Something went spectacularly awry last week, at least in journalistic terms. See, I had this idea that I would begin my review of the Pro year to date with a kind of introductory article, setting out a lot of the questions that I was hoping to come nearer to solving during the year, and also articulating that I wanted to be clearer in not only my thinking, but in my reasons for my thinking. This was greeted by a somewhat perplexed response from many of you who are long-time readers, and therefore presumably find my stuff generally palatable. What I somehow seem to have failed to get across is that there are going to be plenty of these Pro-Race-centric articles as we go through the year, and that it was only possible to make a start from the very first event, Grand Prix: Los Angeles. To those of you who therefore felt that last week left lots of questions unanswered: It did. And to those who felt the story was incomplete: It was. By the end of today, we’ll be a little bit further through the myriad plotlines, and maybe you’ll have learnt some things. Failing that, I hope that you’ll at least find the journey entertaining in this — and this is important — second part of an occasional ongoing review series. There. I think that should have got the job done, unlike last time!
To business then, and the first question coming out of Los Angeles, which was whether the Race was over before it had really begun. Mathematically speaking the enormity of the third Pro Tour and Worlds only a few weeks later means that it’s possible for someone to gain 46 Pro Points on a rival just from those two events (they win both P.Ts and their rival gets 2 Points for starting each event, finishing outside the top 200.) This fact alone indicates that there’s a veritable feast of Magic to be played before we can start crowning Luis Scott-Vargas as Player of the Year Elect. That said, the first event of last year was won by Shuuhei Nakamura, and the collective ‘oh help’ from potential rivals suggested that his win in Grand Prix: Stuttgart was about more than just the 10 Points (8 then.) In addition, it sent a very definite message, and straight away began to have an impact on the possible future travelling plans of players who were trying to work out whether they were looking to make a run at POY or a slightly less ambitious level.
For the record, and to put this into some kind of context, this was my list of potential POY candidates coming into the year. It’s not a long list:
Shuuhei Nakamura — The reigning champion. Managed Level 7 in 2007 despite an essentially hideous year in the Grand Prix trenches, continued to travel everywhere in 2008, and by and large battered people all over town. A guaranteed continued traveller through 2009, and someone with enough miles on the clock to suggest that traveller meltdown was highly unlikely.
Tomaharu Saitou — While Shuuhei wasn’t winning in 2007, Saitou was. One of his great strengths is his fearsome level of competition, where he will scrape and fight and battle for every last possibility in the dying rounds, whether he’s looking at a Top 8 or a Top 64. Saitou’s the man that when you play him you want to have him sign the result slip, nail the coffin lid shut and bury it 12 miles underground before you’re certain you’ve actually beaten him. The other half of the travelling duo from Japan, with Kenji Tsumura absent this year.
Luis Scott-Vargas — If the 2009 Race had started at Pro Tour: Berlin last Autumn, the rest of the world would need a telescope to see LSV off in the distance. Given that your typical expectations for LSV at the Pro Tour level begin at around the Top 32/Top 16 mark, it’s reasonable to expect at least one if not more Top 8s during the year. At the Grand Prix level expectations are even higher, helped of course by three Byes and a weaker field overall. The only reason for not making LSV favorite coming in has nothing to do with Magic ability, but everything to do with travel. While the two Japanese players will likely be at every European Grand Prix, and very possibly every North American event on top of their own Asia-Pacific roster, the same is almost certainly not true for LSV. Even without factoring in the fact that he now has a full-time Magic-related job, his fundamental desire to travel just isn’t as high as Saitou and Nakamura. That means that there are going to be quite a few weekends where LSV is sitting hitting refresh in front of a monitor, waiting to see how many Points his rivals are banking.
Olivier Ruel — a former Road Warrior at the Invitational, a runner-up in Player of the Year behind Kenji Tsumura, a Hall of Famer, a relentless competitor — putting Ruel into the POY mix requires little insight, just a modicum of rational thought.
Guillaume Wafo-Tapa — I’m not sure whether the saying ‘once bitten twice shy’ is universal, but to those who believe LSV has things sewn up, I refer them to the sorry tale of one R. Hagon in 2008. It’s no secret that I have a lot of time for Guillaume, as a human being as well as a player, but there’s so much to admire about his game it’s hard to leave him out of calculations. Having not travelled much in 2007, he still came within a match win of making life very interesting indeed on the last day of Worlds in New York. As a ‘Constructed Specialist’, to find him turning up on Super Sunday as the first victim of Mr. Finkel in Kuala Lumpur was a pretty terrifying prospect for those who saw Limited as a weak point in the Frenchman’s armor. Then he went 8-0 on Day 1 at Pro Tour: Hollywood, and it was at that point that I enquired — for information purposes only you understand — what odds I could get on GW-T going undefeated through the tournament. I just didn’t see him getting beaten, and if he won Hollywood, with Berlin on the horizon I just didn’t see how anyone could live with him. In other words, as we went to bed on the Friday night at the second PT of the season, I was well on my way to saying the Race was over. In the event, Saturday was no repeat, there was no Sunday, and the rest of the year dribbled away in comparative misery. This year, no such predictions, other than he’ll be competitive again.
