Posts Tagged ‘Strategy’

There are only few who are gifted with the ability to do everything right at first try. If you are one of those gifted players then this article might not cheer you up. To the rest, this article is meant to convince ourselves of the importance of losing to become better players.

If you’re afraid to fail, you can’t be sure to succeed. Those who aren’t afraid of losing will probably win more games. Why?

To answer that question, I’d like you to start by watching this video from Steve Jobs‘ speech at 2005 Stanford Commencement. (If you don’t know Steve Jobs, then you better go google him before clicking play).

Hope you managed to watch the whole speech. I know it isn’t really MtG related, but it’ll work great to help me explain the concepts of this article.

Let’s start by analyzing this quote:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forwards. You can only connect them looking backwards.” – Steve Jobs

How can we relate “the dots” to our game? I like to think those dots as mistakes I’ve done during my

games. It’s really important to analyze our mistakes from past games, even if we won them. It’s almost compulsory to take notes during games if we want to be able to reconstruct them afterward. Once we’ve created our own map of the game, then we can say whether or  not those decisions we took were right or wrong. When losing, some games will give us that “Epic Fail” sensation after some bad game decisions, some other might seem like a “bad beat” or like our opponent was extremely lucky. Don’t blame the luck! I consider myself a lucky boy because I make enough mistakes to be constantly learning from them.

So, only by understanding our own mistakes or fails from the past, we will be able to understand who we are now as a MtG players. We might lose many finals before we actually get to win something (no matter at what level you play). Once we finally get to win and become something, then we’ll appreciate our path from the past. A path full with fails and losses.

For instance, let’s say you are an average player who plays regularly with your friends and go every Saturday to you local store to play their Legacy tournament. If the feeling you have after the playtest with your friends is that you always lose, try understand the nature of those losses. Why are they winning? Are you making the wrong choices? Is it because they have better decks? Or is it because you believe they are better players?

If the first rule to become a winner is to understand that you can lose, the second rule would be to think and act like a winner. I covered that second concept in my previous article “The Importance of Playing Competitive“.

Start by taking notes of all your games, hands, openings, etc… and review them after the day. If possible, run a blog where to write reports and share the games with other people. They’ll probably give you some advices too. If you are too lazy for a blog, try a forum for example.

What are the difference between these sentences?

The more you play, the more you fail.

If you are a more optimistic guy, you could also read the previous sentence as:

The more you play, the more you win.

If we said that losing = learning (Only if you care about your mistakes from the past), then we could also say:

The more you play, the more you learn.

And from this point, we could also say:

The more you lose, the more you learn.

The more you learn, the more you win.

I see absolutely no difference between the previously mentioned statements. All of them have the goal of making you understand why losing is positive and How it can help you become a better player. Don’t get too upset if you lose too much, try find the positive side to it and keep trying. One day you’ll be on top of the hill and will look backwards. Then, it will all make sense. That day, you’ll connect the dots!

“Stay hungry, stay foolish.” – Steve Jobs