in the first round. Once the PE fired up, I decided to do one more. I was going to write it up for this article. I would do card pool, build, then matches.
This about sums it up.
There was no article there.
Late that night, however, I decided to rare draft once before bed. I drafted anything that might be Constructed playable first, and only then started worrying about colors, tribes, and classes. I lost that draft in a very close game 3 in the finals. A quick check shows that my main account has now lost over 100 rating points since Morningtide arrived online. My raredrafting and storage account, however, has gone up about 50 points.
The story of those drafts and leagues is not very interesting. The question of why I can do so much better in paper formats than in PEs, or far better when I am less serious, is worth considering. That topic might be worth the read. So, let’s look at some possible reasons.
Quality of Opponents.
It is always hard to tell how good or bad an opponent is online. Ratings don’t mean much. A rating in the low 1600s may mean that the player is marginal — or it may mean that a good player is starting up a new account. That said, however, players with higher ratings generally are better, even online. However, I beat really good players with my raredrafting account, and lost to low rated players with my “real” account. At FNM, the quality of opponents is pretty high. A number of the FNM players last week had earned pro points, and a few have ratings of over 1900. I don’t always beat the pros in real life, but I do on occasion.
More importantly, the quality of opponents is not something you can control. Sure, you could try flying to Alaska for PTQs, but even then you would still have no way of determining the quality of the people shuffling up opposite you. With Swiss pairings, if you win, the quality of your opponents will go up as you proceed in the event. The quality can go down if you lose, but that’s no help in winning the tournament.
Even if you could ensure that the players you will face will be significantly worse than you are, you probably would not want that, at least not in the long term. You only get better by playing against better opponents. That’s true whether it is in playtesting, FNM, or a local tournament: you learn very little beating easy opposition.
By the time you read this, the March Madness brackets will be up, and those teams will start practicing. Do you think any will run scrimmages against the 3rd Street Middle School all-stars? No, me either.
Simply put, worrying about your opponents can do nothing to make you better. It will be what it is. I also don’t see variations in the quality of my opponents as a driver for why I have won more consistently in paper than online.
Tells and Bluffs
On obvious difference between MTGO and paper magic is that you can’t see your opponent online. You can’t see his posture, how he’s looking at his cards, or how he is tapping his mana. You can’t see him separating land into piles, or see what parts of the board he is studying. You can’t tell whether he is looking at his library, his life total or your blockers. You can’t see when he is counting removal spells in your graveyard. He doesn’t have to ask for the number of cards in your hand, library, or graveyard, so you can’t tell what concerns him.
All of these are what gamblers call “tells.” I haven’t studied tells, and I am not a gambler. However, I have been playing Magic for a long time, and I can usually tell when a player is mana screwed, mana flooded, waiting to topdeck, etc. That has to be an advantage, but it does not account for all that much — because the other players probably have as much information as I do.
Serious gamblers have developed a good poker face. I haven’t. As I said, I’m a gamer, not a gambler. I suspect I am about as easy to read as anyone, anywhere. I have played against some very good players, and I know what a real poker face should be. I remember facing Bob Maher, Jr., and being surprised when I had absolutely no idea how he was feeling, much less what he was holding. Even more strongly, I remember playing against Mike Pustilink. I seriously believe people could have set fire to Dr. Mike and his expression would not have changed one iota.
So, given that tells information is pretty much a two-way street in the paper world, when I play, I doubt that is a major factor in why I am doing so badly online.
Some of it may be deliberate, verbal bluffing. I don’t know that I do all that much of it, or that I do it all that well in a Magic game, but I do know that I am very good at verbal bluffs and misdirection in RPGs. I have spent a lot of time behind the screens, getting my players confused and bewildered. I don’t deliberately try that while playing Magic; I just tend to do that sort of thing all the time. It may have an effect. It certainly is easier in real life — you can’t pull the same sorts of cons with a keyboard.
About the best you can do with a keyboard, or online, is pretty pale / transparent bluffs. I know I have occasionally tapped a pile of Swamps, then Alt-Ued one and tapped something else, just to bluff a Terror equivalent. I have no idea if my opponent bought the bluff, saw through it with ease, or just assumed I was a nOOb. I guess you can bluff online, but the bluffs are not subtle.
A number of writers have discussed tells and bluffs in articles on this site. If you want to improve your game, and if you play face to face, read them. If you are really serious, practice reading tells, and hiding your tells.
Rare-Drafting
Online is keep what you draft. FNM is redraft the rares. I know I am prone to raredrafting when I’m doing keep-what-you-draft. If I have a choice between Doran and Mulldrifter in pack 1, I’m probably going to snag Doran. Hell, that’s probably true in pack 2 as well, even if I am already Blue. I know that raredrafting hurts my chances to win, but I don’t know just how great an impact it actually has. I would like to know. I wonder how I could establish that.
Ideally, I would have to raredraft, then travel back in time and do the same draft again, after unlearning everything about what was in all the packs and who drafted what. That’s not going to work. The next option would be to install DraftCap software and record my drafts, then let some Limited specialists analyze the resulting decks. (Or I could do it, but I am hardly a Limited expert. My opinion is going to be less accurate than someone who does a ton of drafting… and more on that later.)
I’ll have to look at installing DraftCap software sometime. After that I’ll have to do a bunch of drafts, then analyze the results. That won’t happen soon — maybe the next time Wizards has a “Nix Tix” weekend. In the meantime, please sound off in the forums if you have an opinion on how badly a propensity towards raredrafting is hurting my results.
Pressure
Pressure is another factor that can have an impact on my results. In theory, I may be more nervous when playing for rating with my “serious” account than with the warehouse account that holds all my spare cards. Maybe.
