This article is rated Experience Level 7. This article is perfect for budding tournament players that wish to understand more about doing well in tournaments and increasing their win rate.
Welcome to Shark Tips, an irregular installment that aims to help readers improve their play, no matter what card game they play. In this segment, I discuss a tip I’ve learned or am in the process of learning, and expand on its ramifications and/or applications.
Today’s Tip: Adjust your style of play to the Tournament Style.
This is one flaw I commonly see in a lot of players. It’s common to think that if you play the same way every time, it doesn’t matter what type of tournament it is, you’ll do better every single time. Here’s the fact of the matter: it actually doesn’t help, and can worsen your results over time.
Since this is primarily a Weiss blog, let’s take a matchup between Sword Art Online and Attack on Titan, a matchup that is roughly 55/45 in SAO’s favor when played by opponents of roughly the same skill level. These numbers may look meaningless (or wrong to some of you), but work with me for a bit. Let’s take this to its logical conclusion: If you play matches where you are always favored to win, say, 55/45, there is still a significant portion of games where you do not win. (We’ll take this further in another Shark Tips down the road.) This means that you’ll want to bend the percentages to go your way, based on the tournament.
We then look at the tournament style, and how that factors in. Here’s a few examples:
- If we’re playing in a non-official setting where the results don’t matter, then it’s more important to focus on your own play and not worry about countering an opponent’s. Since win rate matters less in this context, this is the perfect type of game to focus on making the correct play. (See here for last week’s Shark Tips.)
- If we’re playing while testing for a tournament, then it’s important to not just play a matchup once but multiple times, not only to account for this variance, but to understand what the key cards are and how your deck deals with them. It’s important here not to play yourself into a routine, as a surprise factor will break your concentration.
- If we’re playing in a tournament where going X-1, regardless of where you lost, grants you store credit, then it’s better to focus on making higher risk plays early that grant a higher chance of winning if successful, but then buckle down on your first loss, playing it safe and carefully afterwards.
- If we’re playing in a tournament that takes the top 8 or 16 players based on tiebreakers, then playing it safe and taking a more accuracy-focused approach early will work in your favor. Only take a high-risk approach if you’re keeping up-to-date on the tiebreakers and realizing that yours aren’t good enough.
- If we’re playing in top cut, then it’s a win or go home kind of deal. In Weiss, this means mulliganing more or less depending on the kind of opponent you have, and focusing hard on the strengths of your set and neutralizing an opponent’s.
The biggest thing to remember is that losing a match when you’re favored is not a big deal. It’s bound to happen. Fire Emblem veterans can safely assure you that even 80% is not a sure thing. As long as you know the reason why, you can chalk it up to experience, and learn from it.
~thenightsshadow, continuing the title references
Climax Phase 