Martin Juza — staggeringly consistent during 2008 on the Pro Tour, the Czech Juza cuts an impressive figure at and away from the table. Already inside the top 10 finishers from last year, he seems to be the contender with most room for improvement on two levels. First, if you’re always in the top 16 or so of every event ever, sooner or later you’re going to win, and that makes a huge difference to the Points total. Second, Juza hasn’t historically attended all the Grand Prix he could, even within Europe, and that seems certain to change this year. All in all, MJ is my idea of the most likely alternative to one of the more established names.
And, er, that’s it. I don’t see beyond these six as the most likely to take home the title. Don’t get me wrong, there are many others who could win it, and names like Bucher, Levy and van Medevoort were close to the list. However, there are reasons to doubt all three. Bucher is a fabulous designer and builder and networker, and knows more about the fundamentals of the game than almost anyone outside his awesome testing circle (that includes Wafo-Tapa and one P. Chapin amongst others), but building better than the opposition and playing better than the opposition are different, as Stuart Wright amongst others can testify. Levy is the closest thing the game has to a nailed-on certainty to finish in the top 10 come year’s end, but Pro Tour victory continues to elude him. Van Medevoort has the winning touch, having been a National Champion and a Team World Champion, but his victories tend to come when Pro Points aren’t plentiful. Like Levy, I’m sure he’ll be high in the standings, but it seems improbable that at least one of the others in my six won’t just be, er, better.
Whilst I have two Japanese and three Europeans on my list, (and follow with three more), only LSV represents America on my shortlist, and I’d like to forestall any Euro-bias perceptions from my good friends across the pond. Simply, looking at the Race from last year, there is almost no evidence you can hang your hat on for anyone else making a run at the title. Part of that is due to a cultural lack of willingness to travel (and I’m not making up the fact that an overwhelming number of Americans have never travelled abroad), partly due to the quasi-retirement of Paul Cheon, who would obviously have been a candidate, and partly due to the frustrating inconsistency of some of the more talented players from the States. Steve Sadin, Jacob van Lunen and David Irvine, this means you. These are all good players, and there are more of course (Chapin, Thompson, Yurchick and Scheel for example), but the fact is that outside LSV the only American to get half the Points of eventual winner Nakamura was Jamie Parke (37 to Shuuhei’s 70). That’s a prodigious gap to make up, and I don’t see it being made up. That said, two Pro Tour Top 8s, one of which leads to victory, certainly puts someone into the shake-up, so if your prediction has the capacity to win a PT, they have a shot.
So, LSV wins LA, not ending the Race right there, and Europe got under way with Grand Prix: Rotterdam. I’m not averse to a statistic or two, and as a child I was always fascinated with the way that a few relatively likely events when combined together resulted in some outlandish odds. This tended to manifest itself in the form: Manchester Utd to win the League and Cup Double, plus Liverpool to win the European Cup plus Red Rum to win the Grand National = pots o’cash. Why do I mention this accumulator-style nonsense? Stay tuned, because one of my favorite ever statistics is just over the horizon.
1225 players turned up for this Shards-Conflux Sealed/Draft affair. Paulo Vitor Damo Da Rosa and Marijn Lybaert were among the big names finding they had some spare time on Sunday. Christophe Gregoir, Hall of Famer Jelger Wiegersma and Chilean Julio Bernabe got a win apiece, one more than Bram Snepvangers, for whom home turf clearly wasn’t an advantage. With this many players, all the X-2 records would make Sunday play, and that resulted in a whopping 143 players getting to the Draft portion of the event. One of the spectacular sights of the weekend was Brit Quentin Martin turning up in full costume as Bananaman. You may think that wearing a superhero costume bizarre, even if you’re given the information that there’s a carnival-type affair going on in the Netherlands at the time. You might think that choosing a superhero that nobody on earth outside Britain has ever heard of would be even more bizarre. That, my friends, was the whole point. Ten out of ten for Q. Along with Jan Doise of Belgium and France’s Raphael Levy, Martin couldn’t turn a Sunday appearance into Pro Points, and that was also true for the original Solemn Simulacrum Jens Thoren (‘JENS!!!’ – Yes Brian, that was just for you) and Jan Ruess of Germany, who this time occupied the delightful 65th spot.