On an intellectual level, I know my paper rating means very little, and my online rating pretty much nothing at all. Nonetheless, I know what those ratings are. I clearly care enough about them to look them up on occasion. I don’t consciously think that has an effect, but subconsciously it may.
Stress and pressure can have interesting effects. Here’s one simple example: I know a guy who’s doctor was expressing concern over high blood pressure. The guy started worrying about that, and every time he went to the doctor to have his blood pressure checked, it was high. When he got his BP checked anywhere else, it was 20 points lower.
I’m not sure how much you can do to lower stress, if stress and pressure are, indeed, affecting your game. I can tell you that drinking does not help. I wrote about drafting while slightly drunk once — I did not win that draft. On the other extreme, I have also had to throw someone out of an event because they were too drunk to draft. Literally — he could not pick up a pile of cards and choose one. This went on for a while, then he fell off his chair.
Moving on.
Distractions
I started working on an article as I joined the PE. I wrote some initial notes, some introductory paragraphs, then waited for the PE to start. When it did, I wrote a bit more, and copied the pool and decklists into the article. I took notes on the opponents’ ratings, on plays, etc.
And I lost.
After a while I started wondering about online verses paper play, and the difference in results. Eventually, I noticed that I was multitasking a lot while playing online.
In the shop, I’m sitting at a table, picking up cards, and passing them along. I don’t have anything to distract me, so I spend my time thinking about my picks, and watching the other players.
Online, I do other things at the same time. Looking back at my screenshots of past games, and some of my writings, I note that I am often skritching the dogs as I play — and occasionally taking them outside. I often eat meals while playing — and often cook them as well. I frequently have other programs up: Word almost always, often Excel, email, frequently Spider Solitaire. I typically have an Internet browser up as well. I almost always have the Auction room up, and often have other chat windows open.
Last weekend, I had MTGO running on my desktop. I had the laptop running on the deck next to me, and had IRC chat running. I had email up, and was doing some Google searches.
It is not uncommon for me to also have a radio or TV on in the background — and usually running news or information programming, rather than just music. Or have a podcast running on my iPod.
I may have spotted a clue here.
“Good God, Holmes, however do you do it?”
I decided to try drafting without any distractions. No iPod, radio, or TV. No dogs in my lap. No chat windows open. No browsers — in fact, nothing else open. No food or drink. No distractions.
I about fricken died. Waiting for the screen to show new cards to draft seems to take forever during drafts. That wait for new cards to appear is endless. True, I’m bored easily, but I hated it.
On the flip side, I did not once misclick on the wrong card, which often happens when I am working in another window, then MTGO suddenly takes priority. I also spent more time considering my picks than I usually do.
I noticed another difference when building my deck. Usually, I start by copying the pool (as a CSV) to the hard drive or memory stick. Then I build, then get something to eat, drink, or just jump to something else. Typically, even with copying the CSVs, I still am one of the first to finish building. In this draft, I spent more time on the build, and modified the build a couple of times.
Last article, I talked about a GR deck that really should have been Blue. I also looked back at the first build of another draft deck — one where I was playing 3 Wolf-Skull Shamans — and saw that I had missed / failed to include / misclicked on a Leaf Glider. That seemed to happen less when I did not have distractions.
The results were — well, you can guess where this is headed.
“Avoid distractions if you want to do better” is probably a pretty obvious recommendation, but I keep thinking of all the players I see at PTQs and so forth who are talking to friends, taking calls, or listening to iPods during builds, and during play. Of all the things I looked at while assessing my poor play, I think this is probably the most important one I should consider in my quest to suck less.
On the other hand, drafting on MTGO, with nothing else going on, is probably one of the most boring things I have done recently. It may be too high a price to pay for success.
Of course, maybe some form of compromise is possible — not full sensory deprivation, but maybe something less than sensory overload.
Specialization
I also considered whether specializing in a format or two might improve my results. After all, Vintage players specialize. Many Legacy players do as well, and several good writers on this site are Limited specialists. Maybe being a “generalist,” playing whatever seems like fun at the moment, has a down side. It probably does… the question is how great a downside it is.
I charted out, as well as I could remember / recreate it, what I have played over the couple of weeks to a month. Here’s a partial list.
League play / sealed deck PES:
4 Morningtide release
1 Lorwyn sealed
1 Mirage League
4 MED leagues
2 Time Spiral leagues
Drafts:
2 Time Spiral
1 MED
1 Lorwyn
2 Lorwyn / Lorwyn / Morningtide
2 triple Morningtide
Tournament practice room:
Classic: 15 matches, two different decks (all I have)
Extended: 20-40 matches, nine different decks
Standard: 12-24 matches, five different decks
Lorwyn block: 15-20 matches, four different decks
Multiplayer room:
EDH: 6-10 games, four different decks
2HG: 3-4 games, three different decks
FFA multiplayer: 5-6 games, five different decks
Plus a number of one- or two-ofs with experiments in the casual play rooms.
In any given day, I will play a half dozen different formats, with different decks. Specializing I am not.
It certainly has an effect in Limited, when I fall victim to a common trick I completely forgot about, like the instant that grants Flanking, if I recall correctly, in Mirage block Limited. It probably has an effect in Constructed as well.
I was going to look for hard data on that effect, by studying the extent to which players doing well in one online format also end up doing well in other formats. Unfortunately, since this is release week on MTGO, the only formats available are different forms of Morningtide Draft and Sealed. I’ll have to wait a few weeks, then look again.
In the meantime, feel free to speculate — in the forums – on the extent to which specialization can improve results. I’ll be back with data in a couple of weeks.
PRJ
“sucking badly” on MTGO