longer.blue

RC Turin Post Mortem Yet another disappointing weekend, where I ended up with a negative record. Losing is hard. It has been 4 paper events in a row where I ended up the weekend with a win-rate at 50% or lower. It could be just variance - there was a 2-year period where Paulo couldn’t win a match of Magic, and when he snapped out of it he top 8’d every other PT for years. Maybe that will be me. 🤣 Writing about losing is weird, as I’d like to monetize myself by coaching and writing deck guides. Losing is not the best advertisement for that. I’m also not writing this to gather sympathy (I actively dislike when people offer that). So why write this? There are two reasons. One of them is introspection. I want to gather my thoughts and see what went wrong, and how to improve. Like I said many times, this is a useful exercise, and I recommend you do it as well. Second, I grew up in the tournament report era, and I absolutely loved following my favorite players and their stories week in and week out. A common saying in the content game is to “make content you’d like to consume”, and this is definitely it. If my rambling thoughts can help someone young and aspiring improve, that’s awesome. So, why do I lose, or rather why do I think I lose? Being a full-time streamer and remaining competitive is extremely hard. While streaming you’re putting on an act, interacting with chat, and it takes away from your focus. Prolonged pauses spent thinking aren’t attractive to viewers, and talking while thinking is omegahard unless you’re LSV. All this means is that when I stream my brain turns into autopilot mode, and this weekend, I’ve noticed I struggle to break out of it. After the PT, I wanted to spend more time reviewing games with other people, but I got to do only like 3-4 hours of that. I’ve had a lot on my plate. Between RC prep, Arena tournaments, streaming, and wanting to exercise and spend time with my wife, time is limited. I need to get better at organizing. Lastly, I keep doing decently in Arena events, so there is still an issue of being poor at paper events. I was watching Kanister this weekend, and was impressed by his Lessons efficiency. This one is kinda hard as the only solution is to attend more paper events and practice, which is hard to do as it takes time from my other activities. So where do we go from here? First, I will play 2 matches with no distractions every day before I go live. Then the first 30-45 minutes of the stream will be spent going over the replay and trying to analyze the plays, hopefully chat will be helpful. 🤞Occasionally I’d also like to do these with other, better players than me. Secondly, I want to create a Discord focused on helping people improve at the game. I like the YouTube video format, where I try to break down matchups, and I’m always looking for opponents. This Discord could be the best place for it. If this is something that would interest you, join here - https://discord.com/invite/uRW9wJd9RH 📥 Third: I will try to play more local events to get better at paper events. Maybe finally win an RCQ? No other way to improve IRL than keeping at it. Finally, if you have any suggestions let me know. I keep asking myself and others: “what’s the best way to improve at the game?”, and the answer to that is always: “it’s really fucking hard.” I’m open to ideas. 🧠 I plan to write a deck guide on Lessons for Spotlight London. I don’t think there was much wrong about my deck choice this weekend, and I think I understand the deck well. Likely coming out next week, likely paywalled (sb guide will be posted for free regardless). Thanks for reading! 🙏