Into the Points we go then, and Olivier Ruel, finishing in lacklustre fashion in 40th, good enough for 1 Point, but not good enough by his own near-Legendary standards. Sebastian Thaler stole into the Top 32, a place that Frank Karsten seems to occupy almost constantly, joined by Vincent Lemoine as the top-ranked Belgian. 11th-15th saw a massive crowding of just-missing-out talent. Multi-GP winner Helmut Summersberger came 15th, one behind the Pro Tour: Kuala Lumpur runner-up Mario Pascoli of Italy. England’s Geoff Fletcher continued his ascent up the foothills of the Pro world, missing out on the Top 8 in a final round shootout against Robert van Medevoort. Next come two players with near-identical reactions to near-identical finishes, but for two very different reasons. Although he’s a very private person, I’ve gradually come to know Antoine Ruel during the last three years, and I’m comfortable saying that his 11th place was met with broad indifference. Although winning Pro Tour: Los Angeles in 2005 and the Magic Invitational certainly contributes, the simple onrush of time passing by has created different priorities for Antoine beyond the simple imperative of winning. It’s easy to say that the burning desire for victory has been replaced with a desire for life experiences and friendship, but I actually believe that consciously or not, Antoine has subsumed his own career into the pursuit of success for his brother Olivier. There are only two people who truly understand their relationship, and I’m not one of them, but it seems to me that currently Olivier needs Antoine more than Antoine needs Magic. If Olivier quit Magic tomorrow, I doubt we’d see Antoine either, and AR appears to derive much more satisfaction in the wins of his brother than his own. To me, this partly explains why his 23,768th Top 16 Grand Prix finish (these numbers are approximate) was greeted with a Gallic shrug.
You can argue that this attitude has implications for the POY, possibly knocking Antoine from shortlists and probably improving Olivier’s chances. The response of the man who finished 12th is also significant. Martin Juza matched the ‘whatever’ outlook of Ruel shrug for shrug, but as I suggested for different reasons. Without heading into arrogance, Juza knows he’s good, and in point of fact he knows that he’s very good. Indeed. I’ve now seen this kind of gentle grin routine several times, and the reason he isn’t super-excited is that he knew that this kind of result was inevitable, or at least close to. This is very different to the bitter disappointment where you think you’re destined to win the whole thing and then wind up outside the big show. Instead, it’s just a recognition that he’s not going to lose many, and that some of the time that’s going to put him inside the Top 8, and sometimes it won’t, but not by much. Saitou and Nakamura expect to get hammered from time to time. So does Ruel. Only LSV shares Juza’s expectation of ‘automatically’ being in the shake-up time after time after time. That’s a phenomenal mental weapon to have at your disposal.
Once we reached the Top 8 it was a fairly inexperienced lineup. Ex-Pro Aaron Brackmann from Germany had led the standings throughout Sunday, but he faced Shuuhei Nakamura in the quarters, eliminating one of the big three straight away. That turned out to be Brackmann, going down 2-0. In the bottom half, Robert van Medevoort made it to another Grand Prix final, besting Tomas Langer in the quarters and then Alex Fanghaenel in the semis (Fanghaenel having eliminated Czech Michal Hebky in their Top 8 match.) German Reinhard Kohl was in his first Top 8, and he couldn’t advance past Arjan van Leeuwen. This super-unassuming Dutchie was the super-unassuming and super-surprise winner of Grand Prix: Paris in 2008, when the Format was all-Shards, all the time. I’m going to come right out and say that the Draft deck he used to win Paris didn’t look like much, and didn’t play like much either, but you can’t argue with results. Nonetheless, he was heavy underdog to Shuuhei Nakamura in the semis. Underdog shmunderdog. Nakamura wasn’t in it, and van Leeuwen didn’t drop a game in the final either, doing a comprehensive number on van Medevoort.
So he we are then — stat time. Assume for a moment that you’re the most miserly oddsmaker in the business. You look at the field for Paris, and come up with odds of 66-1 against van Leeuwen. Despite winning this event, he’s still at 25-1 for Rotterdam which he also wins. You now have to handicap the third event in the trilogy, Grand Prix: Brighton in August. Even with back-to-back wins, making him favorite is laughable, so you offer 14-1. If he were to land those odds, it would be a 23,100-1 treble. But now comes the fun part. There’s no way he was actually that likely to win i.e. winning one time in every 66, 25 or 14 events respectively. Imagine what the math looks like if you think he had just as much chance as everyone else in the field, where everyone was of the same standard. Now assume that Brighton has 800 players (which might well be on the low side, but we’ll see.) Now the odds are 1838-1 (Paris) times 1224-1 (Rotterdam) times 799-1 (Brighton). If he pulled that one off, you’re talking 1,797,519,888-1. That’s one billion, seven hundred and ninety-seven million, five hundred and nineteen thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight to one. Sorry boys and girls, but numbers like that just make me giggle. Want to see if he can land the gamble? I know I do.
Next week, we’ll bring things right up to date. Oh yes, and before I go, Happy Easter.
As ever, thanks for reading.
R.